More Site News and a Post

The new CSS is nearly done, and I'll be plugging it in tomorrow.

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Brad DeLong was cited on Salon.com yesterday. Part of his post here was picked up by Salon.

"Is George W. Bush responsible for the fact that the employment situation is lousy? No. The economy is an ocean liner, but the president is not its captain. Presidents influence the economy. They don't control it."

"But are he and his administration responsible for the fact that the employment situation is as lousy as it is? Yes. He sold his tax cuts as employment-generating stimulus programs, while in fact they got only about half as much employment bang for the deficit buck as a reasonable program would have. Think of it this way: Suppose your insurance agent tells you you ought to get homeowner's insurance. You give your insurance agent $4,000 to buy homeowner's insurance. You then have a small fire. And your insurance agent then tells you that you're only getting half of the damage covered--that he only used half the money to buy insurance, and spent the rest buying his friends large flat-screen TVs. That's the situation were in: sold as jobs programs, the Bush tax cuts got us only about half as much insurance against a lousy labor market as a real job-promoting stimulus that cost the same in deficit terms would have generated."

That's how it's now shaping up - the 'recovery' has been great for corporate profits, while creating far fewer jobs than other 'recoveries,' and wages are losing ground to inflation.

The wage issue isn't likely to go away. Corporate America has but one goal: to increase shareholder value. All the rest is way down the list.

When the Fortune 500 can dangle the carrot of jobs here at third-world wages versus the stick of moving those jobs to an already third-world country, you bite the bullet. Neither prospect is palatable. It's almost a stick and stick approach. And that's if you're even given the option.

Then, once your job is 'outsourced' the same unaccountable corporate power will use the same techniques to further their profits and produce a whole series of labor forces vying for ever depressed wages.

Here's a snippet from the linked article:

It's unlikely that employees will get raises that outpace inflation over the next five to 10 years, said William A. Niskanen, former acting chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during the Ronald Reagan administration.

"I don't see any substantial increase in average real wages for some time," said Niskanen, who is now chairman of the Cato Institute, a Washington research group. Niskanen and other economists cite global competition, which forces companies to keep costs down, shrinking union clout and continuing slack in a labor market with an unemployment rate of 5.6 percent, up from 4.2 percent when the last recession began in March 2001.

The disparity between pay and prices may keep President Bush from fully capitalizing on the economy's addition of 1.2 million jobs this year, the best five months of job growth since 2000, as he runs for re-election, said political analysts including Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The stagnation in wages leaves open a big target" for Democratic challenger John Kerry, Mann said. In terms of pay, "a lot of Americans have been left behind," he said. "Kerry now has an opportunity to ask, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' "

After accounting for inflation, wages and salaries have been growing less than a third as fast as they did after previous recessions, Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York, said in a note to clients this week. The rise in pay this time is "far short of the nearly 10 percent gains that occurred in the first 29 months of the preceding six cyclical recoveries," Roach wrote. "This translates into a shortfall of $280 billion in 'missing' real personal income."

If you want to find out what's really going on, read the business press(that was from a Bloomberg piece).

Sure, there are cheerleaders in the business press, but you're far more likely to get at least some reporters with integrity. Remember, their constituency is doing very, very well.