Sunday, April 6, 2014

"Dude, where are the jobs?

When Econo-dunces coined this specious term "the consumer", jobs became an endangered species...

A Circle of Jerks
Every month it's the same dumbfuck fire drill around the jobs report. The number of jobs created inevitably misses expectations and then panels of experts sit around for three hours on CNBS trying to figure out why there is so little net job creation. 

The Myth of the Independently Wealthy "Consumer"
While writing a prior post, I was looking up the term "anti-dumping" to get my facts straight, and there it was plain as day - the secret to the missing jobs:

"The logic behind anti-dumping duties is to save domestic jobs, although critics argue that this leads to higher prices for domestic consumers"

Yes, it's the all important false dichotomy between jobs and consumption. If it were written with any honesty, it would say, "...this leads to higher prices for massively indebted jobless consumers". I've actually never met this person known as a "consumer" i.e. someone who was independently wealthy and didn't also need a job in order to "consume". I suppose that's someone like Bill Gates. So let me get this straight, "consumers" benefit from lower prices when they lose their entire incomes to foreign competition. Am I getting that right?

Supply is Demand
No country can consume more than it produces without leading to massive unemployment
U.S. Imbalance of Trade aka. Net Exports, currently almost half a $trillion
Was very stable for decades until 1980 Reaganomics aka. Supply Side Economics aka. Voodoo Economics


The Specious Theory of Comparative Advantage
Why didn't the Founding Fathers just come out and say - don't worry about the economy, just ship it to another country, which will benefit "consumers". This fiasco is all being conducted under the phony auspice of "comparative advantage". According to that theory, when jobs are shipped to other countries, it "frees us up" to produce higher value goods and services. So for example, "they" now make semiconductors and write software code, while we are "freed up" to make cappuccinos or sit around doing nothing. It turns out that at this late stage, there is now nothing that "they" can't do cheaper and better than we can thanks to this multi-decade arbitrage, so the net incentive for any multinational to create a job in the U.S. is less than zero.

As I've said before, if the goal was to collapse wages down to Third World levels to bolster corporate profits, then we should have all just taken a massive pay cut up front and left the deflated economy intact. This asinine idea of shipping the economy and then marking time until wages collapse, is the worst of all possible outcomes. Clearly, the largest deficit today isn't even economic it's really in commonsense. We are literally surrounded by morons in every fucking direction.

We live in the Idiocracy.