Well, people who are “wilfully unemployed” because they don’t need the money presumably aren’t looking for work, and hence wouldn’t count as unemployed. They’d count as not being part of the workforce. People transferring between jobs would count, but doesn’t “tranfer” suggest a pretty quick switch? I transferred between jobs last fall, and I was a whole 78.5 hours between leaving my previous place of employment and entering the new one. Since most of that was a weekend, it doesn’t seem right to suggest I was unemployed at any time during the switch. Now, I do recall vaguely from Econ 120 the stuff about “full employment” and the need for a pool of available labour and such, and I’m not trying to say anything counter to conventional economic theory. I just wanted to point out that differences between the minutia of the classification schemes used to collect unemployment figures could lead to reporting differences that have no relevance to how much competition there actually is for employment, so that the 1.8% difference in reported unemployment between the US and Canada might not actually mean that it’s harder to find a job here than it is there. Basically I just get annoyed at the degree to which Sam kvetches about Canada, and lionizes the US, and cherrypicks statistics with which to do so.
Unemployed is unemployed, barring retirement. The word really isn’t ambiguous. I see some sources consider 5-5.5% as “full employment.”
I trust “seasonal unemployment” is self-explanatory.
For example, in 1996 I had saved up some money and wanted a summer off. So I didn’t work for three months. Did I have a job? No. Was I unemployed? Yes. Would I look for a job again? Yes. Should I have been counted as unemployed? I don’t see why not.
Yes, conservatives seem to view unemployment statistics as a little mightier than they should. If we need ditch-diggers, we lose efficiency when we employ doctors in that task, but hey, we’re increasing employment, wheeeee…
that falls under “cannot work”, doesn’t it? I’ve never heard an average conservative say they want to dismantle the welfare system, or that unemployment should be done away with. (Libertarians maybe?) Much ado was raised about people with dependent children being limited in the time they could collect, part of “welfare reform” which was a bipartisan effort IIRC. It doesn’t help people who have fallen on hard times to have other people working the system, either. Not saying everyone does, but some did.
The disabled, the mentally retarded, the elderly…people who cannot reasonably expect to earn a living themselves are permanent. Though maybe that’s under Social Security. (AFDC = Aid to Families with Dependent Children.)
Yes, but can we say that the cost of supporting freeloaders is actually more expensive than the loss of employable workers because of various unemployment types? It seems to me that the benefits of welfare and unemployment benefits outweigh the cost from the number of people who freeload, and that most attempts at reducing freeloading end up making getting welfare a job in itself. Not exactly enabling people to get off it.
ok, remember that most people don’t want to end these things outright…yes, that’s a huge issue. If you’re on AFDC you can’t save money. How are people supposed to get off? There’s an even bigger one - benefits. Employer plans often don’t measure up to what the state provides. Having to pay for one or two prescriptions a month nowadays can be the deciding factor in whether you can support yourself or not.
I blame health care costs for being behind a lot of things today. This is a discussion no one seems to be having, people are too busy blaming liberals for fostering dependency and blaming conservatives for taking away needed programs. If we’re going there, I’d rather examine the programs themselves, are they working, why so many are falling into them, why expenditures for them have increased to the power of x since 19__, etc. I’m certain that the underlying problem isn’t “freeloaders.”
You guys are aware that AFDC is defunct, yes? The modern equivalent is TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), but generalizations about it can be difficult since the states have a large degree of freedom in its execution.
We are in total agreement about that issue! When schools stop trying to look good on paper? When Boards of Education stop being afraid of parents? (Hey, my school system was recently “Outrage of the Week” on Capital Gang!
Is the National Teachers’ Exam even given now? I know that it has not been required here in decades. Can you imagine what would happen if lawyers were not required to pass the Bar?
Raise teacher standards and pay. Don’t put executive principals from the local state college in positions of decision-making over classroom teachers with thirty or forty years of experience and advanced degrees from Stanford.
Sorry, Airman. I’m off on a hijacked rant. I return you now to your sane and proper debate questions. Thanks for your response to me. [/hijack]
Hey, this is the SDMB, not Yahoo! News. 
