Good Job

There Are 100 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not Have Jobs ***UPDATED***

The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told.  Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work?  No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs!  According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be “officially” unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either.  The federal government considers those Americans to be “not in the labor force” so they are not included in the unemployment rate.  In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers.  The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined.  Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe.  The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago.  It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now.  So don’t believe the hype that things are getting much better.  If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon.

The first chart that I have posted below shows the total number of “officially” unemployed workers in America.  According to the Federal Reserve, that number is currently 12,673,000.  This chart makes it look like the employment picture in America is getting significantly better….

But if you dig deeper into the numbers you quickly see that this is not true.  A lot of those workers that were formerly classified as “unemployed” have now been moved into the “not in labor force” category.  Since the start of the last recession, the number of Americans not in the labor force has risen by more than 8 million according to the Obama administration.  The total number of working age Americans not in the labor force now stands at 87,897,000….

So when you add 12,673,000 and 87,897,000, you get a total of 100,570,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.

Yes, there are certainly millions upon millions of working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.

But you have to be delusional to believe that there are nearly 88 million working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.

The Obama administration tells us that the labor force participation rate is now the lowest it has been since 1984.  But back then, a very large percentage of women were staying home and raising families.  The percentage of stay at home mothers has declined steadily since then.

So the truth is that the employment statistics that we are being fed are not portraying an accurate picture of what is really going on.

As a CNN article recently explained, there are millions of Americans that say that they would like to have a job even though they have not been “actively” looking for one in the past four weeks.  If those people were included in the unemployment rate, it would immediately shoot up to around 11 percent….

About six million people claim they want a job, even though they haven’t looked for one in the last four weeks. If they were to all start applying for work again, the unemployment rate would suddenly shoot up above 11%.

If you want a much more accurate picture of what is really happening to the employment situation in America, the key is to look at the employment to population ratio.  As I have written about previously, the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs is not increasing.

Let’s take a look at the employment to population ratio for the last six years for the month of March….

March 2007: 63.3%

March 2008: 62.7%

March 2009: 59.9%

March 2010: 58.5%

March 2011: 58.5%

March 2012: 58.5%

The percentage of the working age population that had jobs fell rapidly during the recession and it has stayed very low since then.

When Barack Obama tells you that “America is going back to work” he is lying to you.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that there are millions of hard working Americans that have been sitting at home for years hoping that a new job will come along.

Back in 2007, approximately 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for one year or longer.

Today, that figure is above 30 percent.

The average duration of unemployment in the United States today is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

And according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the number of announced job cuts is actually rising again….

Also, announced jobs cuts rose 7.1% in April, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, to 40,599 — and up 11.2% from last April — another bit of evidence that the jobs market isn’t doing well.

Economic conditions in the United States have been steadily getting worse for quite a while, but that is not the only reason for our employment problems.

There are two other trends that I want to briefly mention.

1) A lot of jobs that used to be very labor intensive are now being replaced by technology.  Thanks to robotics, automation and computers, a lot of big companies simply do not need as many workers these days.  Those are jobs that are never going to come back.

2) As labor has become a global commodity, millions upon millions of U.S. jobs have been sent overseas.  Today, you are not just competing for a job with your neighbors.  You are also competing with workers on the other side of the globe.  Unfortunately, it is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of those countries.  By sending our jobs out of the country, big corporations can also avoid a whole host of rules, regulations, taxes and benefit payments that they would be facing if they hired American workers.

So U.S. workers are at a massive competitive disadvantage.  Why should a big corporation pay 10 or 20 times more for an American worker when they can pad their profits by exploiting cheap foreign labor?

The sad truth is that the value that the marketplace puts on the labor of the average American worker is continually decreasing.

This is making it much more difficult to find a job and it is keeping wages down.

In the old days, pretty much any man that was a hard worker and that really wanted a good job could go out and get one.

But now all of that has changed.  Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

And sadly, the vast majority of the jobs that are being lost are good jobs.  As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.

So how are middle class families making it these days?

Many of them are going into tremendous amounts of debt.  As a recent CNN article detailed, the average debt load being carried by those of us in the bottom 95 percent of all income earners has risen dramatically over the past several decades….

In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.

Unfortunately, many American families are absolutely maxed out at this point.  According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are currently paying their bills late.

If your goal is to live a middle class lifestyle, you need to realize that the entire way that the game is being played is changing.

