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?
 ...
 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{at}sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

... Every city consists of two, one for the poor, the other for the rich. Plato
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