Where is the US economy headed?

@realjohnboy,

rjb, While you wade through the numbers, I find some of them are not consistent with financial pundits who say that our country must be growing at over 5% to add workers, but with the college grads with bachelor's degree that number 1.5 million every year, it would require 130,000 new jobs per month to just keep up with the demand for BA/BS grads. Something doesn't tick right.

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@plainoldme,

@ RJB

Let me give an example of a situation that parallels hawkeye's. It involves another wholly misguided statement. My daughter-in-law joined a Facebook group that supports breast-feeding in public. I joined in support of her. A woman wrote on the comment page that she has no desire to see "a boob hanging out." I feel it is unwomanly to use the word boob and that the woman undercut her own argument.

Parallelism is a writing convention that I have been wrestling with all day, while correcting papers. Parallelism extends to thought as well.

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@cicerone imposter,

Quote:

While you wade through the numbers, I find some of them are not consistent with financial pundits who say that our country must be growing at over 5% to add workers, but with the college grads with bachelor's degree that number 1.5 million every year, it would require 130,000 new jobs per month to just keep up with the demand for BA/BS grads. Something doesn't tick right.

Bingo! You hit the nail right on the head. The problem is not too many college graduates but rather too large a population; too many jobs moved overseas, and too many jobs replaced by machines.

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@plainoldme,

plainoldme wrote:

I would guess hawkeye is one of those demanding a refund.

What did you mean to suggest in that sentence?

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@hawkeye10,

re minting revolutionaries....look at where the energy for rebellion has been coming from, be it China, the Mid East, Eastern Europe....if is from the young, who have been educated and filled with dreams that the society can not honor. THAT should be the take away from Egypt. If we understood this better we would not be so smug, because we are not that far away from the same revolt against the establishment that refuses to share the wealth and refuses to be honest and refuses to work on the urgent problems that face us.

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@hawkeye10,

Of course, rebellion is from the young. Twenty years ago, pundits observed that half the population of the Middle East was under-25. Last week, there was a report from Qatar on the widespread unemployment and underemployment of the young which will grow worse as oil production -- already past peak -- declines.

There are fewer educated people in the Middle East than you think there are. Had their mothers and fathers used surgical birth control after their second child, the situation would not be what it is today.

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@realjohnboy,

That sentence, as you put it, followed hawkeye's muddied, muddled and ungrammatical sentence. He was railing against education while demonstrating that he was poorly educated.

Of course, the possibility exists that he was too angry to write properly. If that were the case, then it is his responsibility to say so.

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@hawkeye10,

Agreed to a point, hawkeye, but one disturbing fact that I see is a younger generation that has been forcefed the unrealities that everything comes from nothing, that food automatically appears in grocery stores, that energy is produced by greedy oil companies, and that life should be full of fun, frolic, and without responsibility, and that nobody need work very hard to achieve it all. After all, how many young people have been given everything on a silver platter? To boil it down, we have a mighty big spoiled generation of people that expect to have everything with very little effort or work.

I am with you in terms of fearing what might be over the horizon for the next generations.

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Quote:

For many college students, educational loans are an unavoidable side effect of attending institutions of higher learning. As the tuition at colleges and universities across the country continue to rise, the total amount of student loans in the U.S. has ballooned as well. According to the College Board, overall borrowing for school has more than doubled from $41 billion to about $85 billion in the ten years leading up to the 2007-2008 academic yea

http://www.businesstoday.org/online-journal/there-student-loan-bubble

A 100+% increase over just 10 years of debt added to Americans per year to accomplish a function is a big problem. It gets worse when we as a society now have far less ability to cary debt than we once did. It gets worse when this debt is going to buy something of not much value, for instance educating citizens who will have no where to put this education to use and no way to increase their earning potential enough to pay off the loans and do the rest of the things in life that they expect to be able to do. I dont want to think about what these people will be capable of if they get to be 35 years old, and they look back with the opinion that university debt has made it impossible for them to scratch out a decent life in america's deflationary wage structure.

