Tag Archives: jobs

Joe Biden

Random Blogging, , , , , ,

Let me begin this post with an admission: I am older than Joe Biden, so I know a little something about the diminishing energy levels that accompany aging. I sometimes (okay, often) blank on words. On the other hand, I have a significant well of life experience to draw on, and so far, at least, I’m reasonably confident that the lessons of that lifetime have more than compensated for the relatively minor deficits of aging.

And I am over the constant media handwringing about Biden’s age. 

Sure, given the challenges of aging, I wish Biden was younger–but after looking at what he has accomplished over the past three years by drawing on his lifetime of political and governmental experience, I realize that significant trade-offs would be involved. (Unlike Trump–who is only 4 years younger– Biden spent his time acquiring the knowledge and skills that have made him a very consequential President.)

In the last three years, America’s economy has added more than 13 million jobs—including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs. We’ve unleashed a manufacturing and clean energy boom. In 2021 and 2022, more than 10 million applications were filed for new small businesses—the strongest two years ever recorded.  Since the pandemic, America has had the strongest growth of any leading economy in the world. Inflation has fallen for 11 straight months.

As my middle son observed, “Biden is the first President I’ve voted for who has exceeded my expectations.”

And as an article in the New Republic argues, there needs to be more recognition of the skills Biden brought to the job.

Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of their workers paid sick days.

Everybody remembers what happened last December. The workers threatened to strike over such days, among other issues. President Biden, generally very friendly toward labor, made it illegal for the workers to strike. He was criticized by unions and workers and fellow Democrats and liberal media outlets, this one included….

When the workers prevailed, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers  explicitly acknowledged that the Biden administration had

played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement. Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

As the article argued, the administration needs to start “making  big show” of such accomplishments.

Biden has been a terrific president. The big legislation. The way he played Kevin McCarthy on the debt deal. The global leadership against Putin. The plain human decency restored to the White House after four years of self-obsessed thuggery. Oh—the 13 million jobs created since he took office, which is more jobs in 28 months than created under any other president, in all of our history, in a full four-year term.

As Jennifer Rubin recently wrote in the Washington Post, Biden has an economic record that has been working far better than most people anticipated but that the electorate doesn’t yet recognize.

 
The economy has created 13 million jobs, inflation has been more than cut in half, huge investments are being made in infrastructure and green energy, wage growth has begun to outpace inflation, the first drug price controls are going into effect and the biggest corporations will finally be forced to pay something in federal taxes. Yet polls show voters incorrectly think we are in a recession and remain negative about the economy.

As Robert Hubbell recently reminded us, “The constant hum of investigations into Trump’s many crimes is obscuring one of the great modern presidencies.”

Historians will look back in wonder at what Biden achieved in a presidency that began mid-pandemic before the smoke of a failed coup and insurrection had cleared. Despite those obstacles, his legislative record rivals or exceeds that of every president since FDR—a president who was mired in controversy throughout his tenure. 

The Biden Administration has a three-part vision: targeting investment, empowering workers, and promoting competition. That vision includes enforcing antitrust rules and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. (Recent results: cheaper insulin and real wage growth.)

As the New Republic reminds us,

Liberals have a list of 50 things they want government to do, and they want those things done fast and to completion. Conservatives have a list of about two things they want government to do: Cut taxes, and punish people they disapprove of morally. For a presidential administration, satisfying that first group is a lot harder than satisfying the second

As someone has pointed out, It’s not how old you are. It’s how you are old.

 

 

Evidence Can Be Such A Downer….

Public Policy and Governance, ,

Last week in Indiana, as our legislature geared up for its short session, Governor Holcomb delivered his State of the State address. One of the major emphases of that speech was about the importance of worker retraining.

Gov. Eric Holcomb used his nearly 30-minute speech Tuesday night to set some lofty goals, primarily in the area of educating and training Hoosier workers.

He identified more than a million Hoosiers who need better skills and set a goal of educating or retraining 55,000 Hoosiers over the next year who didn’t finish college or don’t have a high school diploma.

Although the Governor’s emphasis upon jobs and attention to other actual governance issues represents a welcome change from his predecessor’s obsession with imposing his version of biblical obedience on citizens of Indiana, this focus on retraining ignores an inconvenient reality: data continues to demonstrate that these programs mostly don’t work.

A recent article in the Atlantic summarized our current situation.

The article begins by noting that the problem is very real: automation has decimated manufacturing employment; estimates are that nine out of ten manufacturing jobs have been replaced by automation since 2000. Trade (mostly with China) has cost America another 2.4 million jobs. Of the 1.6 million manufacturing jobs that were lost during the 2008 recession, only 200,000 came back.

It’s true that trade and automation also create jobs, but they are jobs calling for very different skills than those being lost.

Most jobs that are available–primarily in computer technology, health care, and high-skill manufacturing– require training beyond high school. But despite what the article calls “decades of investment” in job-retraining programs, numerous studies have found them to be ineffective.

