UNEMPLOYMENT KNOWS NO SEASON!

UNEMPLOYMENT KNOWS NO SEASON!

(Mother Jones, Dave Gibson, AJ Vicens)

(Tasneem Raja, Frazer Chronicle)

Officially, the Great Recession of 2007 ended in June of 2009, I’ll bet if you pressure the economists who write their dribble about such topics, they’ll give you an exact starting date, time and event, and the guy who perpetrated cashing the first unemployment check, and the last person to get a job in June of 2009. I have absolutely no idea how these people operate, but they sure know how to exact history.

The question of unemployment benefits is a tough subject…..at least for me; there are all sorts of reasons why people lose their jobs, employee theft, coming late to work, unable to handle customers, unable to function with co-workers, inability to take orders from superiors, and poor job knowledge, or job performance.

Available work for Americans is a tricky commodity, and the attitudes that are shared by workers and employers regarding work, work conditions, pay scales and benefits can be, and usually are, the trickiest part of the entire equation. To me, by far the most important issue of the employee-employer relationship is respect, and I mean both parties need to respect the other.

The United States boom or bust economy is, of course, a blessing and a curse, and you can see that analogy through the unemployment rates back to two years after World War II and 2013. From 1947 through the early 1970’s unemployment never went above 6% nation-wide, and was as low as 3% in the early 1950’s.

After the war, people made lots of money, and you could quit one job, walk down the street and grab another. Housing after the war boomed for a decade, as returning servicemen got married, had babies, and went to work, not necessarily in that order.

My dad was a builder back then, and I remember him talking about building entire new neighborhoods, hundreds of homes. According to my dad, everybody “got a piece of the American pie.” Remember the U.S. was just coming out of the Great Depression when war was declared on Japan and then Germany in 1941-42.

The nation shifted gears (so to speak) and turned to a military product industry, everything from hats, to shirts, to underwear, to tanks and bombs, the United States learned how to do it all. By the end of World War II Americans were supplying a majority of the war making products and materials for the world. As one Japanese General said after Pearl Harbor, “I hope we haven’t awakened a sleeping giant” (with the attack.)

The ingenuity of American innovation, engineering, technology and the labor force combined to make the most streamlined industrial force the world had ever seen…..and although busted, broken down, and hanging on by a thread, could be reinvigorated…..and that is a scary thing.

THE NEW WAY

Can you say “off shore” it’s where all kinds of American jobs are going, a phenomenon that had stripped and robbed American jobs. Landing in foreign lands where the pay is literally pennies on the dollar. The worst part of the entire scenario is the fact that the Federal Government say’s they can’t do anything.

 

Luckily for business, there’s nobody in political office like me because I’d have business by the really short strontium hairs…..laws be damned. I’d also have labor by those same hairs, wage demands and benefits have also been a deterrent to keeping jobs here in the mainland.

It’s like the old man said, postage is due, and over the past eight decades the American worker has had two separate periods of almost two decades each of almost unprecedented growth. One was based on solid growth (the late 1940’s through the early 1970’s), based on building and road construction, and the other, the 1990’s through sometime in 2007, based on smoke and mirrors (housing bubble and lending institutions).

There were many dynamics connected with the late 1940’s through the early 1970’s economic growth in the United States. Many Americans feared that the end of the war would drop the nation’s economy back into some sort of depressed state.

However that was far from the truth as exceptionally strong growth prevailed as the automobile industry successfully converted back to producing cars and new industries such as aviation and electronics grew by leaps and bounds. A housing boom, stimulated in part by easily affordable mortgages for returning members of the military, added to the expansion.

The nation’s gross national product rose from about $200,000 million in 1940 to more than $300,000 million in 1950 and more than $500,000 million by 1960. The growth was unprecedented, and the jump in post war births known as the baby boomers increased the number of consumers…..it was like a perfect storm of growth.

The American work force also changed significantly, during the 1950’s the number of workers providing services grew until it equaled and than surpassed the number who produced goods. By the middle of the 1950’s a majority of U.S. workers held white-collar rather than blue-collar jobs. At the same time, labor unions won long-term employment contracts and other benefits for their members.

DOT, DOT, DOT COM

The 1990’s boom in the United States was an extended period of economic prosperity, during which the Gross Domestic Product increased continuously for almost ten years, the longest recorded expansion of the GDP in the history of the United States. The times are remembered as a time of strong economic growth, steady job creation, low inflation, raising productivity, a surging stock market, and sound central monetary policy.

Between 1990 and 2000, the country’s Gross Domestic Product from $5.5 trillion to an astounding $9.8 trillion, there were 24 million jobs created, and in 2000 the country had a surplus of $236.4 billion dollars. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the 1990s was the longest economic expansion in the history of the country.

Of course there was a recession, by the busting of the Dot-Com bubble in late 2000 and the ensuing down-time which was felt from 2001 until the end of 2003. But there was a new boom bubble just around the corner to bail-out the country; it was called home loans, mortgages and shaky lending standards.

THE END…..ALMOST

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 President Bush, in his reassuring manner, told everybody to “hit the streets,” go on with life as normal, purchase items…..and buy a home, hell buy two, “everybody in America should be a home owners.”

There even was a time between 2004 and early 2008 that lending institutions were writing home purchasing loans to NINJA’s. I thought that NINJA’s was a mortgage program for oriental Ninja’s you know, those guys in black robes who kick people, guys like Jackie Chan, boy was I wrong.

A NINJA loan was a program that specifically targeted people who didn’t have a job, and I guess no source of income. The letters NINJA stood for (no income no job or assets,) wow I’m not sure who was manning the directors chairs…..but I thought a criteria of home buying was having a decent job, and kind of rock solid credit…..or a pretty big chunk of cash up front…..but I guess not for the NINJA’s between 2004 or 2008.

This NINJA thing was just the “frost on the top of a beer” the good times during about the middle of the first decade of the 21^st century featured wild mismanagement, unbelievable greed, and crazy governmental bail-outs. And the lessons haven’t been learned yet.

It’s Christmas Eve here in good old Packerland…..and I’d like to wish all of my loyal readers a happy holiday, and remember to spend within your means…..except when purchasing my Christmas gift.

HAVE A NICE DAY!