Working Class and Working Poor
Posted on July 18, 2010 by Lou
I’m sure there’s some correlation between tax cuts for small business – promoted by the administration – and job creation, but let’s be serious here. A lot of hiring “incentives” are – at best – used by retailers to bring on a few more sales clerks.
Retail sales is important work for entry-level and part-time employees, but doesn’t measure up very well as a primary source for head-of-household income.
The president also likes to showcases his job-creation policies in green industries. But, here too, the number of tech jobs from “stimulus” spending barely makes a blip in the overall employment picture.
I know it’s useless to argue for a massive federal jobs program, but now the white house and congressional democrats are stuck defending their meager efforts to combat persistently high unemployment.
I agree that without the stimulus / bailout, the economy would’ve have been even worse, but this effort to reinvigorate the labor markets through tax and investment incentives is too little, too late.
There’s been a 40-year purge of working-class, union jobs in America and they’re not coming back.
Last week’s U.S. Chamber of Commerce “Jobs Summit” promoted the usual conservative bromides (see huff post’s critique) but there wasn’t much talk about how its deindustrialization, deunionization and deregulation policies helped kill off millions of high-wage jobs over the past generation.
So even if this economy fires up again, don’t expect much help for the bottom half of the labor market, where the working-class and the working-poor are fast becoming one and the same.
Comments (6)
Good post. Obama has only recently started using the word “worker.” His campaign was about reviving the elusive, and illusory middle class. The only candidate to even broach the subject of the working poor was, of course, John Edwards, and look what happened to him.
btw, does Rupert Murdoch own “The Enquirer?” (a joke, I think)
This should work out fine.. The Republicans want smaller government and less taxes. How much tax can a non-union service employee pay? The largest part of our economy is consumer based spending. Who will have the means to buy anything but food and substandard housing by the time we have shipped the last good paying job away. Perhaps we should out source the Federal and State governments to the Somalis, they seem to have figured out “smaller government”. When will our grid locked governments realize that it is not worth having power if there is nothing to govern but hungry, cold and angry people that can’t even pay the politicians salaries.
I find it useless to bemoan the obvious. Yes we have been sent into a ditch. Yes we need more incentives and much more aggressive spending and way more creative ideas to get us out of this ditch. We all know that. Now given the attitude of the Republicans and much of the country who unfortunately don’t know what will work. What can be done? Who can do it. Yes there is a massive problem, but kvetching about means nothing. Lets find a solution.
Welcome to the long decline of the U.S. empire, home of 750 military installations across the globe (upon which we cannot focus) and going weak.
When the bankrupt state of California fires liberians and teachers, what do the PTAs on the west side do? They call everyone to get on board for selling more lemonade and cupcakes at the next meeting. Can this really be the lasting legacy of the Sixties, participatory democracy at the baked goods table?
Instead, how about organizing politically, say, with 200 buses with mothers and fathers, everyone, furioso, converging on Sacramento, on the lawns of the capital building, making a political presence and then some. Like the Black Panthers in 1967, but not like the Black Panthers, i.e, leave the guns and revolutionary rhetoric at home.
But liberals, with a liberal in office that works like a mickey finn to the body politic, are disarmed, too passive, bereft of ideas that may have a broader reach than the home front and the lemonade stand. In two words, liberals are confused and weightless, unable at the moment to punch above their class. And, in a phrase, they are afraid to upset the apple cart that is the return of the repressed, Jerry Brown, who seems to merely want something to do, but does not know what, exactly. But he, and the Party, will spend millions to try and do it. This is political vision in the days of our demise: see Great Britain, post-empire.
The fact that the argument is framed in terms of a never-to-be-contemplated federal jobs program (delivered like mana from Heaven) tells us a bit about the left’s political imagination and memory. Can we not recall that FDR and LBJ would have been a two-bit presidents without pressure from below, by the CIO and other broad-based popular movements? Do we not remember that FDR and Johnson were pushed to bring on the New Deal and the “Great” Society? I know, where are the movements from below?
History moves in mysterious ways. But we do know this, until forced, most politicians will trim, unless in a very “safe” district where lassitude is a winner. Witness the Republican party today. Do you really think they want to embrace Tea “Party” politics as a way to power in 2012? Not going to happen, unless they are profoundly foolish. Is the left going to take a lesson from the Tea Party’s inevitable failure: to wit, don’t get too excited about leading from the left of the present conventional wisdom?
Ok, Laborlou, what are the deep thoughts besides “union jobs in America and they’re not coming back.”
How might we organize to reverse prop 13, especially for corporate properties, how might we make it a point of Brown’s campaign to tax at higher rates the oil revenues derived from the state of California (good timing, right?), how might we begin to slough off the weight of the dead past that is Clintonism, the triangulation that is never too far from our now inbred instinctual political reactions, of how to be a “progressive”, with deadly memories of the good old days when the Democratic Party, in a mood for deregulation with a ideological frenzy inspired by R Reagan and Milton Friedman, let the good times role for finance Capital? Are we so ideologically impoverished, and doped, to be hoping (yes we can?) that a tax on hemp will save us?
200, 300, buses to Sacramento, anyone?
kerry candaele
venice, ca. Home of the Homeless, and a part of the failed state of California.
/read more about the Bildenbergers. You’ll begin to geth the picture of where were going. Cheers! pka
What Kerry Candaele said !