In the old days, you could start out with a company as a young person and stay with that company until you retired.  If you worked hard and you were loyal, there was a really good chance that the company would recognize that and be loyal to you too.

These days, most companies are absolutely heartless when it comes to their workers.  The good job that you have today could be gone tomorrow.  Workers are increasingly being viewed as “liabilities”, and there is a good chance that the moment you become “expendable” to your company you will be kicked out on the street.

That is one reason why I am encouraging people to consider starting their own businesses.  If you work for someone else, your security can be taken away from you at any moment.  But if you work for yourself, you aren’t going to get fired.

Unfortunately, tough economic times are coming and things are not going to be easy no matter what road you take.  It will be imperative to work harder than ever, to stay flexible, and to never, ever give up.

***UPDATE***

Since the monthly jobs numbers were released on Friday I thought I would update this article to reflect the latest figures.

The federal government has announced that the unemployment rate has declined to 8.1 percent.

That certainly sounds like good news.

But knowing better, I immediately went and checked how the employment to population ratio had changed.

Well, it turns out that the employment to population ratio has fallen once again.

That means that a smaller percentage of working age Americans had jobs in April than in March.

The following are the figures for the past three months….

February 2012: 58.6%

March 2012: 58.5%

April 2012: 58.4%

If the percentage of people that have jobs is going down, then how can they claim that things are getting better?

The following are the two Federal Reserve charts posted above after they have been updated with the new numbers.  These charts are very revealing.

1) There are now 12,500,000 workers that are “officially” considered to be unemployed….

2) There are now 88,419,000 Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  Please note that this number rose by 522,000 in just a single month!….

Okay, so now let’s do the same math that we did before.

12,500,000 unemployed workers plus 88,419,000 Americans that are “not in the labor force” equals 100,919,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.

That number just continues to climb at a very rapid pace.

When is the mainstream media going to start telling us the truth?

Labor Day 2011: What Are We Celebrating? The Lack Of Jobs In America?

If you still have a good job, you certainly have something to celebrate on Labor Day 2011.  So far you have survived the decline of the U.S. economy.  But your day may be coming soon.  This weekend, there will be millions of Americans that will not be doing any celebrating.  They are not enjoying a break from their jobs because they don’t have any jobs.  In fact, it seems kind of heartless for the rest of us to be celebrating while so many of our countrymen are destitute.  What are we celebrating on Labor Day 2011?  The lack of jobs in America?  At this point, the U.S. economy closely resembles a gigantic game of musical chairs.  Every time the music stops, even more good jobs are pulled out of the game and even more workers are added.  Once upon a time, if you really wanted a job in America you could get one.  But now the competition for even the most basic jobs is absolutely brutal.  If you gathered together all of the unemployed people in the United States, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.  It would be a nation larger than Greece.  All of those unemployed people are not going to be taking trips with their families this holiday weekend.  Instead, most of them are going to be trying to figure out what to do with their shattered lives.

With the economy in such a mess, you would think that someone out there would be suggesting that Labor Day 2011 should really be a day of mourning.  This economic downturn has shredded the lives of millions of American families.

Is there any other crisis in recent years that has had more of an impact on a national level?

On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that no new jobs were created during the month of August and that the official unemployment rate remained steady at 9.1 percent.

Wait, aren’t we supposed to be in the middle of an economic recovery?

Actually, we need at least 125,000 new jobs or so each month just to keep up with the growth of the U.S. population.  So it seems odd that the economy would add zero jobs but the unemployment rate would not increase.

But that is what the government is saying.

In any event, things don’t look good.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the civilian employment-population ratio was at 58.2 percent last month.  This is an incredibly low figure.

In a recent article, John Mauldin explained what would have to happen to return the employment-population ratio to where it was in the year 2000….

The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, we would have to gain some 18 MILLION jobs.

Does anyone have an extra 18 million jobs laying around somewhere?  The following is a chart showing what has happened to the employment-population ratio over the last several decades….

What makes this chart even more startling is that the number of women in the workforce was constantly rising for most of the time period reflected in this chart.  So when you take that into account our current situation is far worse.

For example, back in 1969 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.  Pretty much any man in his prime working years that wanted a job could get a job.

In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.

But that is only part of the story.  Another significant trend has been how flat wages have been.  Average hourly earnings fell 0.1% in August.  Meanwhile, the prices in the stores continue to go up.

