Let Them Eat Grapes Of Wrath
by digby
Total profits of U.S. corporations, as compiled by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, were at $1.50 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2007 and reached $1.59 trillion in the first quarter of 2010. Over that same period, the country lost 8.2 million jobs, or 5.9% of the job base. In other words, about one out of 20 jobs has simply disappeared. While job growth has resumed in recent months, the pace of job creation remains glacial, and as the chart shows, not nearly sufficient to recoup the losses suffered any time soon. Corporations have been able to restore their profitability in the midst of the worst economy in generations even though sales levels are still below those before the recession began. When employers are able to recover their profits many years before their employees can even hope to attain the income and employment levels they had prior to recession’s devastation, economic policy is clearly skewed in favor of corporations and not workers.
Well maybe they are skewed in favor of the corporations, but don’t people understand that profits are hardly even worth having if people have to pay taxes on them? It’s like a slap in the face, especially when bloggers are being so rude to them and all. CEOs have feelings too — they put their Armani slacks on one leg at a time, just like you do. So while they may be making money hand over fist, they feel unloved and unappreciated. Those people running out of benefits should walk a mile in those CEOs’ Prada slip-ons and see what real suffering is. I think they’d learn a thing or two.
All the spoiled unemployed layabouts have to do is snap out of it and start doing the work the free market is providing. As this fine fellow from the Heritage Foundation indicated the other day on Hardball — unemployment insurance is keeping people from piling their family in the jalopy and heading out to Nebraska where the jobs are:
MATTHEWS: But who are these people in the lines every time a job opens in New York that seems to be reasonably OK? Not even attractive, just OK—a job that exists, and the lines are around the corner. What do you think that is? That phenomenon we‘re looking at?
SHERK: Well, part of that is from the unemployment benefits. The New York economy has been hammered. The financial industry has, you know, taken a heavy toll. A lot of investment banks have gone down. With those investment banks, a lot of the New York economy. And so, if you want to find a job, a lot of the workers now in New York or unemployed are going to have to move to different state. They‘re going to have to move to, say, Nebraska, or to Texas, or one of the states where the economy isn‘t doing as poorly.
But when you got the two years of benefits, it encourages the workers to look for the jobs in New York instead of looking for the jobs, say, in another state.
If they would just cut off his unemployment, Tom Joad, laid off Wall Street broker, would pack up and move to Nebraska and get a job as a Walmart stock boy. And his wife Rosasharn, the former IT administrator, can get her foot in the door at the local Denny’s washing dishes. Seriously folks, what’s the big deal? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of jobs in Omaha. Just ask Ben Nelson.
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