Creating New Jobs Without Government Spending

[Misaki]

This was just sent using the White House's email contact form, was it too long?

The concept of the unemployment that exists in the US is simple: too much supply of labour. US companies have plenty of cash (h ttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/net-lending-by-domestic-business/) and are globally competitive. Demand for goods simply does not match the amount of work Americans are willing to do. This desire to contribute to the nation's success is admirable, but it is misplaced: the economy would function better if people worked less than 40 hours per week, and companies can certainly afford to hire if people chose to do so.

By causing companies to give a progressively higher wage for working less than 40 hours per week, the President can fix the nation's unemployment problem without additional government spending.

The nation must, however, be prepared to accept that a balanced budget and full employment is more important than GDP, as this will cause to GDP to fall as production adjusts, until it resumes rising again from inevitable advances in production efficiency and new technologies.

The President must understand that addressing concerns about the lack of jobs is as critical as a balanced budget, and with the reluctance of the rich to appear to be "wasting" money reducing supply of labour is the only short-term way to create jobs under a balanced budget. Please allow this possibility to be discussed within the President's administration.

The critical failure of mainstream economics is a misunderstanding of the importance of income as an indicator of success, and of work as an indicator of contribution to the nation. The objective of changing the wage system is to promote the idea that working hard beyond one's own economic needs benefits the company via the lower wage rate (which people working at good companies would be glad to do), while the best way to benefit the nation is intelligent spending—which many people currently do not put priority on. A longer explanation is at h ttp://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9 (12800 characters).

The President is obviously determined to find a solution that benefits all parties, in keeping with the spirit of Hawaii where he once lived, and where I have lived as well. Under a balanced budget, this is the best and possibly only way to ensure the nation can support those who need help the most.

 

[brono921]

Ask yourself this, do you trust anyone who helped cook the books at Enron to give you financial advice?
That'd be Paul Krugman. A man who hasn't had a single economic forcast predicted accurately.
Liberals.
In the land of make believe, they are kings.

 

[percysunshine]

I think Paul Krugman needs a job picking sugar beets in the San Fernando Valley.

 

[FactFinder]

Creating New Jobs Without Government Spending

That sounds like it would be more government jobs=more public debt.

How about getting rid of the energy weight aound everyone's neck? That just might spur a bit of confidence. Of course, pols may have to look elsewhere for funding besides financial houses and hedge funds.

 

[Maple]

By causing companies to give a progressively higher wage for working less than 40 hours per week, the President can fix the nation's unemployment problem without additional government spending

What the hell is this???????????? Are you kidding me??? Do we live in Greece??? How do you (Cause) a company to pay more for less??? Sounds like communism to me.Gotta to be an (Obama the great) plan. lol

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

You don't know what communism is, do you?

 

[Charles_Main]

This was just sent using the White House's email contact form, was it too long?

The concept of the unemployment that exists in the US is simple: too much supply of labour. US companies have plenty of cash (h ttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/net-lending-by-domestic-business/) and are globally competitive. Demand for goods simply does not match the amount of work Americans are willing to do. This desire to contribute to the nation's success is admirable, but it is misplaced: the economy would function better if people worked less than 40 hours per week, and companies can certainly afford to hire if people chose to do so.

By causing companies to give a progressively higher wage for working less than 40 hours per week, the President can fix the nation's unemployment problem without additional government spending.

The nation must, however, be prepared to accept that a balanced budget and full employment is more important than GDP, as this will cause to GDP to fall as production adjusts, until it resumes rising again from inevitable advances in production efficiency and new technologies.

The President must understand that addressing concerns about the lack of jobs is as critical as a balanced budget, and with the reluctance of the rich to appear to be "wasting" money reducing supply of labour is the only short-term way to create jobs under a balanced budget. Please allow this possibility to be discussed within the President's administration.

The critical failure of mainstream economics is a misunderstanding of the importance of income as an indicator of success, and of work as an indicator of contribution to the nation. The objective of changing the wage system is to promote the idea that working hard beyond one's own economic needs benefits the company via the lower wage rate (which people working at good companies would be glad to do), while the best way to benefit the nation is intelligent spending—which many people currently do not put priority on. A longer explanation is at h ttp://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9 (12800 characters).

The President is obviously determined to find a solution that benefits all parties, in keeping with the spirit of Hawaii where he once lived, and where I have lived as well. Under a balanced budget, this is the best and possibly only way to ensure the nation can support those who need help the most.