As for the topic at hand, when I wrote my original message, I was addressing the particulars of your personal situation. To wit:
- Difficulty with job applications because of oversimplistic, black-and-white morality views (“Have you ever lied?”)
- Difficulty finding jobs in the current economy.
- Concerns about supporting your family because of cuts in social services.
IMO, #1 and #3 are classic hallmarks of conservative ideaology, and #2 is the result of the screwup of the current screwup in the White House (I can’t imagine what your response is whenever a pundit shows up on the news and tells us the economy is doing great). Which is why, as I wrote, I take no pleasure in your situation, since you are now getting the short end of the conservative stick.
I’ll partially agree with this – the tech bubble was hitting the skids at the end of 2000, and whoever was taking the White House in 2001 had to do something to minimize its impact. I disagree, however, that giving tax cuts to the rich was the way to do it, and I doubly disagree that giving a second round of tax cuts to the rich was the solution.
While I do hope you get something soon, I have to be a pessimist here. The Bush apologists can talk all they want about market rebounds and the Dow average, but at the end of the day, the bottom line is well-paying jobs for the citizenry, and those are still long overdue.
And if government regulations on big business weren’t relaxed to the point of non-existence (another hallmark of the conservative philosophy), then maybe some of that would actually get down to our level.
I justify social spending by saying “I want to minimize the suffering of folks who are down on their luck; all the economic benefits in the world mean diddly-squat if you’re a low-income Dad trying to decide between buying groceries for your family this week or buying antibiotics for your ill child.”
Yes, there is always a risk that increased social spending will simply make folks dependent on government aid, but our current society is nowhere near that level of excess. And ultimately, I believe that if our government turns its back on those who are the least fortunate, we all suffer in the long run.
Conservative economic policies are generally more realistic than those of liberals. But conservatives tend to forget that the economy was made for people and not people for the economy.
The fact that jobs are being sent overseas is not in and of itself a bad thing. Theoretically, a wealthy, highly skilled society like ours should aspire to better, higher-paying and better skilled jobs than those that are being shipped overseas. But, inevitably, as a society and its economy transitions to those highly skilled jobs there groups of people who served in the “old economy” who don’t have the skills to serve succeed in the “new economy.”
In such instances, government has a legitimate role to play in helping its citizens deal with the transition, and here is where conservative policies often fall short, in my opinion.
How can government help? By helping people educate and train themselves. Here in my state budget constraints are driving up tuition expenses dramatically while simultaneously reducing the number of classes offered and the times when the remaining classes are offered. For example, the state college my children attend has doubled or tripled tuition in the past couple of years, laid off teachers, reduced the number of new students it is accepting and will not have a summer session this year for the first time in 35 years.
How are people who are trying to keep up with a rapidly changing economy helped by this? It seems that a rational government would respond by expanding the educational opportunities available to its citizens.
The liberal philosophical bias that government has a legitimate role to play in buffering people from the vacissitudes of the economy gives liberals an advantage in addressing such “real world” problems at a time like this.
Well, I’d add a few points here:
(1) The economy cycles on its own and so it is not clear how much of the improvement is due to the injection of money from tax cuts and spending. I think I have heard some estimates on the order of 0.5 to 1.0% of the current GDP growth, at least from the tax cuts part. But, all this is estimatation or educated guessing.
(2) “At the expense of the future” is right. What Bush has done is mortgage our future to the tune of several trillion dollars in order to get a little more economic growth now. His tax cut policies have given the minimal bang for the maximum buck. And, the bucks keep on being paid out long after the economy is no longer slack and doesn’t need stimulation anymore (at least in a Keynesian sense) as is really back in the control of Alan Greenspan and company. [And, let’s face it, these tax cuts were never really about stimulus anyway; Bush proposed them before there was ever a recession. The “stimulus” idea is just the latest convenient justification for him to do what he wanted to do.]
(3) If you are like many lower and middle income people, increases in state and local taxes are offsetting some, often much, of your tax cut. This is not a coincidence as Bush has pursued policies that put additional pressures on state and local governments without providing them the resources. Of course, for the wealthy (who pay the lion’s share of their taxes through the federal income tax), the Bush tax cuts swamp the local and state tax hikes (which are most often regressive) so they will be the net winners while everyone else will likely be net losers in the long run.
