Unemployed - A Memoir

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Location: Cedar Park, Texas, United States

I am an outsourced American: I am black/African American and approaching 43 years of age. This is a chronicle of my story. The major networks talk about the "robust economy," few of them talk about the personal cost of the loss. I hope my story is not just an ethnic story. Like I said: I am an outsourced American, a casualty of NAFTA and CAFTA. We will all share in this boat soon.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Redo That Voodoo

By Paul Krugman, New York Times

Original Link here: Redo That Voodoo

Text below:

Republicans are feeling good about the midterms — so good that they’ve started saying what they really think. This week the party’s Senate leadership stopped pretending that it cares about deficits, stating explicitly that while we can’t afford to aid the unemployed or prevent mass layoffs of schoolteachers, cost is literally no object when it comes to tax cuts for the affluent.

And that’s one reason — there are others — why you should fear the consequences if the G.O.P. actually does as well in November as it hopes.

For a while, leading Republicans posed as stern foes of federal red ink. Two weeks ago, in the official G.O.P. response to President Obama’s weekly radio address, Senator Saxby Chambliss devoted his entire time to the evils of government debt, “one of the most dangerous threats confronting America today.” He went on, “At some point we have to say ‘enough is enough.’ ”

But this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.

The next day, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, confirmed that Mr. Kyl was giving the official party line: “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.”

Now there are many things one could call the Bush economy, an economy that, even before recession struck, was characterized by sluggish job growth and stagnant family incomes; “vibrant” isn’t one of them. But the real news here is the confirmation that Republicans remain committed to deep voodoo, the claim that cutting taxes actually increases revenues.

It’s not true, of course. Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash.

But we’re talking about voodoo economics here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that belief in the magical powers of tax cuts is a zombie doctrine: no matter how many times you kill it with facts, it just keeps coming back. And despite repeated failure in practice, it is, more than ever, the official view of the G.O.P.

Why should this scare you? On paper, solving America’s long-run fiscal problems is eminently doable: stronger cost control for Medicare plus a moderate rise in taxes would get us most of the way there. And the perception that the deficit is manageable has helped keep U.S. borrowing costs low.

But if politicians who insist that the way to reduce deficits is to cut taxes, not raise them, start winning elections again, how much faith can anyone have that we’ll do what needs to be done? Yes, we can have a fiscal crisis. But if we do, it won’t be because we’ve spent too much trying to create jobs and help the unemployed. It will be because investors have looked at our politics and concluded, with justification, that we’ve turned into a banana republic.

Of course, flirting with crisis is arguably part of the plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Anyway, we really should thank Senators Kyl and McConnell for their sudden outbursts of candor. They’ve now made it clear, in case anyone had doubts, that their previous posturing on the deficit was entirely hypocritical. If they really do have the kind of electoral win they’re expecting, they won’t try to reduce the deficit — they’ll try to make it explode by demanding even more budget-busting tax cuts.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Is This It?

I have an entry in this blog (also the book "Unemployed: A Memoir") where I compare my situation at then 41 to "Logan's Run" in the Epilogue.

I thought frankly, I'd concluded the blog. At the time, I wasn't thinking about a book: because it's not a "sexy" subject - unemployment - it understandably does not sell well. That my screed would be answered by common sense and that the recession of the mid 2000s would lift. All would again be gainfully, fully employed. Fantasy.


So, is this it: Too Old for a Job, Too Young for Medicare or Social Security? The original article in the blog and book has moved from http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,375941,00.html to Finished At Forty IN THE NEW ECONOMY, THE SKILLS THAT COME WITH AGE COUNT FOR LESS AND LESS. SUDDENLY, 40 IS STARTING TO LOOK AND FEEL OLD. This article appeared in 1999. It's eleven years old and still relevant today.

It's relevant because invariably, the under-40 crowd will reach what Logan did as a "sandman" in the SyFy Fantasy: the "age of renewal," which he and other sandmen tracked down runners, until Logan reached the age and became a runner himself.

Is this it?

Instead of a laser that zaps us into oblivion, we're to transfer wealth upward and like it. We are to take jobs that pay LESS than our worth and adjust our budgets. We are to take contract jobs and pay exorbitant taxes as a freelance worker. We're to have skills we've worked a lifetime to master, now to be disregarded. Programmers appear to be up and out at 35. Banks on Wall Street are to get a tax payer bailout, and we are to be silent while their mistakes and morass go unpunished. We face foreclosure on our symbols of the American Dream and bankruptcy that will affect our credit for years to come. And, we are to be silent.

Where are YOU in this?

I'd like to hear from you and post your comments to this blog. The email is:

reginaldlgoodwin@blogger.com

Please let me know if I can post your name. Otherwise, your comments will be anonymous. I will respect your privacy.

My plan is to compile a list and forward the same to my Senate and House Representatives. I'd suggest you do the same to yours. If they hear from ALL of us, they'll listen less to Wall Street and more to Main Street. This is not an advocate position of one political party over the other, this is not a slight against the current or former administration in the White House. I advocate the over-40 American worker, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native that find themselves in the conundrum of "overqualified," "too smart" and "if we had two positions to hire for, you'd be one of them." It makes you feel good in the short term, until you look at your current bills that a good paying, fully employed job would remedy.

I am an American. I cannot accept oblivion or the scrap heap. This cannot be "it."

I am naive enough to believe we live in a democracy.

Wednesday, July 07, 2010

FYI: Found this on Dice.com's Facebook page...

Web Searches Companies Pay for on Potential Employee Candidates

In this era of needing Life Lock to protect our identities, we need to be cognizant of our online identities as well.

I'm in the market for a job, but the wrong information "interpreted" from a blog post (like this one) and if you look at the CNN video embed, some of the information could just be flat WRONG and not weigh in your favor.

Here's an outfit that says they'll protect you for around $15/month: Reputation Defender, aptly named.

I for one have taken to innocuous quotes from Robert Frost and Albert Einstein on my Facebook and Twitter account pager. Even that, I'd "self-sensor" just in case.

"Forewarned is forearmed," from: Robert Greene's A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (a.k.a. The Art of Conny-catching), 1592:

"forewarned, forearmed: burnt children dread the fire."