All we can do is create an Business Friendly Environment Politicians have to stop Pretending they Can Create Jobs. Only the Private Sector can provide the Number of Jobs we need in a sustainable way.

 

[Charles_Main]

By causing companies to give a progressively higher wage for working less than 40 hours per week, the President can fix the nation's unemployment problem without additional government spending

The person who said this has obviously lost their fucking mind. Are you even serious? Forget that you are talking about the Government Dictating Pay scales to Companies. Alarm Alarm. Your Real Error is you seem to Ignore that our Economy already in the shiter. Aside from being completely insane. What you propose would put even Further Burden on Business, and therefore there would be even less jobs.

Pay more for less? You have got to be on crack or something dude.

 

[hellofromwarsaw]

#2- As alway TOTAL BS character assassination from RW TURD...

as far as I can tell Krugman is ALWAYS right...PK Archive, from himself:

MY CONNECTION WITH ENRON, ONE MORE TIME
SYNOPSIS: If you had any questions about Krugman in this diminishing non-scandal, this piece should answer them


I really didn't want to say any more about the Enron advisory board issue - I've already posted quite a lot of information here . I don't have anything to hide, but my job at the New York Times is to write about real issues, not myself. Still, the story keeps popping up.

Let me give the people bringing this up the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that they really are concerned about journalistic ethics. That's certainly a valid subject. It's important that a national publication like the New York Times insist that its journalists be free from conflicts of interest; kudos to my employers for their strict rules, which insist that writers be free from anything that might raise questions - rules that I have followed from the moment I joined the Times. It's also important for a journalist to disclose previous connections where they are relevant - which I have.

But somehow this keeps shifting from a real discussion of journalistic ethics, the guidelines that publications should adopt and that writers should follow, to a prurient fascination with other peoples' paychecks. If that's all that it's about, then it's tabloid journalism, not a real attempt to grapple with the issue.

Lately I find myself presumed guilty of an ethics violation simply because I was paid for my time. All that anyone wants to talk about is $50,000 (which turns out to be wrong - see below). There is such a thing as earning money honestly; if you want to challenge a journalist's ethics, you have to ask not how much he was paid but when, for what, and whether it distorted his writing. It's particularly important to get the context right when the person in question had a successful non-journalistic career before he went into journalism - which I did.

Too much of what I read about myself doesn't get even the most basic facts right. Critics imply, falsely, that I received money from Enron as a New York Times columnist - that I was receiving a bribe because of a prominent journalistic position that I did not in fact have at the time (unlike the other journalists who have served on that board, who held the same jobs then that they do today). They don't acknowledge that I disclosed my connection almost three years ago, and again a year ago. And they don't acknowledge that I have been criticizing Enron since January 2001, long before everyone else started bashing the company.

By all means let's have a discussion about journalistic ethics; Enron has made us all a lot more conscious of ethical issues involving business. But a game of gotcha, in which anyone who received money from Enron is lumped in with the genuine malefactors in this story, does nothing to improve journalistic integrity - on the contrary, it's counterproductive.

To make it easier for anyone who is still interested in this story to get the facts right, here are some frequently asked questions about my role on the Enron advisory board, with answers.

1. What did I do? In early 1999 I was asked to serve on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues. As far as I knew at the time, they genuinely wanted to learn something. I resigned from that board in the fall of 1999, when I accepted an offer to write for the New York Times.

2. What was I paid? It turns out that I was actually paid $37,500 - the last quarterly payment did not take place, because of my early resignation from the board.

3. Was this exorbitant? It didn't seem so at the time. In 1998-1999 my normal fee for a one-hour business speech in Boston or New York was $20,000 - more if the speech involved long-distance travel. The Enron board required that I spend 4 days in Houston. So the sum they offered didn't seem out of line - if anything it seemed rather low compared with my usual rates.

4. Was I being paid off because I was a journalist? That Enron board, when I was on it, did not strike me as a board of pundits. It included Larry Lindsey and Bob Zoellick - future Bush administration officials, though I had no way of knowing that, but certainly not journalists. It also included Pankaj Ghemawat, a strategy professor at Harvard, and Irwin Stelzer, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. (Stelzer had a column in the London Times, but I didn't know that) The only person there I thought of as a journalist was William Kristol - I thought he was there to regale us with Washington gossip. And I regarded myself as being in the same category as Ghemawat - an academic expert, who was there because of his expertise.

