Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head again with his Op-Ed this morning, This Is Not a Recovery. He points out we need 2.5% GDP growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and instead, the latest figure out this morning for the second quarter is 1.6%! Instead of treading water with a 2.5% growth we’re being swept backwards, as though in a Pakistan flood, with a mere 1.6% growth.
Here’s the most popular comment, twice as many votes as the next most popular, on Krugman’s article:
As enlightening as your commentary always is, it assumes that policy makers have the interest of the average American, and in particular the unemployed, at heart.
The name of your blog is quite revealing here: you indeed appear to have a conscience, and as a liberal (and further as one freely admitting to the same) you possess a small healthy dose of naivete about your fellow man, generally believing in good intentions. I’m afraid the same can not be said about the majority of those at the Fed or otherwise controlling the reigns of the broader economy.
As an economist, you really should know better than anyone: whenever an inexplicable behavior arises, the best way to find an explanation is always to simply “follow the money”. So who stands to benefit from high unemployment?
If you look at the last ten years of US economic history, you see repeated rises and falls that all follow a similar pattern: when the economy is growing, the average worker fails to benefit. When the economy falls, the worker always loses the most, in terms of both buying power and job security. The benefit to large business owners, who control the majority of wealth and political power in the US, is substantial. The shakier the labor market, the more workers worry about their job security and the less compensation they are willing to work for. Eventually most workers are simply happy to have a job at all and are forced to settle for less and less.
What other explanation, for example, in the government’s complicity in allowing US jobs to be shipped increasingly overseas?
The political and the wealthy in the US are well enough intertwined to form a well-oiled machine. The working class is increasingly powerless. The federal officials you seem to hope for see things in terms of what is most beneficial for them, and increasingly this is to work in alignment with the very wealthy, who contribute most to their election and who stand to offer most in the private sector when they cycle back out of government.
As long as labor is weak and nervous, with the promise of better times always around the corner, unrest is kept at bay enough to permit the rich to keep getting richer with little or no downside.
As nice as it would be to believe in a government with the interests of the little guy at heart, it’s about as much based on hard evidence as Santa Clause. Let’s grow up and either decide to stop complaining about it or talk about some way to fight back.
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Yes, this is a pretty cynical comment, but unfortunately it may in very large part be true. The question is, How do we fight back?
Thanks to “Klark, New York, NY” for the comment in red.
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