But but but — everyone is going back to work!
No they’re not. I’ve posted this out for quite some time and it’s not new either. Now Tim Knight has brought it up too with a couple of interesting charts to go with it.
David Stockman, one of the heroes here on Slope, offered up this illustration of the aggregate hours being worked in the leisure/hospitality industry. As you can see, the jobs “growth” is nothing more than a PARTIAL undoing of the shutdown last year. The job market isn’t growing at all. It’s simply partially un-shrinking.
Yep.
And worse, the make things group has been in a severe decline for 20 years. You’re not really going to tell me that making things isn’t the backbone of any economy, are you? Because it is.
And yet the aggregate weekly hours of those who make things has been in the crapper since 2000. Oh, it bounced some in the 05/06 timeframe, but then dove doing the alleged “Great Recession.” Note that rather than recover those jobs we offshored more of them and never brought them back. In addition despite the claims otherwise we have a growing population which makes it worse in that the hours worked to produce things per-capita has fallen even more than that chart suggests.
This is both sides of the aisle folks. Do recall that we’ve had both Republican and Democrat Presidents during those times, yet has not the “recovery” from the 2008 crash continued more or less at the same pace from when Obama was President to when Trump was? Wasn’t Trump the “bring it back” President? Did he? Nope — not at all.
Nor did Bush.
If you think this is a partisan political issue and gets resolved with more partisan political BS you’re out of your mind. It does not. And more credit emission by Congress just makes it worse by raising the cost of living which forces those on the lower rungs of the economy out entirely. If you can’t earn a living doing “X” then X will get done no matter how many Help Wanted signs you put in the window. If you increase wages then prices must go up which again means that the wage “X” is once again no longer enough to live on!
This is called a wage-price spiral and you’d think that having tried this BS back in the 1970s, complete with wage and price controls you’d figure out that it doesn’t work. It certainly didn’t work last time for the same reason it won’t work this time — when you keep emitting credit prices rise faster than wages and because taxes are on top of that and parasitic even if they were to rise at the same rate you still wind up underwater.
The only way to stop it is to force back downward the credit aggregates by forcing the government’s spending to fit within revenues minus a bit. In other words spend a bit less than you take in. In today’s world where the Federal Government blows huge sums on Medicare and Medicaid the only way to do it and make it work is to destroy all the medical monopolies.
It’s simply math: There is no other way to get the books to balance.
The gov has no idea the monstrous consequences it has brought about. A monster it cannot wrangle. Traitors created it, dumbasses are attempting to control it. Ain’t working, folks…it just ain’t working.
“Government” is a tangled web of bureaucracies staffed by mediocre people that seek stability, safety, and the good life snuggled into mostly do nothing other than processing their own data around and around “jobs”.
Every empire and even smaller nations suffer this decline and collapse When their Governments get so BLOATED and by default become Corrupted due to inherent criminality of stealing a salary for No “Productive” work.
Louis XVI had the same Exact Situation in France. CYA.