How Much Is A Job Worth?

Post Mortem For America: "And they lived happily ever after?..." As a people brought up on nursery rhymes, we like to hear good news and happy endings. We are not eager to peek behind the screen to see who is manipulating our thinking processes. Therefore, when the government says that they’ve created more new jobs than at the end of any recession we tend to buy into their arguments without examining what they say critically. We don’t ask what kind of jobs or whether they are permanent or decent paying. In our anxiousness for good things to happen, we kind of make allowances. . When we are told that Americans are reinvesting in the stock market and that the market is going up, we tend to think of that as bullish news. And we rush to get into this new American bonanza. When we hear that the economy is going strong, that’s enough for us. In short, we still tend to buy into the American dream 9/11 or not. That’s why when occasionally the real truth slips out, it doesn’t seem to penetrate our desire for “happy endings” to those fairy tales that Washington seems good at conjuring up.

So, if you really want to know what’s going on, you must get beyond the “Disneyfication” of the American way of life and take a long hard look at the facts. A good place to start is at the state level.

Here’s just one example that I came across on one of my periodic visits to parts of the country to get a feeling for where things are in an America that’s been Wal-Marted to the extreme. Let me explain: We all know that the states compete internationally for new employers who will provide good paying jobs. That is nothing new, but what is new is the fact that for the first time, state governments seem willing to give away the store to attract jobs to their states.

We may ask why.

The answer is somewhat unsettling. The truth is that most states are bleeding good “quality of life” jobs and replacing them where they can with low-paying service sector jobs that are not equivalent by any measure.

To understand how this works take the recent comments by the president during recent trip to India where he reassured the people there that we support the improvement in their economy. At the time, he mentioned that it was time for Americans to start training for the jobs that will be in demand in this century. .

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics was queried about which jobs would be plentiful in this new century, they responded that the two fastest growing segments of work will be for nurses assistants and food handlers, two of the lowest paying income categories.

What do we make of this? It seems to imply that the Information Age jobs scheduled to elevate America’s economy was misgauged by that self-serving guidebook, the Greening of America, that said it was okay to jettison our manufacturing base replacing it with higher level “clean” jobs in Information. Based on historical precedent, quite the opposite has proven true. Information Age jobs are continuing to move “off-shore” while Americans will have to be content with service-sector replacements which tend to be part-time and low paying. .

The States are already beginning to pay the price in the economy with the current changes in the automotive industry occasioned by the demand for Japanese and German cars and the loss of textile and other manufacturing jobs to places like India and China.

To rectify that problem and rebuild their tax base, many states are finding that the cost of attracting new business is growing steeper all of the time. Costs of job replacement are running the States up to 100,000 dollars a job and up and those steep prices are not uncommon among States competing for international business.

Last week, South Carolina broke the record paying upwards of 160,000 dollars per job to attract KIA a South Korean automobile manufacture to locate a plant there that would create several thousand new jobs for the state. South Carolinians expect that they will make up the losses in new taxes that the give-away will incur but recognize that it may take many years. But if we thought that this was insanity on a state-wide scale, you might want to look away when hearing about Washington State’s decision to pay Boeing over three billion dollars to locate a plant there.

But all of these high end pyrotechnics do not get into the reality of what is taking place here and tend to camouflage the fact that Americans are finding themselves the whipping boy of free trade policies that are simply wrong-headed and don’t work unless there is a level playing field, they will continue to hemorrhage jobs that impact their quality of life. Until Americans see clearly how their futures are being traded away to ensure fat profits for business, we will continue to see a growing trade deficit and lowered expectations now and into the future for each family. Nevertheless, with our fairy tale mentalities, we probably won’t do anything about it until it gets very personal. On the other hand, that day may not be far away!


Les Aaron