Word: labors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...before the Labor Department announced a second month of 10%-plus unemployment last week, the White House hosted a get-together to hear from executives, labor leaders and academics about how the Federal Government can jolt job growth. "We're looking for fresh perspectives," the President said. "I am open to every demonstrably good idea...
That may sound promising, but the truth is, drumming up new jobs on short notice isn't exactly in the government's wheelhouse. In the long term, what the government does and doesn't do is incredibly important to the health of the labor market. Trade policy, corporate tax rates, the structure of health care - these things all have a real impact on economic growth. But Washington's tool kit doesn't work nearly as well in the short run. Right now companies aren't hiring for a very specific reason: there's not as much demand for their products...
...question how effective and efficient such a program would be. First of all, it is misleading to imply that companies aren't hiring because workers aren't cheap enough. As Dale Mortensen, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, points out, workers are a real bargain right now. Unit labor costs - how much a company has to pay people to produce a unit of whatever it is that the company makes - have been flat or falling for all of 2009. Between the second and third quarters, labor costs dropped at an annual rate of 2.5%. "If you just look...
...also misleading to imply that companies aren't hiring. They are - about 4 million workers a month. There is always a lot of churn in the American labor market and that doesn't stop during a recession. (We don't particularly feel the hiring right now because companies are letting workers go at a higher rate.) In a best-case scenario - if using tax dollars to subsidize corporate hiring works exactly as it should - we'd wind up paying for 4 million hires a month that we would have otherwise gotten for free...
...This is a tragic society," Taiwan's Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang proclaimed in a Nov. 28 speech at the National Science and Technology Museum. He warned that if the island continues on this track, the population would experience a future labor shortage and that the next generation of children would have significant difficulty covering the health costs of their aging parents. That intense financial pressure, he said, could raise the future suicide rate. The Education Minister, in a separate statement, predicted that one-third of Taiwan's colleges will close in just 12 years if the trend continues...