and reauthorized by Republican controlled Congress, signed by George W. Bush The WIA has continued to be reauthorized.
I agree w/the songbook, of course. But it was rather amusing to see his “rolleyes” and comment.
Which, of course, completely misses the point. We don’t need any FDR-style programs to deal with anything, including job creation. The market will take care of things, until your liberal friends start monkeying around with it.
‘Fair Trade’ will take care of any perceived unemployement woes. Yep. Couple that with a health dose of taxing the job-creators, and I don’t see how Kerry’s plan could possibly fail.
milroyj : Stop digging.
The Workforce Investment Act, which has had bipartisan support, was most recently reauthorized by a Republican controlled congress. and signed by Bush.
for your edification, the JTPA, (which WIA replaced) was coauthored by none other than Dan Quayle, and was considered to be the most significant accomplisment of his pre White house career. ([url-“http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/?&Db=d097&querybd=@FIELD(FLD003+@4((@1(Sen+Quayle++Dan))+00935))”]cite, # 18 on the list )
the Workforce INvestment board which you scoffed so, up there, is the descendant of the “Private Industry Councils” of the JTPA. You might find this comment from the home page of the National Association of Workforce Boards interesting. Or rather, others may find it interesting, you seem to simply rely on your inate intelligence, w/o researching the issue. Their mission (linked on the prior mentioned page) :
Yea, you seem to be trying to rub my face in the dirt simply because I’m not blindly buying into the idea that the economy sucks just because you say so.
fixed link for those too impaired to cut and paste.
First it was “russian” then it was “FDR”. He musta missed it that it was most recently reauthorized by a Republican dominated Congress and White house. Wonder what he’ll use now.
IMHO, a misrepresentation. You offered up your personal observations as why you tend to think the economy is doing ok. Others have offered up theirs. So, if nothing else, if you believe that he’s suggesting that you should believe it’s crappy ‘just because he says so’, your offering was pretty much in the same vein ("This year I made a lot more money than ever before. You can bitch and whine about a poor economy to grind your particular political axe all you want, but out here where the rubber meets the road, you look like you’re full of it.
". )
I suggest that instead simply relying on your own personal observations of stuff around you, that you check out some other sources. Small business growth is not the only indicator, neither is unemployment data. I mentioned one of my sources is my local WDB, which focuses on employment/economic growth of the region in which I live. It includes data Unemployment data, new business growth data, educational data (for example, they recently commissioned a study to evaluate regional educational needs wrt future business needs).
and again, please reflect on the sheer number of small businesses that would have to experience rather significant growth, to offset the numbers of large plant closings and other events that have a regional effect on the economy.
No, I don’t find it interesting, I find it disturbing, to say the least. How Orwellian is that phraseology? National Association of Workforce Boards? Sounds fascist, to me.
So your complaint is about the name of the organization, and that alone is enough to discredit anything that they say.
I like you milroyj. You’re thilly 
My goodness, what a vocabulary you have.
An association (group) of voluntary business leaders giving their time to help guide economic growth in their regions is fascist to you? Do you know what fascist means?
well, to the rest of the reading (ie thinking) public -if you wish to find out what the local economic and jobs picture is in your area, these are the folks to ask. Their meetings are public. It helps give you more of an idea of the true nature of the economy and job market than snippets of data. YMMV. and, of course, some people aren’t at all interested in learning, either.
Nah, it’s not the name, thilly, it’s the political ideaolgy behind it. Why on God’s green earth would we need a National Association of Workforce Boards, for heaven’s sake? We don’t.
Good for you. But I’m still making half what I made last year.
A friend of mine who is a trained phlebotomist, trained paralegal, and was a Black Hawk pilot with the 101st Airborne in the Gulf War is having to work for eight bucks an hour sewing uniforms because there are no other jobs. From the half of department whose jobs were given to Tata (India) last year, I know of two who have gotten jobs: me, and one other guy. And we had to take jobs at a much lower salary. The point people have been trying to make is that while you may be doing well, and people you work with may be doing well, that doesn’t make it true across the country.
It’s said that “all politics are local”. Same with the economy, I think. And from my local viewpoint, the economy sucks.
Let’s look at it another way: There has been a net job loss in this country of something like 800,000 jobs. There have been jobs created. Mine was one of them. But the jobs that are created pay less than the jobs lost. Kerry says the salaries of the new jobs is an average of $9,000 less than the salaries of the lost jobs. In my case, I’m making $25,000 less.
