It’s often said that the political class is out of touch with “Main Street,” but this recession has made that discrepancy particularly glaring. Policy makers have really struggled to explain our economic malaise (or worse) while sticking to tried and true political talking points.
Take this example from President Clinton, who’s no political slouch. He’s asked who the employment situation is so bad, and he makes several pretty good points explaining why we’re not seeing job growth in this recovery. But then he adds this:
“The last unemployment report said that for the first time in my lifetime, and I’m not young, in my lifetime, we are coming out of a recession but job openings are going up twice as fast as new hires. And yet we can all cite cases that we know about where somebody opened a job and 400 people showed up.
How could this be? Because people don’t have the job skills for the jobs that are open. So here’s the most important thing. If we were hiring since last June when economists said the shrinkage stopped, between then and now, if we had been hiring people on the jobs where people are trying to hire, that is we could get those jobs this morning after this TV show is over, if we were doing that at the same rate were doing that in 93, 94, 95, there would be five million more people at work. This unemployment rate would be 6.9 (percent) not 9.6 (percent.) We would be in a different world, not just economically but emotionally as as country.
Get that? There actually are lots of jobs available, the problem is that our workforce just isn’t smart enough–err–isn’t trained enough to fill them.
Right. Tell that to all the recent-college graduates or seasoned workers who are working low end or part-time jobs just to get by.
The truth is that the vast majority of workers without jobs are unemployed not because they are untrained, but rather because there’s too much productive capacity in the economy to support our present demand. And we’re not going to see a meaningful pick-up in demand (and employment) until we deleverage the huge cloud of debt hanging over our economy, which will take many more months or years.
There’s no easy way out of this dilemma and politicians have no painless solutions. Our near-term outlook is painfully at odds with the long-standing, politically-palatable myth about “American Exceptionalism.” Which is why I suspect we will continue hearing politicians wallpaper over our problems as Clinton did above.