Sunday, June 05, 2011

'Woodford' Bigflower or Yellow Vetch in June 2011

Let's shorten the work week

It's not right to leave the unlucky jobless to starve on the side of the road, when we can just shorten the work week and spread the pain a bit. We could encourage four-day work weeks by starting time-and-a-quarter overtime after 32 hours in a week, with time-and-a-half overtime after 40 hours as usual. Accompanying this with underemployment insurance from the nation or state could help preserve our society from crimes of desperation by those people otherwise left behind. A similar 'Work-Sharing' approach has been implemented in Germany, and has been widely used.
If, as a result of such a law, a half of workers had their hours shortened by a day a week, this would create jobs for about an additional 7% of us. That alone could almost eliminate official unemployment, currently at 9.1%, and make a dent on actual unemployment, which is calculate to be quite a bit larger.
In addition, this could ease the burden on social service providers, as the newly employed could care for themselves. And it would ease discrimination against minorities, as fuller employment tends to do.

Saturday, June 04, 2011

John Maynard Who? Wall Street shoots own foot while wounding Economic Recovery.

What part of 'insufficient demand' doesn't Wall Street greed understand? If stimulated into employing the one of five of us now out or short of work, the US economy could rebound, further enriching fat cats while saving the unluckiest of us from an uncertain fate, which is sure to drag all of society down with us on our way there. It could rebound because so many more of us would be actually producing things that we need - we'd have more goods to share and more pay to spend at Wall Street's businesses. If these jobs are green jobs, we might wisely prepare USA for our certain future of uncertain climate and fierce global economic competition.

Not to mention that tightening banking law to guide capital from speculation into producing real value would actually help people, as opposed to just changing the digits on the GDP.

Nah. Let's just suffer stupidly instead.