An amazing number of people seem to think that I was paid by Enron while working for the Times. I wasn't - when Enron approached me there was no hint that a Times connection lay in my future. As soon as I shook hands with the Times, I resigned from that board.

I did write monthly columns for two magazines in 1999, but I would not have described myself as a journalist - no more so than, say, Laura Tyson, Robert Barro, or or Gary Becker, respected economists who write monthly columns for Business Week. I wrote a monthly column for Fortune; that column was neither a major commitment of time nor a major source of income. I also wrote a monthly column, for very little money, for Slate. My main sources of income were teaching, consulting, and business speaking.

5. Did I disclose my connection? Yes. I reported it the one time I mentioned Enron in Fortune, almost three years ago. I reported it again the first time I mentioned Enron in the New York Times, in a highly critical article more than a year ago. I didn't say that I was paid to serve on the board, but I thought that was obvious: who volunteers his services to for-profit corporations?

One point that seems to have been missed in all the mud-slinging: I was the only member of the board to declare my connection voluntarily. Lindsey and Zoellick, as government officials, were required to disclose their consulting; none of the other members uttered a peep before the January 2002 New York Times article about the board.

6. Should I have disclosed the sum of money I received? I have always understood that when writing about someone you disclose the fact of a potential conflict of interest, not the financial details. If I had disclosed the sum back in January 2001, when I first wrote about Enron for the New York Times, it would have sounded strange - I'm sure people would have accused me of bragging.

7. Did the payment from Enron cause me to write anything I would not have written otherwise? No. Some people seem to think that because I had nice things to say about Enron's energy trading in a Fortune article - in which I disclosed my connection - I was being out of character. But I have always been a free-market Keynesian: I like free markets, but I want some government supervision to correct market failures and ensure stability. Some of my pro-market Slate pieces enraged people on the left - check out The accidental theorist , or In praise of cheap labor . My Fortune piece about the rise of markets, illustrated by Enron's energy trading, was an attempt to take a sunshine break from the dark pieces I had been writing about the Asian crisis; it was also a favor to my editors, who devoted that issue to e-business. It wasn't at all out of character. In fact, the next column I wrote for Fortune was also a pro-market piece, with kind words for Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher.

8. Was Enron trying to buy my soul? That's for them to answer. But I wasn't selling.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Workers fewer but more productive in ‘09

Fewer, working harder, for less - that was the American job picture last year.

One byproduct of the terrible labor market is that those lucky enough to still be drawing a paycheck find themselves doing the work of their unemployed former colleagues - and sending national productivity rates soaring.

“To date, businesses have been getting by in the recovery by increasing productivity rather than payrolls,” said Andrew Gledhill of Moody’s Economy.com. “Part of this is a confidence issue: Businesses are not yet convinced of the sustainability and strength of the recovery.”

Workers fewer but more productive in '09 - Washington Times

And that remains the case two years later, to today:

Middle-Class Americans More Productive, But Earning Less: Report

American workers' productivity has soared over the last 30 years, but that extra output hasn't translating into higher earnings for the American middle class, according to a report released this week.

A 40-year-old male high school graduate earned less in real terms in 2009 than he would have in 1980, according to the report by the Employment Policy Research Network, a collective of labor, management, economics, employment and sociology researchers from 50 universities brought together by the nonpartisan nonprofit Labor and Employment Relations Association.

As middle-class Americans have lost out economically over that 30 year period, productivity, corporate profits and the incomes of America's rich have all soared, the report said. By 2009, 1 percent of the population lived on 21 percent of the nation’s total annual earnings.

The study warned that the average middle-aged man can no longer expect or assume his children's economic situation will be better than his own.

Declining middle-class wages have also helped erode the federal government's solvency, the study's authors said. It might even be causing a decline in the marriage rate.

"As the link between productivity and wages broke down, families and the government turned to borrowing and credit to support living standards," Frank Levy, one of the study's authors and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of urban economics said in a statement. "These options are no longer sustainable."

Middle-Class Americans More Productive, But Earning Less: Report

Why would a given business/employer want to hire more employees when he can do more with less? And adding to payroll will cut into profit – can’t have that. Even as the economy continues to recover and grow, employers will hold out as long as possible before forced to hire, and those new hires will happen only when profits are threatened.

 

[hortysir]

Demand for goods simply does not match the amount of work Americans are willing to do

Sorry 'bout that but I have more faith in my fellow Americans than that