One problem, according to experts, is that job-retraining programs “remain rooted in the industrial era.” They haven’t evolved with the economy.

Workforce-development officials and labor economists describe four main trends in the job market that make the road from unemployment to retraining more treacherous now than it was even a decade ago. These trends, according to observers, have turned the government programs to support dislocated workers into relics of the past.

Not only do we live in an era where the skills needed to keep up in any job are changing at a much faster pace than before, but states have added licensing requirements to an enormous number of occupations. According to some estimates, those licensing requirements have cost the economy some 2.85 million jobs nationwide. Nearly 30 percent of American workers need a license these days; in the 1950s, only 5 percent did.

Do we really need to license interior decorators, travel agents, painters and auctioneers?

Researchers have also determined that the speed of retraining is critical–being jobless for a year or more permanently hinders a worker’s chance of new employment. (Retraining is actually most successful if it starts before a worker leaves his old job, but few people have the benefit of sufficient advance notice to make that feasible.)

Finally–and this pains me, but I recognize its accuracy–retraining typically is offered through a college or university, and most laid-off workers, especially older ones, have minimal interest in starting or returning to college. Worse, most colleges take far too long to create or update retraining programs. (As I discovered when I joined the faculty at my own university, lack of urgency may be the defining factor of higher education–followed closely by lack of flexibility. Unfortunately, speed and flexibility are critically important to retraining.)

Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is the “chicken and egg” character of the problem. As the Atlantic article concludes, workers aren’t likely to waste their time retraining simply to retrain. Unless there is a specific job at the end, they won’t bother.

As with so many of the issues we face in public administration, it’s more complicated–and daunting– than it seems.

As Chambers of Commerce endlessly reminds us, employers look to locate in places with an educated workforce. In the long term, we’d get a better return on our investment of tax dollars by increasing funding for public schools.

But this is Indiana. I won’t hold my breath.

 

 

If Jobs Were Really What Mattered….

Public Policy and Governance, , ,

I’m one of the people who watched with disbelief as the GOP tax “reform” bill was loaded up with provisions that any sentient human would know to be counterproductive. There are two possible explanations why lawmakers might support this disastrous legislation, and they are not necessarily incompatible: the sponsors of this piece of excrement really believe–in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary–that it will spur economic growth, or they are obeying the demands of their donors/masters.

I say the two explanations aren’t necessarily incompatible because humans have an infinite capacity for self-delusion. It is entirely plausible that our elected Representatives and Senators prefer not to acknowledge, even to themselves, that they have been bought and paid for, and instead have convinced themselves of the merits of policies that have ushered in disaster every time they’ve  been tried.

In fact, as I have watched members of a once-responsible political party disintegrate into delusion and corruption, I’ve noticed their growing preference for make-believe rhetoric over reality. Ryan and McConnell, especially, have been displaying a decidedly Trump-like belief that assertions can shape reality–that saying it will make it so.

Increasingly, Republicans in both the legislature and Administration live in La La Land.

Case in point: the repeated Republican refrain about job creation. Listening to the rhetoric, you’d think that the retention and creation of jobs was really an important focus of GOP policy. (Of course, if you’d been listening to Republican rhetoric since well before Reagan, you’d have thought deficits were a concern– in the wake of the tax bill, we can see how bogus that was.)

So–how’s that “jobs focus” thing working out?

Well, here in Indiana, Carrier Corporation is continuing its move to Mexico, despite Trump’s boasts about preventing the move, and despite the company’s extraction of some seven million dollars in “economic development” money from the state.

And from The Hill, we learn

An analysis of Labor Department data by the labor coalition Good Jobs Nation found that more than 93,000 U.S. jobs have been eliminated since Trump’s election due to foreign trade.

That’s roughly on par with the previous five years, which saw an average of 87,500 jobs per year eliminated.

The coalition’s analysis also found that the number of jobs outsourced by federal contractors has actually risen since Trump was elected. Since November 2016, some of the biggest federal contractors have offshored some 10,269 jobs, making up 11 percent of trade-related layoffs, compared to 4 percent in the previous five years.

It is becoming more apparent by the day that Trump’s loyal core–around 30% of the electorate–desperately wants to believe even his most obvious and embarrassing lies. They’re like the boyfriend who really does realize that his lover is cheating, but who nevertheless talks himself into believing her increasingly unlikely alibis. Trump loyalists desperately want to believe that this pathetic buffoon can reverse global realities, make “great deals” in which business enterprises and other countries will miraculously ignore their own interests, and–most important of all– take the country back to a coal-fired past in which white Christian males were dominant (and could grab p**sy with impunity).
Just like that boyfriend, they want him to keep lying to them.

Beyond the Factory Floor

Public Policy and Governance, ,

The other day, I looked into a mirror and suddenly realized that my mother was looking back.

