“Nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary,” said Ashe Schow in the Examiner report. At the same time, full-time jobs decreased by 240,000 positions.”The recovery, or lack thereof, is being fueled by a shift from full-time to part-time work,” Ms. Schow said in the Examiner. And one more statistic related to the United States’ new economy, as reported by Fox News on Tuesday: Nearly one in six Americans is on food stamps. That’s more than are employed in full-time jobs, Fox News said.
We got into this shitty situation by cutting taxes on zillionaires, deregulating the banking sector, and slashing the social safety net. Which for our friends at Fox means the best way out is to cut taxes on zillionaires, deregulate more industries, and slash the social safety net.
IOW, there is an element in the right-wing psyche that cannot accept that their policies not only failed to work as advertised, they produced an economic catastrophe the likes of which we have not witnessed since 1929. They’re have nothing new to offer, but they can’t go back. They’re stuck, mentally frozen, like fish swirling in a bait ball. Their only prescription is more of exactly what failed so catastrophically. It should be a no brainer, but if these clowns get into real power ever again, with all three branches of government under their thumb, about 98% of us are truly fucked for life.
You are supposed to be embracing truthiness, not truth.
“But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.” – Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
As the first comment under the linked article demonstrates, not only will the working class be destroyed, many of them will be cheering along the way.
An unfair comparison – >1% of the fish swirling around the bait ball are actually getting a solid meal for their efforts.
Isn’t it great how our lack of a social safety net forces people to take horribly shitty jobs (which in the process screws over the previous lowest-paying employees at that job) because it’s either wage slavery or starvation/eviction?
@#4: sathyalace:
In all fairness one has to say that a social security net does not necessarily protect you from wage slavery. In some cases it can actually encourage the companies to pay you even less. For example, here in Germany there is a general social safety net. For a single person they will pay ~380€ / month in assistance (housing is payed separate but of course there are restrictions on the maximum size of the apartment) which is not much but you won’t starve.
Now there are jobs where you make even less than this amount. In this case the government will pay you the difference. Now on the one hand this sounds great: It encourages people to seek work but also makes sure that they don’t become homeless. But as you already might suspect: It didn’t take long for the companies to realize: This is great. Now we can pay our employees/slaves even less since the government will pay part of our salaries.
Now they are finally discussing to introduce a minimum wage but of course there will always be loopholes for companies to exploit.
@Compuholic
Yeah that’s not really an argument against a social security at all when it is clear that the lack of a minimum wage is to blame.
Out of curiosity, what happens to the owners of the means of production when reduced costs via wage and benefit reductions leave the USA without a consumer class to buy non-necessary goods?
That is a good question Rogg, and the answers is they either don’t care — usually short focus outweighs theoretical long term possibilities — or stridently believe it can’t happen to them. People who luck out and hit a home run, become multi-multi millionaires, they tend to be seduced by their own success and come to believe they are untouchable. It’s human nature. And even they don’t, there are plenty of skilled toadies willing to wait in a long, long line to try and seduce them with their own success and convince them they are the most noble, gracious, generous and special favored creatures on God’s great earth.