"It's the Economy, Stupid"

[unixronin]

And the government isn't exactly helping.

On February 2, 2009, NumbersUSA with the Coalition for the Future American Worker launched the above "elevator ad" in an extended nationwide educational campaign on cable TV.

The purpose of the ad is to inform the public of two government statistics that, when placed together, show an outrageous participation of our federal government in increasing the numbers of unemployed Americans.

The two statistics from last year?

• 2.5 million Americans lost jobs
• The federal government brought in 1.5 million new foreign workers to take jobs

NumbersUSA has been doing everything in its power the last three months to persuade the nation's political leaders and media leaders to address this incongruous policy. Yet to date, there has been no indication whatsoever of a slow-down in importing an average of 138,000 new foreign workers each month -- even as half-million Americans a month are losing jobs.

This tells only part of the story, of course.  Part of the problem is that employers want to hire the cheapest workers they can, even if they're not the best.  Part of the problem is that sometimes they ARE the best, because US schools aren't graduating enough qualified engineers and other technical professionals.¹  Too many people want the "easy money" careers like law practice and banking.²  On the lower end of the scale, most of the Mexican migrant workers that people complain about are doing menial jobs that the complainers aren't willing to do in the first place.

[1]  The truth of this claim is hard to ascertain.  There are documented claims asserting both its truth and its falsehood.

[2]  Lawyers are perhaps the most egregious example.  The United States has 5% of the world's population, and 70% of the world's lawyers.  The United States has slightly under 2.4 times the population of Japan, and 30 times as many lawsuits per year.  The US has three lawyers for every doctor, five lawyers for every four police officers, two lawyers for every three engineers.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup. But I'll bet the H1B engineers got paid a lot less, didn't they?

You can thank the Harvard Business School with its MBA program and its theory of bottom-line economics for that — the short-sighted and stupid ideas that all companies are interchangeable, that you don't have to actually understand anything about your industry to run a company, and that the only thing that matters is the bottom line on the quarterly balance sheet.

(The last time I knew, IN THEORY, in order to get a H1B worker approved, a company first had to demonstrate and document to the Department of Labor that no qualified American citizen was available to fill the job. I'm not sure exactly whether that requirement got swept away, or whether they're just ignoring it...)

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

That requirement is ridiculously easy to meet. I had a couple of H1B people working for me when I was at $BIG_COMPANY. It was a bit of a pain, as far as special documentation of actual work was concerned, but HR just waved a magic, obfuscating-wand at the US government, and everything went through. I was really happy to have the folks I got through the H1B program, they were great workers!

Put things in a different perspective. If the quarterly balance sheets are not coming out right, nothing else matters. (I know that you turned that slightly, but I believe that my statement is true.) It is only when you have a correct balance sheet that you can focus on other areas of the company. (I am talking about a going concern, not a startup/small business where it may take a couple of years to get the fundamentals and market segment functioning.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True, the company won't survive if it's not profitable. The problem is the absence of long-term planning that the mindset encourages — sacrificing the ability of the company to maintain and develop its business in the long term in order to make a bigger profit this quarter to make the analysts' projected numbers, because if you don't make the projections the stock will drop. I understand the original intent and purpose of the stock market, but I think today it has become the tail that wags the dog.

Were I ever to start my own company, I would fight like hell to keep it from ever going public, because once it goes public, you're at the mercy of the stock market.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

That's sort of a myth.

If you were to go public for say 20% of your stock, hold the remaining 80%, show a profit and distribute dividends, the price of your stock wouldn't matter a damn except to the traders in the market.

Once well-established, it would, in theory, be to your advantage for your firm's stock to tank, it could then be purchased at a discount by your firm and retired.

Then you could sneer at the market and pocket the profits.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True, there is that. Of course, if you actively (or arguably actively) arranged for the stock to tank, you'd likely face insider-trading charges...

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

True, but if you simply paid dividends and sneered at the WSJ when asked why your stock's value wasn't climbing, that might do it -- something on the order of "We pay decent dividends to our stockholders. What it trades for isn't a matter of concern. It was a good value at our IPO."

The media should take it from there.

You, of course, would be reviled as a hard-hearted ebil capitalist swine oppressor of the poor, et c.