(If people had jobs, they could take care of their own healthcare. What’s to gain with that?)

Perhaps this is most accurately be interpreted as: “those who are willing to work” = the typical american worker, and “those who would not” = the overpaid CEOs and corportate boards, the hedge fund managers and wall street bankers. Government of, for, and by the rich is no democracy.

A lot of us got faked out. We didn’t notice the expansion of body shopping that got its push in legislation passed just before Reagan went into office. Nor did we notice the additional measures like Simpson-Mazzoli and rule 1706 which made it worse. We read about the farmers being foreclosed and evicted, the manufacturing workers sent packing, but believed the stories that they could just go to the juco or university to re-tool for more cutting-edge high-tech jobs. NSF had begun whining about high salaries for people with PhDs and pushed for more student visas and guest-work visas, acknowledging that reduced rewards would drive many US citizens out of these difficult to prepare for and remain current in fields. By 1990, with the reorganization of the Soviets, we saw large numbers of experienced science, tech, engineering, math and manufacturing workers dumped, and, at the same time the H-1B visa was created. Some cutting-edge aerospace engineers found themselves out of work for as long as 8 years. Employers stopped flying candidates across the country, greatly reduced relocation assistance and in most cases demanded that candidates relocate themselves. Employer investments in education and training dried up.

Then, during the Clinton admin, it was vastly expanded, twice, the second about 7 months after the start of the Y2K bust, economic recession and dot-com crash. Fortunately, those visa increases were temporary, but just as it looked like things might start looking up a year or two out, they slipped in more increases in the form of the E-3 visa, and various exemptions.

But we were all working 10 and 16 and 18 hours a day, trying to avoid the regular waves of down-sizings, and didn’t notice until it was too late.

Those who were able to hang on and avoided being displaced worked even harder. But federal over-spending and Fed policy were driving up consumer prices at a steady clip, while compensation was pretty much flat. So, those who were hanging on also leveraged their home equity, and maxed out the credit cards, hoping improvement was right around the corner. Many of them go swamped when the results of congress’ pressure on Fredde and Fannie to hand out loans to people who couldn’t pay them off.

Now, some of us educated in those cutting edge fields, see that there are hundreds of thousands fewer jobs (see yesterday’s CW article on Silicon Valley and the BLS report), we’ve long since burned through our savings, retirement, etc. Some have lost their homes and cars and libraries of professional books. We don’t have money or resources to gad about to “networking” events, or relocate ourselves. And most prognostications I’ve read in the last few days indicate that the job markets won’t have recovered for at least 4 or 5 years.

Call it 2 lost decades.

Bless your pea picking heart. You really know how to stir up the peanut crowd. From looking at your photo, your age is probably somewhere around 40. Given that, I congratulate you and so many others for supporting our economy with your high taxed income. And, obviously, your poor child will also have to endure the back breaking tax load of the future. Have a great life.

Please allow the Ol’ Wyld one to have a teachable moment with you. You wrote, “President Obama has emphasized “green jobs,” or creating a new sector around environmental needs. That’s not a bad vision, but the recession has frozen lending, so new companies are having a hard time getting started.” Lending has very little to do with creating new businesses, let alone a new sector. Most businesses are small enough to be started from personal savings/resources of the owner. Once economic viability has been proven, new capital is likely to be raised from relatives, partners, equity investors, and SBIC, or, perhaps, VC investors. Finally, after a business has established a predictable cash flow stream and some secondary repayment capacity, a guarantor or collateral, loans from banks or other financial concerns become available.

When a new business is started, lenders will not take equity risk that is left to equity. As you can see, you were wrong in your diatribe.

Further, tax cuts make investment more attractive to those who would take equity risk in a new venture since tax cuts greatly enhance returns. So, to incubate new businesses or economic sectors, tax cuts are the way to go. Unfortunatley, these facts fly in the face of your poorly designed thesis.

Perhaps, one should write about only that which one truly understands rather than casting about, as if participating in a battle royale, for ways to cast aspersions on Republicans and President Bush.