WhipperSnapper
Lifer
- Oct 30, 2004
- 11,442
- 32
- 91
Originally posted by: Double Trouble
Partisan hackery aside, it really is a scary prospect. If you lose your job right now, you're probably going to be a) looking for work for a long time, or b) going to be underemployed or making a lot less than what you were making.
Today, you don't merely suffer for a while and then find a replacement job that allows you to continue on with your career in a couple months. Rather, today you fall into a lower economic class (probably permanently)! You could go from being upper middle class or middle class to impoverished. Also, people will suffer career loss and education loss--that is to say that people will end up losing the value of their education and their careers since they could end up being unemployed for so long that they are rendered unemployable in their fields. Also, many fields are suffering job losses through foreign outsourcing and work visas, reducing the total number of jobs available in those fields.
Also, I'd like to point out that this finger pointing to which president "lost" the most jobs etc is dumb. That's a function of the economic situation and economic cycles, something the president can barely influence in the short term. In the long term, fiscal policies etc have a major impact, but that's more on Congress than the president....
What we are seeing is not merely a cycle but a long-term, non-cyclic economic transformation with a downward slope. We might continue to have cyclic ups and downs, but the overall trend will be downward, like a sine wave that propagates down a negative slope.