Structural unemployment? What nonsense.

Why structural unemployment isn't the job market's problem - Oct. 11, 2010:
"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- An increasingly fierce debate is raging over the reason why unemployment is still so stubbornly high.
While most people think businesses simply aren't hiring enough to absorb the millions of unemployed workers, a rising tide of prominent economists dispute that. They claim that there are jobs out there, just not the right candidates to fill them."

I guess its a slow news day for this Columbus Day holiday, but for any media outlet to publish such a nonsense story is atrocious. Of course there are "jobs" out there, but would you really expect an engineer, say, to flip burgers at the local fast-food joint ... or would he/she look for a job as, say, an engineer perhaps?

"With more than 3 million job openings reported by the Labor Department, the unemployment rate should be close to 6.5%, said Kocherlatokta, not the 9.6% where it stands now.

He said that one of the reasons for the worsening imbalance is that so many underwater homeowners who can't sell their houses are unable to move in search of job opportunities."

Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Perhaps his Presidentshipness would like to fill one of the job openings in his own agency, say, as a janitor? And this clown is in charge of a Federal Reserve Bank, no wonder we are wallowing in the fiscal doldrums.


Its quite simple. Employers employ employees. Duh. Less employers, less openings for employees, ergo higher unemployment. The current tax and regulatory environment coupled with the lack of any available funding from banks is killing our small businesses, whose owners are packing it up and looking for jobs themselves. Bailing out banks, car makers and health insurance companies is NOT creating jobs - because it is NOT helping small businesses to survive, forget about growth. Small businesses form the bulk of "employers", not mega-corporations, who are gleefully slicing and dicing at their employee salaries and benefits while the current Congress is blindly stumbling around throwing wads of taxpayer money into every trough they can find.
 
The trillions that have been wasted on these foolish bailouts should have been routed to small business as tax credits. It would not cost as much, since no taxpayer money would be paid out up front. As businesses prosper, they will increase tax revenues in the long run by increasing hiring and thus consumer spending from the happily employed, who will no doubt run out and buy High Definition 3D televisions with every paycheck. And if any business fails, it didn't cost the government a dime - since the failed business is not going to be taking that tax credit. I'm no economist, but this is straightforward common sense. In the immortal words of Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), "Common sense is not so common". Especially in Congress.