An economist tells it like it is
4/15/2014
*BY KEITH C. BURRIS
COLUMNIST FOR THE BLADE*
http://tinyurl.com/q843u4h
I had a chance to chat with Kate Warne, an economist with broad
experience - including working for the Council of Economic
Advisers under President Ronald Reagan and being part of the
team that deregulated the airline industry.
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So, she has already confessed her time spent serving the forces
of evil.
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de-regulation also has resulted in all the things that drive
people crazy about airline travel today: long lines, planes
packed like sardine cans, and flying to Sheboygan, Wis., to get
to Chicago.
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Yes, you got cheaper air fairs, and less reason to want to fly,
and she admits it's her fault, well the team she was on.
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The good news, she says, is that the economy is looking much
better - not that it is booming, by any means, but a tentative
calm, and even confidence, has begun to descend.
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Now, ain't that something. One of Saint Ronnie's people admits
things are going much better than is widely admitted, though she
works hard to avoid admitting Obama did good.
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Second, Washington, while not exactly inspiring in its
rationality and spirit of cooperation, is at least not
spectacularly and theatrically dysfunctional. We are no longer
talking about fiscal cliffs and default. There are even rumors
of bipartisanship.
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What she is saying, without actually using the words is, the
extreme right wing focus on bringing down Obama by crashing the
economy has been a disaster, and the republican party is the
heart of it. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion, working
with Obama instead of against him would have been much better
for this country.
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Further, Obamacare seems to be here to stay.
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A servant of Saint Ronnie admits that? Wow, it's about time
someone on the right did.
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But why has job growth been so slow to rebound?
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The recession was not just a recession, but coincident with a
banking crisis, which triggered a worldwide financial crisis.
...
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Funny, this is what Paul Krugman has been saying for years. This
is what many economists have been saying, but the right won't
admit it's not all Obama's fault, and Obama is struggling to
contain a meltdown that threatened the entire economy with
collapse.
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Here are two amazing under-reported facts:
We have regained all the jobs lost in the recession. We are
still looking for new ones, but we got the old ones back.
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Krugman, and other economists, and those of us who actually read
competent economic reports, have been saying this also.
Though she still doesn't admit free trade is the big culprit
here.
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Under pressure of recession and job loss, American workers have
reached their highest level of productivity in a generation.
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I reported, very long ago, that a look at the Organization of
Economic Cooperation and Development reports on international
competitiveness ranked developed countries on levels of
efficiency, measured in productivity. The scale was 1 to 100,
with 100 set at the US level of productivity. The US was clearly
the top. Back then Japan was known as the world leader in
productivity, but when you looked at the real numbers Japan was
ranked as 73% of US productivity.
Japan's fame was focused mostly on the automotive sector, the
only sector where Japan was more productive than the US.
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The big thing we know about new jobs, future jobs, is that they
will be technical jobs.
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On this I'm not sure if this is the columnist's thought, or if
he is quoting the economist. Either way, it's misleading. Truly
new jobs will be relatively few, what we will have is old jobs
applied to new products. Real leaps forward in industrial
technology are actually few, and fairly slow. Computer control
of machines really is just a slow process of upgrades, more
efficient and less expensive ways of doing the same thing. This
has been going on for half a century or more.
Hell, I had a piece of it for nearly 40 years. In that time
frame I worked with equipment that was even then badly obsolete,
but only in ease and speed of operation, the actual controls did
much the same thing, but slower. Speeding it up makes it more
efficient, but not really that much different in working
principle.
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If we hope to fill them with U.S. citizens - our children - we
need to produce more college graduates, ones who know how to do
and make things.
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Actually, no. First because we don't need to HOPE to fill them
with US Citizens, we need to do it. It ain't that hard, but it
will require the will to do it here instead of outsourcing.
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/Keith C. Burris is a columnist for The Blade./
BOB KLAHN
bob.klahn@sev.org http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn
... Every city consists of two, one for the poor, the other for the rich. Plato --- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
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