In City Journal Edward Glasser makes a number of proposals for reducing joblessness:
- More Americans with college educations.
- Improved vocational education.
- Better retraining for older workers.
- Reduce regulatory burdens to entrepeneurship including “one stop permitting” and reforms in occupational licensing.
- Consolidating the alphabet soup of support programs for the poor into a single cash payment to ensure that work made more sense than joblessness.
- Wage supports to replace the Earned Income Tax Credit.
More higher education is cargo cult thinking at its best. An alternative explanation for the lower unemployment rate among those with college degrees is that those with college educations have a competitive advantage over non-degree holders for jobs that don’t actually require a college degree. What we actually need is more jobs that require college degrees rather than more people with college degrees.
Better retraining for older workers is an explanation in search of a problem. Older workers are holding on to their jobs as long as they can these days as is reflected in the fact that the labor force participation rate for the elderly is the highest it’s been in decades.
I found a couple of factors conspicuous by their absence. We should reduce the number of workers that come here illegally, particularly those without skills. We should ensure that foreign workers are not imported unless there’s a genuine need. Keeping U. S. wages low is not a legitimate reason to import workers.
And companies should be given incentives for investing in the U. S. economy (or disincentives for holding cash).
There are several posts related to jobs, today, but this one seems the most relevant.
I am curious about the jobs that people with and without college degrees are supposed to obtain. Manufacturing is gone and will not return, and in the Tech industry, the college graduates are too stupid to fill the jobs needed.
The free trade potentially produces jobs on US flagged ships, the docks, transportation (trucks, trains, barges, etc.), local delivery, the low cost retailers, the financial industry, and any additional support needed. American college graduates are too stupid to produce any technical improvements, and American non-college graduates are too lazy to work the menial jobs.
Any increase in personal consumption goes to investment in foreign companies and wages for their workers. Imported goods and services are lost jobs. What are the jobs for these displaced American workers, and how do they purchase the imported goods and services with no or substantially reduced income.
When they “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, what exactly is the result of this “bootstrapping”? Will poverty “be a thing of the past” once all the poor “bootstrap” themselves out of poverty? Can everybody be middle or upper income workers? To my feeble brain, middle income requires the lower and upper components. Otherwise, there are lower and upper income workers, and when all these new and existing “middle income” workers “bootstrap themselves” into upper income workers, has poverty been solved?
When answering, please show your work.