Erislover:
The word really is that ambiguous. Technically the word unemployment still means what you think it does, namely a person seeking a job. Problem is that governments worldwide have repeatedly and consistently manipulated with unemployment rates for as long as there has been a definition for it. This has led to the current situation were comparison between unemployment in different countries is not only difficult but also rather pointless, häck, it is even hard to compare unemployment rates within the same nation from one year to another.
Definitions:
unemployment: Persons between 15 and 64 years of age who are not working , but are available for work, and are actively looking for work.
unemployment rate: The percentage of the labour force that is unemployed.
labour force: The number of people employed plus the number of unemployed.
employment: Persons between 15 and 64 years of age working for pay at least one hour per week, or without pay at least 15 hours per week in family business.
Economics, Karl E. Case.
Take a look at these definitions and you will see that it is pretty trivial to alter the unemployment rate. For example, define “available for work”.
Far be it for me to suggest that statistics aren’t able to be manipulated, Sleipner, by crafty or interpretive definitions. The point I was addressing was that people between jobs are included in unemployment figures. They are.
Airman Doors:
It is true that the economy has been hit by 3 adverse shocks. These are 1) the tech bubble collapse, 2) the realization that corporate executives have been cooking the books and the subsequent collapse in equity prices and 3) 911, of course.
Unfortunately, Bush did not respond to the downturn in a way that previous Presidents would have done, including Nixon.
Specifically, tax cuts for those who are less apt to spend the proceeds are thought to be less effective than tax cuts for those with middle or lower incomes.
A program of short-term spending, on the other hand, is likely to stimulate the economy more, for a given dollar of long-term budget deficit produced.
This isn’t ideology: this is basic macroeconomics.
When the economy was doing well, Bush’s tax cuts were about, “Giving the money back to the people”. When it was doing poorly, they were about, “Getting the economy moving again.” The circumstances change, the conclusions -tax cuts biased towards the donor class- remain the same.
I truly believe that average Republicans placed their bets on the wrong horse. They would have done better with a McCain, a Lugar, an Alexander (though admittedly they probably would have done worse with Steve Forbes).
Some of you are thinking, “Temporary spending? The Federal Government? Ha!!”
Ok, but I have a reply. Block grants to the states are credibly temporary. The Feds can just hand over a cool $100 billion (say) for 1-2 years to the states, based upon their population or other objective measures.
States in trouble would then have to cut spending less. Also, they wouldn’t have to raise taxes as much. States who had planned better might even be able to invest in infrastructure and the like.
And let’s not forget the multiplier effect: when the government buys a good or a service, that increases the incomes of the sellers, who then are able to spend more. Thus a single dollar of initial spending can result in $2 to $5 of eventual spending.
Another standard recession-fighting scheme involves extending unemployment insurance to those who have been out of work for over 26 weeks. Again, handing money to those likely to spend a greater share of it tends to stimulate the economy more, during downturns. Alas, the Republican congress broke with past practice and dragged its feet on this measure. Some of the twists and turns with this legislation are documented here.* It makes for depressing reading, given their enthusiasm for donor-class tax cuts.
- What that site doesn’t go into are attempts by House Repubs to attach all sorts of constituent goodies to a bill that should have been wholly bipartisan.
Incidentally, we discussed this topic in March 2003: Current presidential administration and today’s economics
Eris: FYI
The unemployment rate is based on a telephone survey.
If you out of work AND say you have “looked for work” within the past “reference week”, then you are counted as unemployed.
Flipping through the newspaper does not count as, “looking for work”. In contrast writing a cover letter would be characterized as job-seeking.
If you have not looked for work, you are “out of the labor force”.
If you have not looked for work because you believe their are no jobs available you are, “Out of the labor force”, and, “A discouraged worker”.
(I don’t know whether Eris is aware of the preceding or not.)
