| Perhaps you and I had a similar experience today. You saw today's employment report and your heart sank.
The Bad news.
More misery and tough times ahead for our country and we have really lousy leadership that doesn't hold much hope for solving anything soon.
Part of the answer is to look to our best and brightest for ideas, and then hope that the policymakers can square themselves away for just a moment to get things right.
For me, one of those people is Paul Krugman. He has a great critique in todays NY Times of Obama's bummer Presidency and what he (Obama) can do to get it right. (....er...."correct" that is...he's already too far right). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12...
Another one of my favorites is Robert Reich. The former labor secretary to President Clinton is arrogant, but also very smart. His piece in Salon today probably sums up the employment problem and potential solutions as well as any recent column that I've read.
http://www.salon.com/news/feat...
Combine this with Rob's outstanding reference to the Atlantic article and we've got a bonanza. All that pretty much sums up the situation that we're in and even has some great ideas on how to get out of "Bush's Revenge" aka "The Great Recession" or our current economy.
I submitted the following to Reich's piece. We met last spring in San Fransisco at an economic
conference.
Hi Robert. Please recall from our conversation in SF: As you point out education is one of two essentials in protecting or growing wages. The other is collective bargaining. Remember slide #19? It showed that, not only is a lack of higher ed the problem, but that a College Education is becoming a relative term. States are gutting funding for higher ed, accelerating a trend that started 20 years ago. Now, there are only two public universities left in the top 25 (Yours, UCB, is one at 22nd) with none in the top 10. The funding gap is leading to an opportunity gap whereby a student with a degree from a private university has much greater value and, therefore, disproportionately greater opportunity than a student with a public university degree.
Regarding wages, I believe that the Great Recession is also proving that collective bargaining is the other great essential (with education) to protecting or growing wages. Indeed, I submit that the correlation between bargaining power and economic prosperity is no longer a correlation but cause and effect. The lower the bargaining power the lower the wages; pretty simple. So, it's education and collectivism as the cornerstones to the long-term rebuilding of our economy. You agreed before, do
you still?
BTW, I would throw in two things to a govt based recovery plan:1. a program were the FED buys up the current, outstanding student loan burden and forgives the bottom 20% and then refinances the rest at prime plus 1%. 2. Lower the retirement age and eligibility for social security and medicare to age 60. That'll create jobs!! Check out our "Left in the West Blog" http://leftinthewest.com/ |