In this column, I write a lot about how the middle class is being destroyed in this country.  When you look at the ratio of employee compensation to GDP, it is now the lowest that is has been in about 50 years.  In other words, U.S. workers are taking home a smaller share of the pie than at any other time in modern U.S. history.

But at this point those that still actually do have jobs consider themselves to be the lucky ones.

Tonight, there will be millions of desperate unemployed Americans that will blankly stare at their televisions as they try to figure out how their dreams got flushed down the toilet.

Remember how I mentioned at the beginning of the article that unemployed Americans would constitute a country larger than Greece?  Well, 42 percent of all of those unemployed Americans have been out of a job for 27 weeks or longer.

What would you do if you lost your job and you were unemployed for half a year?

Would you be able to survive?

In America today, the longer that you are unemployed, the harder it is for you to get another job.  If you have been unemployed for at least one year, there is a 91 percent chance that you will not find a new job within the next month.

Out of sheer desperation, many Americans have taken jobs that they never even dreamed that they would take.

Only 47 percent of the U.S. workforce is “fully employed” at this point.  Right now there are hordes of Americans that are waiting tables, flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wal-Mart because that is all that they can find right now.

Sadly, this is all part of a long-term trend.

Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.  Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

This middle class is being pummeled out of existence, and most Americans don’t even understand what is happening.

It certainly does not help that both the Republicans and the Democrats have stood by as millions upon millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country.

It also certainly does not help that both the Republicans and the Democrats have stood by as millions upon millions of illegal immigrants have taken jobs away from American citizens.

It also certainly does not help that both the Republicans and the Democrats have stood by as U.S. businesses have been absolutely crushed by mountains of nightmarish regulations and have been taxed into oblivion.

The decade that just ended was the worst decade for job growth in America since the Great Depression.  In fact, even though thirty million people were added to the U.S. population during the decade, there was essentially zero job growth.

Sadly, things look like they are going to continue to get even worse.  For example, the United States Postal Service is in such trouble that it is asking Congress to allow it to lay off 120,000 workers. Overall, the Postal Service wants to eliminate 220,000 positions by 2015.

So is this big speech that Obama is going to give on Thursday going to solve anything?

Of course not.

The reality is that if Obama or any of his advisors had any grand ideas for fixing our situation they would have implemented them by now.

And what is the big deal in making us wait until Thursday to hear these “new ideas”?  Why not just tell us now?

Sadly, the truth is that everything that our politicians do now is about setting themselves up for the 2012 election.

Most likely, Obama is just going to take a bunch of tired ideas that do not work and “spin” them into a grand new plan.

Millions of Americans will actually buy into it.

But it is not as if establishment Republican candidates have anything to offer either.

You know, if Obama wanted to do something substantial, one place to start would be to order the Federal Reserve to stop paying banks not to make loans to individual and small businesses.

But just like all of our other weak-minded recent presidents, Barack Obama is not going to confront the Federal Reserve.

In fact, everything that Obama actually does “for the economy” only seems to make things worse.

As I have outlined before, we know exactly why our economy is losing jobs and we know things that we could start doing right now to reverse the long-term trends that are absolutely killing us.

But Barack Obama is not talking about real solutions and neither are the establishment Republican candidates.

So things are going to continue to get worse.  The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.  Every month we have been setting a new record.  The middle class is going to continue to disappear as the number of good jobs continues to decrease.

So, no, there are not too many reasons to celebrate on Labor Day 2011.  Our economy is dying and millions upon millions of our fellow citizens are deeply suffering.

Urgent action is required in order to prevent our situation from rapidly getting worse, but right now the vast majority of our politicians are asleep at the switch.

So instead of celebrating this Labor Day, why don’t you say a prayer for America instead?

We really could use it.

What Is Outsourcing?

Once upon a time in America, virtually anyone with a high school education and the willingness to work hard could get a good job.  Fifty years ago a “good job” would enable someone to own a home, buy a car, take a couple of vacations a year and retire with a decent pension.  Unfortunately, those days are long gone.  Every single year the number of “good jobs” in the United States actually shrinks even as our population continues to grow.  Where in the world did all of those good jobs go?  Economists toss around terms such as “outsourcing” and “offshoring” to describe what is happening, but most ordinary Americans don’t really grasp what those terms mean.  So what is outsourcing?  Well, it essentially means sending work somewhere else.  In the context of this article I will be using those terms to describe the thousands of manufacturing facilities and the millions of jobs that have been sent overseas.  Over the past several decades, the U.S. economy has become increasingly merged into the emerging “one world economy”.  Thanks to the WTO, NAFTA and a whole host of other “free trade” agreements, the internationalist dream of a truly “global marketplace” is closer than ever before.