Now, who do you think contributes more to the economy? 800,000 people who lost their jobs and the couple-hundred thousand who are making less than they used to? Or the lower number of people who have gained revenue under this administration?
I am contributing as little as possible to the economy; not because I want to, but because I’ struggling to make ends meet. I made $50,000 last year. This allowed me to go to restaurants and buy consumer items. This helped to keep The Chili Pepper, Black Angus, Tokyo Lobby, Amazon.com, The Easton Press, et al profitable. Although I haven’t flown in a few years, I did rent helicopters when I was making more money. This helped to keep Group 3 Aviation profitable. It’s good for business when people buy things. Now I don’t go to restaurants. Now I don’t fly (although it’s killing me). Now I don’t buy consumer items. Now there are 800,000 people who are out of work, and 200,000 to 400,000 more who have taken lower-paying jobs, who are also not buying things. How is this good for the economy?
I’d much rather have the $25,000/year I’m no longer making, than the $300 tax reduction I received. It would be better for me, and it would be better for the businesses I (used to) patronize.
Of course not. Our current unprecedented productivity growth, low unemplpoyment rate, and downright staggering income equality, it appears that the “market” has everything well in hand. We ought to abolish this nonsensical association and increase our support for such libertarian-sounding agencies as the Department for Homeland Security.
You know, it’s funny that I keep hearing about how these small businesses generate so many jobs for us, when FactCheck.org has this to say about the matter:
(emphasis mine)
Yeah, I’m sure that the 15% of the fraction of a fraction of all the small businesses in the U.S. generate an assload of jobs.
LilShieste
And what makes you think that sans tax-cut, you wouldn’t have lost your job?
Wring, I understand that, but I made it pretty clear that I was speaking anecdotally, didn’t I? Also notice that I never made any blanket statements about anything other than my personal experience, and indeed even posed a question to you. What part of all that is rubbing people’s nose in anything?
I understand that also, but Small Businesses are the only part of the economy that has grown consistently over the last 20 years. Overtaxing the only segment of the economy still growing in an attempt to fund the Government programs replacing benefits and jobs formerly offered by large corporations in the boom years of the Cold War seems to me to be a perfect recipe for killing off what is working in the name of saving something dying, rather than looking to find new solutions for a 21st century world economy. The class warfare aspect of the “tax the rich until they bleed” philosophy bugs me as well. When did working hard and making money become something that is deserving of scorn or make one an acceptable target for extra fiscal penalties? The majority of “rich” people I know (I don’t know any hyper-rich folks, but I do know a few millionaires and a number of people making several hundred K per year) work 40-80 hours a week or more. They are not debutants but hard workers who have gotten where they are through perseverance and effort. What about that makes them deserving of an extra tax burden other than it’s easy to hold them up to people not making as much money as legitimate targets, creating a perfect “us VS Them” mentality?
milroyj: * The market will take care of things*
Chanting your market-fundamentalist mantra doesn’t change the facts. My point is that over the past four years, during one of the most conservative, anti-government, pro-market, low-tax, laissez-faire Administrations we’ve had for decades, the economy actually lost net jobs—for the first time since the Hoover Administration. And in addition, job quality, wages, benefits, and household income for the average worker are stagnant or declining. Obviously, the market is not taking care of things as far as many struggling people are concerned.
Wd: Yea, you seem to be trying to rub my face in the dirt simply because I’m not blindly buying into the idea that the economy sucks just because you say so.
Dude, we’ve provided several links and summaries of economic data to support the contention that the economy does in fact have some serious problems. Nobody’s asking you to be concerned about the economy just because a few individuals say so, but I think you ought to be concerned about it when the data says so.
Why yes, productivity is up, and unemployment is near the “natural” rate for our economy. Thanks for asking!
So fuck them? You realize that if being in business for themselves stops panning out, you are going to be competing with them for jobs, right? (And that is ignoring the true nature of small business, with people being payed in cash, owners not taking an incime for themselves, et cetera.)
The problems with the economy also include the outsourcing of jobs. If incentives were given to companies to keep jobs within the country, then companies would be less likely to outsource. Instead, companies receive incentives to send jobs overseas.
The fact is that starting in 2002, my former company started hiring “consultants” from Tata. When Tata’s “consultants” started taking over the jobs, people were laid off. Thus it’s likely that if outsourcing were not encouraged, I and many others would not have lost our jobs.
If fewer people lost their jobs, there would be less competition for low-paying jobs. The people who kept their jobs would be contributing more to the economy, and the people who did not have jobs before and who took the lower-paying jobs would be contributing to the economy. Instead, we have a net loss.