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@okie,

Why don't you campaign for better birth control to protect the young?

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@hawkeye10,

Fine. Then restructure the tax code to penalize any woman who has more than two children.

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@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

rjb, While you wade through the numbers, I find some of them are not consistent with financial pundits who say that our country must be growing at over 5% to add workers, but with the college grads with bachelor's degree that number 1.5 million every year, it would require 130,000 new jobs per month to just keep up with the demand for BA/BS grads. Something doesn't tick right.

Actually, that would not be true CI. Existing college grads leave the work force every year if they retire or die so the new college grads are not all new positions. Many of them are simply replacing existing ones that leave the work force.

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@parados,

Thanks; that makes a lot of sense.

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@parados,

Good point. However, some jobs are disappearing for many reasons including technological changes and some positions are not being filled after retirements.

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@okie,

Quote:

Agreed to a point, hawkeye, but one disturbing fact that I see is a younger generation that has been forcefed the unrealities that everything comes from nothing,

Well ya, but they were raised by the "me generation", who thought it a good idea to teach their kids that all one has to do to get the prize is to show up and collect it.......

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@hawkeye10,

I am part of the baby boomer generation, hawk. Please do not group me with the hippies though. We did not have many in Oklahoma.

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@okie,

Quote:

I am part of the baby boomer generation, hawk

So am I..born in 62. History will not be kind to us I think...though for the opposite reason than you suppose. The revolution of the late 1960's was right, it was what was needed. Our generation gave up any desire to fix important problems, we concentrated on the relatively petty and became narcissistic and entitled and unwilling to do the heavy lifting that circumstances called for. There was a strong push towards living the fantasy life instead of living real life, which was extremely damaging to the nation. The wreckage that we now need to deal with accumulated over 40 years time, and it will take at least a generation to repair.

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@hawkeye10,

I think most used to consider you part of Generation X.

I think the 60's generation was very destructive, hawk. It was basically a rejection of the moral standards previously established. As a result, divorce rates and single parent households have proliferated, and the results have not been pretty. In fact, I think most of our economic problems may be tied to cultural problems. I would be remiss if I did not mention LBJ's Great Society, which some believe had a big hand in breaking down the black family and culture, and as a result the inner cities of America have suffered in a very big way. Some of the people that have studied this and believe it very much are black conservatives, such as Thomas Sowell, author, commentator, and professor of economics.

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@okie,

Quote:

I think most used to consider you part of Generation X.

I am from an off year, not really part of either, or am both.

Quote:

I think the 60's generation was very destructive, hawk

Periodic destruction is required for renewal. It was the race riots and the birth of groups like the Weathermen that scared us into giving up any effort to reform, or taking on the thieves (corporate class) who came calling after they figured out that we would no longer defend what was ours, or what was right.

Quote:

I would be remiss if I did not mention LBJ's Great Society, which some believe had a big hand in breaking down the black family and culture, and as a result the inner cities of America have suffered in a very big way.

True, I think that history will record that the mass urban renewal programs more than any other single factor is responsible for the multi generational blight that has infected black culture. Librealism was already bankrupt by this time, the Great Society was the last gasp of idea that had come and gone, by the mid sixties leaving its advocates so confused and out of it that they thought that cultural problems could be fixed by throwing up spiffy new buildings in high density planned communities and by running 8 lane highways though neighborhoods that we wanted to kill off and replace with something better. Once we realized by the late 70's that we had spent so much money on a bad idea we gave up on cities, and tried not to spend any more money on them, which leaves us where we are today. Urban renewal was an example of wanton destruction where those who tried to point out the mistake before it was made were ignored. Something that we have seen a lot of in the years since.

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@plainoldme,

Also good point; although the work force is somewhat stabilized now, government layoffs will continue for several years. I know that teacher layoffs in California will be very high this year with budget cuts.

1 Reply

Where is the US economy headed?

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