But for American workers, a “global marketplace” is really bad news.  In the United States, businesses are subject to a vast array of very complex laws, rules and regulations that make it very difficult to operate in this country.  That makes it very tempting for corporations to simply move out of the U.S. in order to avoid all of the hassle.

In addition, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the entire world.  This also provides great motivation for corporations to move operations outside of the country.

The biggest thing affecting American workers, however, is the fact that labor has now become a global commodity.  U.S. workers have now been merged into a global labor pool.  Americans must now directly compete for jobs with hundreds of millions of desperate people willing to work for slave labor wages on the other side of the globe.

So exactly how is an American worker supposed to compete with a highly motivated person on the other side of the planet that makes $1.50 an hour with essentially no benefits?

Just think about it.

If you were a big global corporation, would you want to hire American workers which would cost you 10 or 20 times more after everything is factored in?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why millions of jobs have been leaving the United States.

Corporations love to make more money.  Many of them will not hesitate for an instant to pay slave labor wages if they can get away with it.  The bottom line for most corporations is to maximize shareholder wealth.

Slowly but surely the number of good jobs in the United States is shrinking and those jobs are being sent to places where labor is cheaper.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. multinational corporations added 2.4 million new jobs overseas during the first decade of this century.  But during that same time frame U.S. multinational corporations cut a total of 2.9 million jobs inside the United States.

So where are all of our jobs going?

They are going to places like China.

The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

In addition, over 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed permanently during the past decade.

What do you think is eventually going to happen if the U.S. economy continues to bleed jobs and factories so badly?

As the U.S. has faltered, China has become an absolute economic powerhouse.

Ten years ago, the U.S. economy was three times as large as the Chinese economy.  At the turn of the century the United States accounted for well over 20 percent of global GDP and China accounted for significantly less than 10 percent of global GDP.  But since that time our share of global GDP has been steadily declining and China’s share has been steadily rising.

According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.

Should we all celebrate when that happens?

Should we all chant “We’re Number 2”?

Our economy is falling to pieces and the competition for the few remaining good jobs has become super intense.

The average American family is having a really tough time right now.  Only 45.4% of Americans had a job during 2010.  The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.

Not only that, only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

Just think about that.

33.2% of American men do not have jobs.

And that figure is going to continue to rise unless something is done about these economic trends.

Today, there are 10% fewer “middle class jobs” in the United States than there were a decade ago.  Tens of millions of Americans have been forced to take “whatever they can get”.  A lot of very hard working people are basically working for peanuts at this point.  In fact, half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

Things have gotten so bad that tens of thousands of people showed up for the National Hiring Day that McDonald’s just held.  With the economy such a mess, flipping burgers or welcoming people to Wal-Mart are jobs that suddenly don’t look so bad.

Right now America is rapidly losing high paying jobs and they are being replaced by low paying jobs.  According to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 percent of the job growth.  Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 percent of the job growth.

Thanks to the emerging one world economy, the U.S. is “transitioning” from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.

But it certainly doesn’t help that China is using every trick in the book to steal our industries.  China openly subsidizes domestic industries, they brazenly steal technology and they manipulate currency rates.

A recent article on Economy In Crisis described how the Chinese paper industry has been able to grow by threefold over the past decade while the U.S. paper industry has fallen apart….

From 2002 to 2009, the Chinese government poured $33.1 billion into what should be an unproductive industry. But, with the help of government subsidies, China was able to ride export-driven growth to become the world’s leading producer of paper products.

In the same time frame that China pumped $33 billion into its paper industry, U.S. employment in the industry fell 29 percent, from 557,000 workers to just 398,000.

So why should we be concerned about all of this?

Well, just open up your eyes.  As I have written about previously, our formerly great cities are being transformed into post-apocalyptic hellholes.

In a comment to a recent article, Trucker Mark described what he has seen happen to the “rust belt” over the past several decades….

