Your argument is that in the space of 18 months, during the Mortgage Crisis, the U6 unemployment rate went from just over 8% to over 16% because of a lack of job skills?
I once heard here a very smart quote:
This also applies to skills. If companies don’t have work for people to do, it doesn’t matter how many awesome skills they have.
Then show a little American gumption! Like Forrest Gumption! Your boss has a job, doesn’t he? Well, take his!
Or go to your boss and offer to work free, as an intern, until you learn the job you’ve been doing for the last several years! Even if he calls security, he will be doing it with a new respect and admiration for your tenacity and initiative!
It was party-lined vote in the Senate and Ds had the solid 60% they needed there to pass anything they wanted. The House did have just enough votes to get it, even though they had 34 swing Ds.
I am unconvinced that they couldn’t have passed Single Payer under those circumstances. Most of the D holdouts voted with the party line greater than 50% of the time and had issues with the ACA itself. They won enough of the holdout Democrats at the last minute, for instance, by allowing the High Deductible Health Plan to be considered coverage. I can’t say that if they hadn’t forced a vote at that time and had pressed harder we couldn’t have gotten some form of SP.
If we look back at your previous assertion:
That’s not really true. Clinton’s Health Security Act was very similar to the ACA. It required that all legal persons in the US have a health plan through an HMO, PPO, or fee-for-service schedule and those under a certain income level would have their plans paid for by the government.
Sound familiar? It’s obviously the same health insurance framework that is at the base of the ACA (despite the ACA getting modified for 15 years prior to Obama adopting it as his plan).
While it additionally allowed states the opportunity to implement Single Payer, it was up to the state and wasn’t mandated. For my opinion, I think we would have seen only the leftist states implementing the Single Payer option (California, New York, DC, etc). I also sorta wonder how California would have fared with the economic collapse if they had the added burden of state-run single-payer.
Here is an okay breakdown of the Clinton-era health initiative.
Violently humping your ex-bosses leg will get you put on a sexual offender registry. I wouldn’t advise it.
Dunno if it’s helpful for me to say this–the OP is of course gonna think not–but I find it really unhelpful and well-poisoning to start off with the idea that the GOP hates Americans. I’ve criticized others who have said things like Democrats don’t care about poor kids, and it’s only fair for me to say it’s bullshit in the other direction as well.
Look, I think we desperately need health care reform, and I think ACA is a lot better than nothing, even if it’s not exactly what we need, and I think opposition to ACA is often very misguided. But there are a lot of strong arguments against ACA, and if we’re going to talk about the law honestly, we need to do so with an attempt to understand where opponents are coming from, not caricaturing them. The caricature dooms you to ignorance.
Well, exactly that word: “caricature”. A caricature exaggerates certain salient characteristics in order to make a point. It presumes that the audience/reader is smart enough to know the difference. If the caricaturist or the reader is too stupid to know the difference, too bad, nobody is obliged to pander to their duh, certainly not out of polite respect for positions that don’t deserve it.
It is very helpful. Thanks.
Sure. Look at vacancies in skilled work.
I found 157 IT security positions within 30 miles of my house listed on one website.
75 financial analyst positions.
A dozen paramedic/EMT spots are going begging — one in Prince William County’s been open for a month.
Yes, you’re right – but companies DO have work to do. Just not a good match for unskilled laborers.
It’s extremely helpful. Thank you.
Suppose tomorrow half the nations lawyer’s were out of a job. For whatever reason, zombie Apocalypse, Second Coming, whatever…which of those positions would you qualify for?
Well, that’s 244 down, 39,999,756 to go.
There aren’t anything like enough IT jobs or FA jobs or EMT jobs to fix our unemployment problems. Anyway, even if there were, it takes years to train up for one of those jobs, if you’re not already in the field. Years and tens of thousands of dollars of education for a person who can’t afford food, shelter and healthcare today because they have no income and a social welfare system that ignores them, because they should just get a better job.
It literally makes my stomach hurt to read some of the posts from the right wingers in this thread. This is not a stupid game. People are dying from lack of health care. People are dying because uninsured medical costs are so high that they put off seeing a doctor until they are in such pain that their cancer or whatever has advanced beyond the curable stage.