It sneaks up on you.

Most of us don’t notice the day-to-day changes in ourselves, or our environments, unless something triggers that recognition. That is especially true of the inexorable increase in automation–and it matters, because it is automation, far more than trade, that has eliminated so many American jobs. And that automation isn’t limited to spiffy robots on a factory floor; it is all around us.

When I first started to drive, gas station attendants pumped my gas and cleaned my windshield. These days, I pump my own gas, and the windshield gets cleaned when I go through the automated carwash. When I first practiced law, one legal secretary worked for two lawyers at most;  partners in the larger firms usually had their own secretary (and still dictated directly to her as she sat, steno pad in hand). Today, even in the “silk stocking” firms, lawyers type their own letters, emails and documents on their computers. Wealthier families often had maids and cooks; ever-improving home appliances have reduced the jobs available for such domestic help.

Old movies will sometimes feature the banks of telephone operators who used to direct calls, handle switching equipment and place “person to person” long-distance calls. My IPhone doesn’t require those switchboard operators. Speaking of telephones, those ubiquitous “telephone trees” are a decidedly mixed blessing, but most businesses use them rather than the human employees who used to answer the phones.

Remember the rows of bank tellers with eyeshades, who kept account ledgers by hand? Computers have replaced them.

I don’t know how much snail-mail has been replaced by email, but my guess is that we aren’t running short of postal workers.

As we anticipate an era of self-driving cars, we might consider the trade-off to come: greater safety and cost-effectiveness for individuals against eventual loss of employment for literally millions of truck, delivery van, taxi and Uber drivers.

Technological innovations make our lives more satisfying, our work more productive and our daily tasks more efficient–but they also take their toll on the workforce, and not just numerically. It’s true that many of these modern conveniences create new jobs, but rarely in the numbers they replace, and usually requiring a different and more demanding set of skills.

We are going to need some creative policies to deal with the accelerating and inevitable changes in the job market. Retraining–while undoubtedly a critical component–will not address the plight of the high-school dropout who lacks the capacity to learn more demanding skills, or the older displaced worker who cannot cope with radical change.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know we will continue to see machines displace human employees, and I’m pretty sure that bribing Carrier to delay moving 700 or so workers to Mexico is neither an answer nor a policy.

Beyond the Bumper Stickers

Public Policy and Governance, ,

“It’s more complicated than that” is a sentence I probably mutter in my sleep. (My students  think I repeat it on a daily basis, sort of like a mantra.)

In a New York Times op-ed a couple of weeks ago, Miriam Sapiro, who was a deputy U.S. trade representative from 2009 to 2014, addressed one of the many subjects that is more complicated than either free-trade purists or knee-jerk opponents of markets understand, in “What Trump and Sanders Get Wrong About Free Trade.”

After noting that the United States enjoys a 200 billion dollar trade surplus, she points out that unless we continue working to pry open foreign markets for American goods and services, we will have a hard time creating more jobs: Nearly all of the world’s population lives outside our borders.

The Department of Commerce estimates that every increase of $1 billion in exports sustains nearly 6,000 jobs, and that export-related jobs pay on average 18 percent more than jobs focused on the domestic market.

We Americans have an unfortunate tendency toward “either/or” arguments. Trade is good or bad. We are for it or against it. But this is one of those areas in which the question is not–or should not be–yes or no, but how. What distinguishes a good trade agreement from a bad one? How do we ensure an equal playing field? If domestic manufacturers have to abide by rules protecting the environment and ensuring fair labor practices, for example, other parties to these agreements should be bound by similar constraints. All trade agreements are not equal.

And we need to recognize that there are multiple causes of our economic problems.

Rather than blaming international trade for economic woes, we need to have an honest conversation about what the United States must do to strengthen its economy. More than 20 percent of American children today live in poverty. Our educational system, once the envy of the world, now ranks in the bottom half of much of the developed world. The tax system rewards companies that exploit loopholes, infrastructure is crumbling and training programs lack the kind of apprenticeship and credentialing opportunities that Germany and other major economies offer…
Of course it is easier to score points by denouncing trade than to tackle the tough issues, but such demagogy ignores the roots of economic insecurity and inequality.

It’s handy to have a villain to identify, but the emotional satisfaction of identifying someone or some thing as the “bad guy” rarely translates into a solution to the problem at hand.

It is also a mistake to think that positions on trade policy break down along neat party lines. As we learn from Political Animal, 

U.S. Conference of Mayors (which is overwhelmingly Democratic), endorsed TPP. The reason, as Ron Brownstein pointed out, is clear.

New data released May 13 by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program helps explain the mayors’ tilt toward trade…Brookings found that fully 86 percent of U.S. exports now originate from urban areas. Moreover, exports drove more than one-quarter of all metro area economic growth from 2009-2014.

I think it was H.L. Mencken who said “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”