I am a product of Detroit’s northwest suburbs and the Cleveland, OH area, where together I lived almost 2/3rds of my 54 years. As a 30-year semi driver, I am intimately familiar with large areas of the industrial Midwest, the Northeast, and even much of central and southern California, and everything in-between. I am also college-educated, in Urban Planning and Economics. What has happened to not just Detroit, but to virtually every city in the southern half of Lower Michigan and northern Ohio is mind-boggling. When I was 18, it was quite common to head over to a car plant and get hired immediately into a middle-class job. At one time I had dozens of friends from school working at car plants, dozens more in other large factories, dozens more in major grocery warehousing and distribution, and me, I was a semi driver delivering to all of those places. Between 1979, when I started driving semis, and now, I must have seen 10s of thousands of factories across just the southern Great Lakes region close their doors. Some of them were small, and some of them employed 10,000 workers or more.

The former Packard plant from your photo closed in 1957, and at one time it employed 12,000 workers, and my roommate in 1982 in Birmingham, MI had been laid-off from the old Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, which once employed over 20,000 workers, which closed in 1981. In 1970 just Chrysler had over 40 plants in the Detroit-area, and now there are just 11 left open. The Willow Run plant, which at one time turned-out a brand-new B-29 bomber every 40 minutes, and employed 50,000 workers, is long dead too, as is the tank plant north of town too. Even fairly new car plants like Novi Assembly are closed, Pontiac’s ultra-modern robotic car assembly plant too. In Cleveland 100 or more huge old plants stand empty, car plants, steel mills, and machine tool builders, in Akron dozens of rubber plants are long gone, Sharon, Warren, and Youngstown have all lost huge numbers of industrial jobs, Canton and Massillon too, where the NFL started, have been reduced to mere shells of their former selves. Along with the plant closings have gone the hopes and dreams of many thousands of retail operators, restaurant owners, and thousands of other small businesses too. Hundreds of entire major shopping malls stand vacant, as seas of potholes consume local roads. The city of Hamtramck, MI a Detroit suburb of 40,000 people, is bankrupt and has had to layoff all but two employees, one of whom works part-time. The traffic lights are shut-off and stop signs now appear at those intersections instead, as the city can’t even pay its power bill. I could go on & on & on for days but I don’t have the time.

I haven’t driven a semi in almost 2 years as my eyesight has begun giving out early. My last 10 years in the industry was spent delivering fresh and frozen meat on a regular multi-stop route through the Chicago-area and throughout southern Michigan. Between 2001 and 2009, my boss lost 14 of 19 major weekly customers in Michigan to bankruptcy, including three major grocery chains, plus numerous less-frequent customers. The Detroit News reported before Christmas of 2007 a 29% unemployment rate within the city limits of Detroit, with an estimated 44% of the total adult population not working, and another news story reported a 1 in 200 chance of selling a house across the entire metropolitan area, which still has 4 million people total. Since 2003, home prices within the city limits of Detroit have fallen by 90%, and today there are thousands of houses in move-in condition on the market there for $5K to $10K. The suburbs are not immune either.

You know what?  Detroit and Cleveland used to be two of the greatest cities in the entire world.

Today very few people would call them great.  They are just shells of their former glory.

Sadly, this cruel economy is causing “ghost towns” to appear all across the United States.  There are quite a few counties across the nation that now have home vacancy rates of over 50%.

Another reader, Flubadub, also remembers how things used to be….

I am also a product of that generation and remember well the opportunities that existed for anyone with even a high school diploma in those days. Just within a reasonable commute to where I grew up we had US Steel, 3M, General Motors Fisher Body, Nabisco, The Budd Co., Strick Trailer and others providing thousands of jobs that enabled you to provide a decent living for your family. There were also plenty of part time jobs to keep high school students busy enough to avoid the pratfalls of idle youth and afford the 28 cent/ gallon gas for their used cars. Most of it is gone now and I don’t blame the Mexicans or the Chinese for stealing it. I blame the greed of the globalists and their flunkies, the phony free trade advocates in office, who’ve spent the last twenty years giving it all away.

Our jobs are being shipped overseas so that greedy corporate executives can pad their bonuses and our politicians are allowing them to get away with it.

According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.

Life is great if you are a CEO.

Life is not so great if you are an average American worker trying to raise a family.

Another reader, Itsjustme, says that things are also quite depressing In New Jersey….

I live in northern NJ in a suburb a very short ride from NYC.

Our region was hit very hard — we once had a very prosperous and booming industrial area; mixed use with many warehouses and commercial buildings, hirise and lowrise.

The majority of companies that were in those buildings are gone. Long vacant; the signage is left and nobody is inside them.

