re: #375 Targetpractice

To quote my grandmother, “A job’s a job.” If we want to get people off 20 hrs and onto full-time jobs, then we need to get out there and vote next month to ensure Democrats can bring up minimum wage increases again and again. Expecting Republicans to see the need for higher wages that don’t come due to the “generosity” of “job creators” is like expecting a pig to understand that shitting where it eats is not healthy for it.

Upon further review… Really the way I see the economy is that a real boom, like what we have seen a few times in the past century trumps government policy every time. So much was clearly wrong with Federal policy and the economy during the dot com boom. We knew it, we saw film after film at 11:00. Clear warning like the accounting scandals. Obvious corporate power plays. But that was all perfectly tolerable at the time given the boom. Jobs dot com etc.

Now we have the opposite a reduced and stuck on simmer pro part time economy and we are looking to relative minutia to fix it. This is a war economy if you ask Boeing or Raytheon. Where is the boom? When the Air Force uses a missile. By all means fix the symptoms as best we can to treat the patient so to speak. But really you can’t build a strong middle class by adjusting the minimum wage. Or by changing the legislative majority.

You do that with jobs that pay more than minimum require full time plus attention and you have them in great numbers. Building. Creating. Managing those $$ numbers and people. That usually happens at best in parallel or even in spite of the legislature or who is in office. The other larger force in play now is the global economy.

This got loudly pointed out to me by a smart friend from India. He runs big jewelry manufacturing shops there and exports to the US. You don’t want to endure his expletives when we talk about bringing those jobs back “home”. He excoriates our selfishness for that local perspective. His attitude is the economy is no longer anything short of global and policies that don’t embrace that are doomed to fail at great cost.

My conclusion? That next boom needs to be something that moves us forward, not something that takes jobs back away from a trading partner or ally. When that time comes again who is in charge will matter only somewhat. Only to the extent they facilitate the government side of it.

My apologies to highly contrary perceptions, this concept is a hard sell within a month of the mid terms. Right now focus is very local and shorter term as a congress critters term in office. 2015 will be the time to take a hard look again at this concept.