President-elect Obama said Saturday an analysis of his stimulus proposals shows that between 3 million and 4 million U.S. jobs could be saved or created by 2010, nearly 90% of them in the private sector.
Employment as of December 2008 was about 3.3 million jobs less than it was as of November 1007 according to the household survey. The employment-population ratio has declined to 61.0%. Even if we had an additional 3.5 million jobs today, the employment-population ratio would be only 62.5%. Now when they start talking about an additional 7 million new jobs, I’ll be impressed as that might get us closer to the 64% employment-population ratio we enjoyed in the late 1990’s.
Have you ever considered that the "employment-population ratio" is the measure of how many family members must work outside the home to make ends meet? In the 50's that ratio was a lot lower because only one family member needed to have a full time job in order to support the family.
ReplyDeleteI am not a big fan of full time employment and I haven't been since my kids left home. That was 15 years ago. Given a decent nationalized health and pension system there would be a lot more part time people and a lot more jobs. It would actually be possible to _share_ the work that actually needs doing instead of creating additional jobs manufacturing lip gloss and fast cars.
I read an article recently by James Galbraith on ideas for the stimulus package. I really liked a couple of the ideas: lower the Medicare age to 55 and increase Social Security payments. This would begin to make the changes Trucker wants.
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