One large commercical building with 15 floors now is home to 2 tenants: a law firm and a Korean shipping company.

It’s very sad what’s happened out here.

The only “companies” moving into these buildings are small change tenants that that are usually Chinese or Middle Eastern; you’ll see them subletting out 2 or 3 offices in these buildings and they operate out of those offices. They’re mostly importers of apparel or soft goods.

My guess is that they are there on very short term leases.

This will benefit our local and state economy not. These groups usually send the money home.

If this is the shape of things to come, we can hang it up right now. No viable companies are moving into our area; if anything new is being built it is retail and service industry garbage, like crummy fast food chain restaurants. No livable wage jobs are entering our local economy.

As I have written about previously, the standard of living of the middle class is being pushed down to third world levels.  We have been merged into a “global labor pool”, and what that means is that the standard of living of all workers all over the world is going to be slowly equalized over time.

Our politicians never told us that all of these “free trade” agreements would mean that soon we would be living like the rest of the world.

America used to be the greatest economic machine on the planet.  But now we are just another region of the one world economy that has workers that are too expensive to be useful.

In the end, there is not some great mystery as to why we are experiencing economic decline as a nation.

If millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas, it was basically inevitable that we were going to experience a housing crisis.  Without good jobs the American people simply cannot afford high mortgage payments.

Today we consume far more wealth as a nation than we produce.  We have tried to make up the difference by indulging in the greatest debt binge that the world has ever seen.

We have lived like kings and queens, but our debt-fueled prosperity is not sustainable.  In fact, the collapse of our financial system is a lot closer than most people would like to believe.

Things did not have to turn out like this, but we bought into the lies and the propaganda that our leaders were feeding us.

Now our economy lies in tatters and our children have no economic future.

Is America Becoming The Land Of The Part-Time Job?: Most Of The Jobs That Are Being Created Are Part-Time Jobs And Some Companies Are Going To A “Part-Time Only Policy”

Do you need a good job?  If so, there are millions of other Americans that are just like you.  Unfortunately, most of the jobs that are available in America today are either part-time jobs, temp jobs or are “independent contractor” jobs.  The “full-time job with benefits” is a dying breed.  There are so many desperate unemployed workers in America today that companies don’t have to roll out the red carpet anymore.  Instead, they can just hire a horde of inexpensive part-timers and temps that they don’t have to give any benefits to.  But isn’t the employment situation supposed to be getting better?  No, it really is not.  Yes, the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs in March.  However, the truth is that approximately 290,000 part-time jobs were created and about 80,000 full-time jobs were actually lost.  This is all part of a long-term trend in America.  Good jobs are rapidly disappearing and they are being replaced by low paying service jobs that do not pay a living wage.  In many American households today, both parents have multiple jobs.  Yet a large percentage of those same households can’t even pay the mortgage and are drowning in debt.

Whenever a new government jobs report comes out from now on, try to find out how many of the jobs that were created were actually part-time jobs.  Most Americans that only have part-time jobs are living around or below the poverty line.  The truth is that it is really hard to get by if you are only making a couple hundred bucks a week.

As mentioned above, the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs last month.  The Obama administration and the mainstream media heralded that figure as evidence that the U.S. economy is recovering nicely.

But is that really accurate?

Rebel Cole, a professor at DePaul University’s Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, says that when you take the time to do a closer examination of the employment numbers they don’t look so good….

“If you look deeper in the report, there were 290,000 new part-time workers, which means that there were 80,000 fewer full-time workers, that’s not a good sign. Things are getting worse, not getting better.”

Unless you are a teen or a college student or a retired person, most likely you would prefer to be working a full-time job.  Most people do not actually have the goal of working part-time.  Most part-time jobs pay very poorly and offer very few benefits.

Unfortunately, that is why so many big companies like part-time workers and temp workers.  There are so many more rules, regulations and laws that pertain to full-time workers.

Hiring a bunch of part-time workers is so much easier and so much cheaper.  Without a doubt it is definitely more profitable in most situations.

Today, there are millions of Americans that have part-time jobs that would love to have full-time jobs.  In fact, the government says that there are about 8 million Americans that are currently working part-time jobs for “economic reasons”.

One such worker named “John” recently left a comment on another article I did entitled “How To Find A Job: Just Be Willing To Flip Burgers And Work For Minimum Wage“.  John says that the restaurant chain that he works for has implemented a “part-time only policy”….

“Could your family survive on $505 a week?”