Vdc: *I dont hear any liberals commenting on how practical work experience is just as valuable an education in many fields as a college education. *
That sounds kind of odd to me, because policies that strongly benefit non-college-educated workers are generally viewed as “liberal” causes. E.g., strengthening labor law enforcement, defending workers’ right to organize, workplace safety regulation, retaining eligibility for overtime pay, extended unemployment benefits, etc., are all important issues for workers without college educations. (So are more general “social capital” programs like public education and single-payer health care.)
And the people who support these policies are largely liberals, while those who oppose them are largely conservatives. It’s a common rhetorical gambit for conservatives to decry liberals as snooty elitists who have no concern for “ordinary people”, but they seldom put their pro-business money where their pro-worker mouth is.
Youre missing the point. Im talking about people on their knees, trying to stand up; and youre bragging about how liberals have given them knee pads.
Im not speaking as some business-owning conservative, Im speaking as someone who was one of the ‘working-poor’ until my early 30s.
There are quite a few problems conservatives have caused, namely mouthing the rhetoric of free trade all the time rigging things in the background. As far as Im concerned, ~more~ competition is a great leveler; when a company has major amounts of competition, all they can afford to worry about is the best person for the job, not stupid things like gender, skin color, or a degree in the humanities.
The current conservatives havent done much to increase competition, or to remove the artificial barriers to competition (i.e opportunity) that exist (largely in the tax code, but also in various little regulations here and there, such as the previously mentioned due diligence rules). The current conservatives seem to be more concerned with trying to gaurentee large corporations staying in business, rather than trying to make it easier for people to compete with them and thus inceasing opportunity, and in the long run, jobs and wealth.
On the other hand, liberals dont seem to be interested in making it easier for anyone to work their way out of things either. Hell, many liberals will laugh at the very concept, and patronize the poor by patting them on the head and telling them ‘Itll be Ok, we’ll protect you’.
As it is now, if you start at the bottom in a company, you really cant work your way to the top. Only to the middle, if even that. This is by design, not by nature, and it hasnt always been that way. Kids just out of college start in the middle and work their way to the top. In a great many companies and industries, this is screwball. Its also extremely unfair. Youre answer is along the lines of ‘well liberals are responsible for giving everyone stuck at the bottom a pillow’.
Liberal policies facilitate artifically static ‘owner’ and ‘worker’ classes just as much as any conservative policies do. If tomorrows middle management and business owners are not to a large part drawn from todays working poor, there is something very wrong with our system. I rarely trust an employee who doesnt some day want to be an employer, and I rarely trust an employer who wasnt for most of their life an employee.
If you want to create jobs, you create competiton. None of the liberals posting on this thread are attacking the conservatives for their lack of creating and enhancing competition (i.e opportunity); theyre attacking them for not giving the poor enough bread and circuses.
Yes, the conservatives are responsible for the state of things today.
Equally so are the liberals.
What’s a conservative policy? I know everyone thinks that there are ideological divisions between the parties. There are litmus tests, abortion being the best example. Ideology really doesn’t enter the picture, much, or for long.
If your congressional district is one half elderly, you are for raising SS at least inflation times two every year. “Viagra and champagne for everyone!” Your party affiliation will not matter one bit. All these philosophical differences are nice to trot out around election time to pretend like they exist.
The US not only has a social safety net, but 51 social safety nets. Many problems attributed to the US might as well be attributed to the rest of the world, as that’s who lives here. I know child services workers. One of them insists that every single case of starvation he’s seen – and he’s seen a few – were inflicted on the child purposefully or neglectfully. Many of the scare statistics I’ve seen on the United States don’t seem to take anything about human behavior into account. If the kid starved, lack of food.
Right, but what if there was $500 of cocaine and heroin on the table when the police found the child? How do we welfare out of that problem?
Many comiserations, Airman. I was unemployed a few years ago. To provide some comparison, were you to live in the UK you would receive around $55 per week Job Seeker’s Allowance and around $200 Housing Benefit, as well as Child Support (don’t know how much, not having kids myself) plus full health and dental costs. Should your situation become so desparate that your house was repossessed, you could apply for a council house.
Of course, this is by no means a lot of money. However, such a safety net does provide the peace of mind that your family’s health will never suffer because of your, hopefully temporary, unemployment.