Occupy Wall Street Movement

[leo9]

There are jobs. Just not the high-paying jobs that they want. Nobody wants to start at the bottom and work their way up.

Thorne, you got to stop taking those curmudgeon pills. Being a grumpy old man may seem like fun, but if you carry on like this you'll get religion, and then you'll be sorry.

The bottom level jobs - shelf stacking, burger flipping etc - are already full of college graduates and people who used to have executive jobs till their firm got outsourced or downsized. They're not working their way up, they're treading water desperately. When the simplest job is offered there's a line for it. I don't know enough about the US to say, but in this country the growing problem is not the newly unemployed, it's the people who've never had a job in their lives and know there is no realistic prospect of their ever getting one, because no matter what qualifications they work for, there will be people with the same pieces of paper plus work experience in the line ahead of them.

Even our conservatives have stopped repeating the old line about how there are jobs if people look for them, because they have been hit over the head often enough with government figures showing that there aren't.

But that's the point of running a business. Maximize profits and minimize costs.

And that's why business can't be the only thing that matters. Because there are lots of important things that can't be done efficiently on a profit-making basis. For example, it's why no civilised country relies on profit making systems to provide basic healthcare: that has to be done by a system where the point is keeping people healthy, and the profit and loss account is just part of the administrative background, not the basis of policy making.

If that's too contentious, how about considering why the Department of Defence isn't run as a profit making business? After all, that's supposed to be the way to make any operation efficient, right?

Are we supposed to mandate how many employees a business must hire? Even if they don't need them?

It's been done, but the record shows it's not an efficient solution. Subsidising employment (either directly, or indirectly by pumping government money into a business so it won't lay off staff) also has a poor record, usually because the bosses pocket the money and then fold the business. But in this country we have what's called tax credits for people in work but not earning enough to live off, and it's been pointed out that this amounts to subsidising employment: if it wasn't there, businesses at the bottom end would have to pay more. (Not - before you say it - because people won't take low paid jobs, but because there comes a point of low pay when you're financially worse off working.)

Again, what's the point in starting a business, then?

There are always costs and problems with being in business, and one of the tasks of government is to make business carry all the load it can but not more than it can. A mandated payroll, if there was one, would be effectively another tax, and would have to be figured in along with the rest of the tax load.

I agree completely. The businesses SHOULD be weeded out if they cannot compete. NO business is too big to fail.

The Great Depression happened because the banks were left to fail. Would you let the only hospital in town close because it couldn't pay its bills? When the private company running our railways was failing, they didn't pour money into it with no oversight, they nationalised it.

The mistake wasn't rescuing the banks, it was rescuing them with public money without getting any public control, so they just went right on doing the same things wrong that got us into this mess.

No, not at all. But you would have a lot of small businesses, individuals or families running their own businesses, which wouldn't help the job situation either.

You mean, if it's not being done by corporations, it doesn't exist economically. If people are working for themselves, not making profits for shareholders, they might as well be unemployed for all the good they're doing.

UK governments, right and left, make a priority of supporting small businesses with tax breaks and legal help. Not just because every big business was a small business once, but because small businesses soak up unemployment faster than big ones. They keep their staff longer when times get hard, because they work as a team, and they hire sooner when the economy picks up, because they're more flexible.

I think there are a LOT of people who would be satisfied with nothing more, at least on the books. Sure, they'll work off the records to get some luxuries, but if they didn't have to work for the basics, too many would be satisfied with what they have.

I take it you're not a Star Trek fan
You don't believe people will ever work for nothing? Right now, all over the developed world, a large percentage of the population are working full time cooking and cleaning and tending children without a cent of pay, and nobody (except for some feminists) thinks that odd because it's what women are supposed to do. And yet according to conventional economic rules, it shouldn't happen.

And looking at it from the other end, the people at the top of the economy have more money than they can find ways to spend even though there are whole industries devoted to wasting their money for them. By textbook economics, they should have stopped working long ago, they have no economic incentive. But some of them work harder than the guy on an hourly rate.

But there ARE always jobs. They may not be GOOD jobs. May not be high paying jobs, but there is work out there. You just have to be willing to do it.

I grant you that the government and the private agencies whose statistics say otherwise might all be lying. What I want to know is, where do you get the facts that contradict them all? Or is it just a gut feeling?

And we have federally mandated education through high school in the US. There are teachers out there who want to teach. There are students who want to learn. Perhaps the biggest challenge this country faces, though, is fixing the education system. Which takes money. TAX money.

There, every liberal in the country will agree with you. My oldest son is working as a teacher in New Jersey, because any school that can afford it hires from outside the US. Because in order to make "No Child Left Behind" work without actually spending any money, US teacher training was cut down to "this is a blackboard, this is chalk, but you won't every use them because all you have to do is stand in front of a class and try to shout down the riot."

Doing "stuff" doesn't necessarily imply doing constructive labor. In this day and age people are quite happy riding around on their four-wheelers, or their jet-skis, or going to parties. They just don't want to actually have to earn the money it takes to do those things.

See, this is the kind of thing that makes debate so dificult. thir talked about giving people the basics of life, you jump to giving them jet-skis and parties.

There's a textbook to write on this, but I'm on my lunch hour and already half an hour over, and my boss knows about it because I'm self employed. More later.