If only I could make HALF that much! The dirty secret is McDonalds needs to add 50,000 workers to increase the headcount in every store. The goal is to have no full-time employees who qualify for health benefits. So these 50,000 jobs will pay $174 a week BEFORE taxes, and have no benefits, no vacation days, no holidays off, call in sick and get fired, but they will have 52 mandatory weekends each year.

And how do I know this? I work for a national restaurant chain that already has gone to a part-time only policy. I am scheduled for 23 hours next week. The threshold for benefits is 26 hrs.

Of course I would assume that there are perhaps a couple of full-time workers at the restaurant that John works at (such as the manager).  But the reality is that we are seeing this kind of thing more and more around the nation.  Companies are being careful to keep hours low enough so that the majority of their employees do not qualify for expensive “full-time benefits”.

Another commenter on that same article said that it is possible to get by on a low wage but that doesn’t mean that it is easy….

I make about $400 a week; my wife nothing. Rent is $500 a month. Credit card bills (run up back when I made about $1200/week) run about $200 a month. Other expenses run us another few hundred dollars. We quit tv. We’re a litte cold. We eat ok. Try to fill the gas tank just once a month. We’re getting by, but able to save nothing, nor do we go out and have fun. Well, fun has become walks on Saturday morning. Those are free. And, as we’ve learned, rather nice.

$10 an hour stinks, but it is livable if you don’t mind admitting that you are poor. I know I’m poor now. It’s just the way it is. If I tried to keep living as i did when I was a middle class manager, I’d be extremely unhappy. I cant say I’m happy about being poor, but my wife and i are finding that happiness isn’t about having “stuff.”

This is the new “American Dream” for millions of American families.  They are learning to scratch and claw to get by on what they have.

As I have written about previously, the standard of living of the middle class is being pushed down to third world levels.  We have been merged into a “global labor pool”, and what that means is that the standard of living of all workers all over the world is going to be slowly equalized over time.

Translation: your standard of living and the standard of living of virtually everyone that you know is slated to go way down.

Right now America is rapidly losing high paying jobs and they are being replaced by low paying jobs.  According to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 percent of the job growth.  Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 percent of the job growth.

So yes, jobs are being created, but most of them are jobs that none of us would really want under normal circumstances.

Unfortunately, times are not normal and millions of desperate people are having to take whatever they can get.

What makes things even worse is that really bad inflation is coming.  There are less good jobs for American families and at the same time the cost of basic necessities is going up.

Have you been to the gas pump lately?

As I wrote about yesterday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States is now $3.70.

A year ago it was just $2.83.

For average American families on a tight budget that is a huge difference.

Food inflation is already here as well.

During the month of February, the price of food in the U.S. increased at the fastest rate in 36 years.

Are you starting to understand why so many American families are feeling squeezed right now?

Times are tough and they are going to get tougher.  If you still have a good full-time job you should be very thankful, because there are millions and millions of people that would love to trade places with you.

So do the rest of you believe that America is turning into “the land of the part-time job”?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….

Need A Job? Too Bad! The Good Jobs Are Being Shipped Out Of America As Part Of The New One World Economy

I hope that you enjoy the cheap foreign-made plastic trinkets that you will be exchanging with your family and friends this holiday season, because they are literally destroying the U.S. economy.  As part of the new “one world economy” that both Democrats and Republicans insist is so good for us, millions of good paying middle class jobs have been shipped out of America.  Do you need a job?  Are you wondering where all the good jobs went?  Well, the next time you are out just walk into a store and start looking at the product labels.  Most of the things that are sold in our stores are now made out of the country.  So if you need a good paying job to support your family that is just too bad – you have been merged into a global labor pool where you must compete for jobs with people on the other side of the globe willing to work for less than a tenth of what you usually make.  Welcome to the “one world economy” where big global corporations make a fortune exploiting slave labor on the other side of the world while “overly expensive American workers” get dumped out on the street.

Are you in favor of a redistribution of wealth?  Most of the time when the phrase “redistribution of wealth” is brought up, conservatives and libertarians visibly cringe – as they should.  But did you know that right now the greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of the world is taking place and our politicians are doing nothing about it?

For a moment, imagine a giant map of the world.  On that giant map, put a huge pile of money on the United States, and also put a huge pile of money on China and on the OPEC nations.  Now imagine a big hand coming along once a month that takes tens of billions of dollars out of the U.S. pile and puts it into the piles of China and the OPEC nations.

