Shortwoman.com

Maybe you’ve seen this show on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs. As you can guess from the title, it features a good natured fellow who goes around the country learning about and doing the sorts of dirty jobs that like it or not must be done in this country.

I don’t honestly see how anybody can watch a whole episode of this show and still think there’s such a thing as “Jobs Americans Won’t Do.”

The current estimate is that there are 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States — a Senate proposal to allow 87,000 guest workers annually is nothing more than a paper parasol in a hailstorm. Most of the undocumented immigrants do their best to hold down jobs and follow the law except for the fact that they are here at all breaks the law. I have said before that we honestly have no way of telling whether they are just honest tax paying law abiding (except for immigration) folks trying to make a living or evil terraists and/or drug lords trying to do us harm. Nor do we particularly know how many of these people are living in poverty or are homeless — and would such people be included in, or over and above the reported statistics? But that’s not my point today.

My point is that these people hold jobs that could be held by a legal worker. The deliberately optimistic numbers released by the government* show that there are 7 million unemployed people who want jobs and another 1.5 million who are not actively looking for work but would gladly take a job if one came along. This says nothing of the millions of people who have been “retrained” from skilled labor to unskilled labor.

We are told Americans don’t want these jobs because these are low paying, low skill jobs. They involve hard work, long hours, and sometimes deliberately ignoring safety rules. The truth is that some employers want exploitable workers, and workers who fear they will be deported if they say anything are just perfect. Well it turns out that the people who have these jobs don’t much like that either.

The truth is that illegal immigrants are here because they can get jobs. We need to create incentives to businesses such that it’s easier and cheaper to improve pay and working conditions so Americans do “want” the job than to hire easily exploited foreign workers. Molly Ivins suggests jail terms for hiring illegal workers. It might make prices go up in a way that can’t be hidden in the Consumer Price Index, but we all benefit from having safe, decent paying jobs.

In closing: Joe Average can’t be a real voter because that house is owned by Joseph Average; How to Succeed in Retail; Greenspeak v. Bernankespeak, and New! Greenspeak for Kids!; and to paraphrase the classic children’s book Go, Dog! Go!, “Do you like my hat?”

* Under these criteria, just as an example, I am considered employed despite not having been paid to work because I “did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family-operated enterprise.” That means every high school kid who helps out after school at the family farm/teriyaki-stand/taqueria/store is theoretically “employed.”

As in, Left Behind

Let’s start with an economic problem so obvious many people don’t think about it: water. We can’t live without it, and neither can people who live in developing nations. It should be but isn’t obvious that if your life is focused on basic necessities like boiling and filtering your water, you aren’t focused on productivity. A thousand million people do not have access to safe drinking water, and the problem is getting worse. Even though there are inexpensive things that can be done to improve water quality and supplies, it is expensive to make an entire country’s water supply safe. Private money, thought to be the solution, is not forthcoming. And forgive me for thinking that is a blessing in disguise. Water is too important for a profit motive to be involved.

Another thing we can’t do without — but you probably think about it from time to time — is healthcare. People who are ill generally have trouble doing their jobs well, assuming they can work at all. Well, there’s good news and bad news. It turns out that most Americans get roughly equal healthcare, regardless of race or status. Unfortunately that care is mediocre. I love these last two paragraphs:

Health experts blame the overall poor care on an overburdened, fragmented system that fails to keep close track of patients with an increasing number of multiple conditions.

Quality specialists said improvements can come with more public reporting of performance, more uniform training, more computerized checks and more coordination by patients.

So the problem is too many departments and too much work, but the solution is another department that makes more work. Right.

Now on to an underutilized resource in the United States, ironic considering how commonly it is found, the female labor pool. The summary: “We’re so far behind the rest of the world in commonsense, pro-women and pro-family policies that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to figure out what works…. The returns on investing in working families are high.”

It’s hard to have an economy when the world is coming apart. Some people have been saying for decades that ecologically friendly initiatives would hurt the economy. They are wrong. There is a lot of money to be made developing and selling green technology. And besides, if we destroy the planet, there will be no more economy.

Have you ever tried really hard to figure something out — a song title, how to solve a problem, why something works the way it does — only to have the answer mysteriously pop into your head hours or days later, usually while relaxing or thinking about something completely unrelated? You almost certainly knew your body requires regular rest, but it turns out your mind needs rest too! Time you take to relax might be the most productive time of all. And Americans don’t take very much time off at all.

So just maybe the world would be a better place if everybody had access to safe drinking water and quality healthcare, if every family could count on maternity leave, affordable childcare and other support services, if we had access to more “green” technology, and if we could just all take a break now and then.

In closing, How to get a Conservative to Lie.

Bill Fleckenstein has been bearish as long as I have known of his existence, which is going on a decade now. Even he is in awe of the mighty statistical wonkistry involved in unraveling Joe and Jane Average’s dilemma: “The government tells us the economy is fine and unemployment is low, but things sure feel rough from here.” A direct quote from Mr. Fleckenstein: “I have been aware of nearly all the statistical tricks used by the government since they were implemented. Nonetheless, seeing them collectively described in one article is incredibly sobering.”

He thinks this article is so important that he is giving us the short version days before the original — economist John Williams interviewed by Kate Welling — will be available without a subscription. Some of these items are not a shock to those of you who have been reading here a while, but Williams and Fleckenstein have the numbers and methods to tell you the underlying whys and wherefores. Go read how….

* Real unemployment is more like 12%, more than twice the official Department of Labor number.

* The government literally changed the rules of how inflation is measured to get a lower number.

* That still wasn’t good enough so they started changing the items whose prices were measured.

* If they hadn’t tinkered with these numbers, Social Security checks would be 70% higher than they are now. No wonder money seems tight to Granny.

* American’s incomes are lower than reported too, because of some accounting slight of hand that assumes homeowners pay rent to themselves!

So if you would like to think I see the economy as “a glass half empty,” I would like to remind you to pay attention to what’s really in the glass. These things are even more startling when you realize that Income is not keeping pace with the official inflation numbers, and remember both those numbers are tweaked to seem as rosy as possible.

In closing: cause of death, corporate culture; new bankruptcy rules suck, even judges say so; some tips on getting health insurance coverage; and the real Cola Wars.