Perhaps slightly off the topic, perhaps not, but something I have been wondering. How many kids we got today borrowing every dime they can find in order to pursue that golden ticket to Upper Management, the M.B.A.? How many of them can we afford?
This time, you can blame the unions. Because all those union workers who got better wages, some wanted better housing, some wanted a better car, but damned near every one wanted to send their kids to college, to have that better life America promises.
Are they suddenly a bunch of lazy bums when the get their freshly minted ticket to ride, only to find that the seats are all taken?
Thankfully, while serious, it doesn’t look fatal.
Is that a large number? How many unemployed unskilled laborers live within 30 miles of your house?
Eh, the problem is that studies have been released for a long time that equates earning power with college degrees. It’s often been assumed that you just don’t make money without a degree. You can see this by noticing the tradesman (electrician, plumber, etc) shortage we have, nowadays. Those are apprenticed positions, traditionally, that don’t require college.
People started to go “Wow! My kid needs to have a degree!” This has been drummed and harped on my entire life. College just makes you better! It’s true! Really! Middle school had career day talking about this stuff, so did high school and it’s college prep courses. You MUST go to college. Or you’ll be like Hobo Bill that eats the cafeteria waste food every evening. I was even told on more than one occasion that it doesn’t matter WHAT I get a degree in, I just needed a degree. Which ALWAYS bothered me… If I get a degree in Comparative Egyptian History, why would someone hire me (even with work history for the position) over the guy with a degree in Finance that minored in Business?
So instead of something where you learn the basics because your dad is an electrician (or mechanic or whatnot) and apprentice with him or one of his buddies and go on to your adult life, your dad gets wind of the fact that salary people “make a lot more” money than he does. So he sends his kids to college.
On the flip side, as an 18 year old looking to either go to college or work your ass off to learn a trade, what are you going to do? You’ll go to school.
How ever you get your foot in the door, though, four years later if you come out with a degree in anything but certain fields that are in demand today (not what was in demand four years ago, mind you) you lose out because, sorry, we don’t need any pharmacists, right now. Try again when this batch retires!
You could be trained to do any job, but companies don’t want to do that. They want you to come in and sit down and go to work. I’ve spent a lot of my life battling corporate people for training budgets for those tradesman that have worked under me. It’s something that finance people just don’t want to do. In 5 years when they can’t do the new stuff just fire them and hire a new one! It’s cheaper!
How many times have you heard about how Wall Street loves, loves, loves that newly hired CEO, who has a reputation for “lean and mean”? Nobody wants to be a cruel and flint-hearted bastard. They want to hire a cruel and flint-hearted bastard to do it for them. We never seem to run low.
I’m sure he was well aware that his point was meaningless.
The GOP doesn’t, I think, hate Americans. They are mislead by decades of nonsense media that has built a faulty narrative that they’ve bought into.
They think that making people suffer will force them to rise to the challenge. If you remove the safety net, no one will need it.
Unwed mother with three children? Cut her foodstamps and she’ll get a good job!
50 year old let off from his factory job? If he had worked hard in the first place, they would have fired someone else!
It’s simplistic thinking driven by their view that we live in a world that almost always rewards merit and that laziness is responsible for the vast majority of poverty.
Necessity is the mother of invention? Maybe, but laziness is the father. You just know that some guy was trudging to grind grain or pump water, looked up as the wind blew and thought “There has to be a way to get the wind to do this shitwork for me…”
And lo, it was so!
Well we have to separate the ideologues who buy into this line of reasoning from people who are indifferent about the fate of Americans but are only interesting in lining their own pockets. I would say a HUGE proportion of Republicans are indifferent pocket-liners who push the ideology you have described simply because that gets them votes in their districts. The creation of all the safe rural districts in America, and the inherent advantage that rural voters have over urban voters in the House means that the US is being held hostage by a deeply ignorant and not to put to fine a point on it, stupid minority that keeps voting these larcenous pretenders (and the few idiots who take the stuff seriously) in.
Not surprisingly, skill mismatch is something actual professionals get paid to study with more than anecdotes about the number of unfilled positions near them. While there is a good chance that it constitutes part of the explanation for the current unemployment problem, few professional economists think it represents the entire hiring/seeking gap, much less the entire slack in the labor market. (Cite.)