As this continues month after month after month, what is eventually going to happen?

The U.S. pile of money is going to get far smaller and the other piles of money are going to get much, much larger.

And that is exactly what is happening in our world today.

Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was 6 million dollars for the entire year – not really anything to worry about  it.

Well, let’s fast forward to 2010.  For the month of August alone, the trade deficit with China was more than 28 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) dollars.

In other words, the U.S. trade deficit with China in August was more than 4,600 times larger than the U.S. trade deficit with China was for the entire year of 1985.

My, how the world has changed in 25 years.

Oh, but doesn’t China “invest” some of that money they are getting from us back into our country?

Well yeah, our top officials regularly go over there to beg them to lend us more money.  Now we owe China close to a trillion dollars.  We also owe the major oil exporting nations of the Middle East massive amounts of money.

Is this a good idea?  Let us keep in mind the ancient principle that the borrower always ends up the servant of the lender.

Is it wise for the United States to become enslaved to China and to the oil exporters of the Middle East?

Is that any way to run an economy?  Is that any way to run a country?

All over the United States factories are closing down.  If you go to shopping centers in many areas of America you would think that the hottest new store was called “Space Available”.

Since the year 2000, we have lost 10% of our middle class jobs.  In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs.

What kind of progress is that?

“But oh”, the supporters of the one world economy will declare, “the cheap goods, the cheap goods!”

Yes, I hope you enjoy paying ten percent less for your plastic trinkets.  But you will also support American workers one way or another.  Either you will provide them with good paying jobs, or you will pay for their food stamps and their unemployment checks.

One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in a federal anti-poverty program.  As 2007 began, 26 million Americans were on food stamps, but now 42 million Americans are on food stamps and that number keeps rising every single month.

Can anyone out there please explain how the “one world economy” is supposed to be good for us when 42 million Americans cannot even feed themselves?

Allowing our country to be deindustrialized just so that we can consume more cheap goods from China is like tearing down pieces of your house to keep your fire going.  In the end, you won’t have much of a house left.

Whatever your opinion of Donald Trump is, this next video is worth watching.  Trump certainly should not run for president, but as a savvy businessman he definitely understands what China is doing to us….

It is time for the American people to wake up.

We are being taken advantage of.

The one world economy is going to keep destroying the U.S. middle class.  There is no way that American workers can compete with slave labor on the other side of the globe.  It is impossible.

In fact, just about every kind of job imaginable is being shipped to places where labor is cheaper.  Even engineering and computer programming jobs are being offshored and outsourced.

The United States is even being slaughtered in high-tech industries.  Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.

According to one recent study, China could become the global leader in patent filings by next year.

The United States has become a bloated, slovenly nation that consumes massive amounts of wealth but that produces relatively little.

With each passing year, we make fewer things inside the United States….

*The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

*Since 2001, over 42,000 U.S. factories have closed down for good.

*As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing.  The last time that less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

*Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

*In 2010, the number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash”.

Oh, but won’t “getting more education” solve all of our problems and get the American people back to work?

No.

The truth is that tens of millions of Americans have a “higher education” that is not doing them any good today.

In his article entitled “The Great College-Degree Scam“, Richard Vedder explains that a large percentage of U.S. college graduates are working in jobs that have not historically required college degrees….

Here it is:  approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.

Ouch.

Later on in his article, Vedder notes that the number of college graduates that are waiting tables or that are working as cashiers is absolutely exploding….

In 1992 119,000 waiters and waitresses were college degree holders. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 318,000. While the total number of waiters and waitresses grew by about 1 million during this period, 20% of all new jobs in this occupation were filled by college graduates. Take cashiers as well. While 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates.

So do you still think that the “one world economy” is a great idea?

Well, you might want to practice the following two phrases….

#1 “Would you like fries with that?”

#2 “Welcome to Wal-Mart!”

Our economy is turning into a low-wage service economy because we don’t make much of anything in the United States anymore.

So if you need a good job, I am afraid that the joke is on you.

The good jobs are being shipped out of the United States as part of the new one world economy, and millions of unemployed Americans have been left to fight over the low paying service jobs that remain.

So if you are flipping burgers or stocking shelves for a big multinational retail chain, perhaps you should consider yourself to be fortunate.  At least you still have a job.  There are millions of desperate, hungry-eyed Americans that would take your job in a second.

And you know what?  Things are only going to get worse.

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