Our economy and jobless are crying out to become a nation that creates, makes, and builds things again.....the true wealth creation engine for all Americans not just Wall Street!
We have discussed this many times before; the solutions are in 1) correcting/balancing our trade deficit in manufactured goods and services by stopping trade mercantilism and focusing on rules based free trade and holding our trading partners accountable, 2) rebuilding our infrastructure through meaningful investments that payback several fold, 3) undoing excessive regulations on business that are destroying our global competitiveness, 4) using our new found energy resources here at home to create more good paying jobs/careers and rebuild our global competitiveness. Being sure to not allow a " free-for-all" exporting of these resources but a balanced approach, 5) being sure that government policies are designed to encourage people to work not provide disincentives to work, 6) get our tax system globally competitive and job creating instead of chasing jobs overseas.
For those that incorrectly blame a skills gap, I say yes we always have a skills gap as innovation changes the world we are in but today's jobs crisis is not skills gap based, it is based on not creating jobs for those who were gainfully employed prior to 2009 with skills enough and lost their jobs. This failure is rooted in ignoring the opportunities we had in spades to put them back to work rebuilding our infrastructure and making
/building things, and the services that support all of it! Just what they were doing prior to the economy crashing.
It time our leaders woke up our left town and it is up to us to hold them accountable. Don't be swayed by false and hollow sound bites, but demand substance from people of real experience not personality. Leave personality to Hollywood and the talking heads in the 'press' not to building a globally strong and competitive economy here at home.
Don't be swayed by the happenings on Wall Street which have more to do with 1) low interest rates driving investors/Americans to look for better returns; 2) being the prettiest ugly man/woman at the global economic dance; 3) companies buying back their own stock; 4) merger/acquisition mania brought about by painfully slow growth in the economy and easy money looking for a home/returns.
Nothing necessarily wrong with good times on Wall Street but without a dynamic growing economy it does not reach all Americans in their paycheck or job aspirations .
America Wake-Up and do it Together.
Dan
Catherine Rampell: Many life Milestones are Out of Millennials' Reach
By Catherine Rampell Opinion writer September 15
We want to move out. We want to own our home. We want to marry. We want to work.
The problem is, many of us can’t.
America’s young adults have gotten a lot of flak for missing many of the milestones that earlier generations checked off with ease.
We aren’t getting even entry-level jobs, which could enable us to pay our own bills. Not only are we not buying houses, many of us aren’t renting, either: About a third of millennials still live with their parents, earning us the irksome epithet “boomerang generation” — a play on “boomer generation,” the presumed victim here.
We’re hanging out in our beleaguered parents’ basements rather than marrying and starting legally recognized unions of our own. Marriage rates have skidded downward, with a little more than a quarter of 18- to 35-year-olds ball-and-chained in 2012, compared with about 40 percent at the dawn of the millennium, according to calculations from the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. Partly as a result, more than half of the country is presently single, the first time this has been the case since the government began keeping track in 1976. (Singlehood hasn’t stopped many of us from continuing to reproduce, of course.)
To some, this arrested development is evidence of a prolonged adolescence and a rejection of self-sufficiency, perhaps encouraged by indulgent “helicopter parenting.” According to a recent Reason-Rupe survey, about threequarters of America’s young adults consider millennials to be “responsible” and “hard-working,” while just half of older adults agree. If character isn’t the issue, perhaps it’s misplaced preferences: We millennials have set aside the ideals of an “ownership society” in favor of the hippy-dippy values of a “sharing economy.” We rent, borrow or share our textbooks, cars and evendinner leftovers, so why would we bother buying a home or permanently attaching ourselves to a single romantic partner?
Recent data, though, suggest that these standard, American-dream-style signposts still retain an incredibly strong hold over young people’s desires and aspirations. What’s changed is that basic goals such as getting married, having a secure job and owning a home have drifted further out of reach.
Even as marriage rates have plummeted — particularly for the young and the less educated — Gallup survey data show that young singles very much hope to get hitched. Of Americans age 18 to 34, only about 9 percent have both never been married and say they do not ever want to marry.
“Although there is now a growing class divide in who gets and stays married in America, there is virtually no divide in the aspiration to marry,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, white, black or Hispanic. Most Americans are married or would like to marry. The challenge, then, facing the United States is bridging the gap between the nearly universal aspiration to marry and the growing inability of poor and working-class Americans to access marriage.”
On to housing. Young Americans are substantially less likely to own homes than their counterparts a generation or two ago, with their homeownership rates reaching record lows this year.
But survey after survey shows that young people would love to be deed-owners. Fannie Mae’s National Housing Survey, for example, asks respondents whether they think it’s better to own or rent to achieve various goals (such as feeling safe, building wealth, feeling engaged in their communities, etc.). On almost every point, young adults — just like their older brethren — say that owning is better. The vast majority of millennials also say they’ll buy at some point, if they haven’t already, and they believe that the best reasons for owning are not financial but the “broader security and lifestyle benefits of homeownership.”
So what’s keeping young people from buying, even as mortgage rates appear relatively cheap, and from marrying, even though possible mates are plentiful?
Economic opportunity has a lot to do with both. Unemployment rates for the youngest adults remain high, and they look far worse when you include people who aren’t actually looking for work but still say they want a job. Student loan debt also seems to be weighing on young people’s ability to buy, as documented by the economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among others.
Perhaps preferences for these kinds of life milestones will eventually change, too, as norms evolve out of economic necessity. But in the meantime, don’t malign millennials for “rejecting” milestones that remain out of their reach.