2006-7 U.S. Household Income

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

You know it not so easy to "force people to go to work" Espeically with 10% unemployement that will liekly not reach 7.5% till 2013-2014. My mother can't work because she wore herself out in the 90's and early 00's working because my dad couldn't keep a job at the time or to supplement his income. My dad did learn his lesson and work his ass of from 2001-2008. At three different companies Making $11 an hour from 2000-2002, $12.50 from 2002-2005, 16.40 from 2006- 2008 and  $17.14 the first six months of 2008 before being "terminated"(nobody lays people off, which meaning its temporary and the job will be restored, no its permenent and the chanches of him getting hired back are zero because the position was eliminated).

Still despite the wonderfulness of the economy, my dad spent the the last 9 months of 2005 and the first 8 months of 2006 unemployed except for part time retail work( a viable option when retail was king in 2006, but retail has been sent reeling and is controlling its labor force and using more self-checkout lines meaning less retial jobs).

This economy is different. All sectors have been hit, hard. there was not "safe sectors" like last time when retail, finance, construction, etc boomed straight through the recession. This time those sectors were at the heart of the bubble and thus the most impacted when it burst.

Lastly you get discrimination based on age(Too old or too young), companies do not want to be the first person to hire someone or someone who has been unemployed for a while because hiring someone is an investment decision and you don't want to risk hiring someoen irresponsible, and of course the infamous "Your overqualified" translation: We don't want to pay you a respectable wage, we will give it to the first immigrant who applies because he won't complain" Its not a question of reducing the need for so much immigrant labor, there was no need of them to begin with. We now have a 17.5% unemployement rate counting those that have given up. A 10.0% rate among people working or looking for work, and 5.9% long term unemployement who are being locked out of society. And you bitch because they don't get jobs. Nobody wants them, because they are too risky of an investment. So basically you are calling for genocide.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

And you bitch because they don't get jobs. Nobody wants them, because they are too risky of an investment. So basically you are calling for genocide.

I wasn't referring to people unemployed in this recession, rather I was referring to those out of work during 2006-7....heck even in the boom of the 90's we still had ~4% unemployment when all you had to have was a pulse to get a job.  There is a segment of the population that will never be employed regardless of economic conditions.  And for those people maybe a little bit of starvation would motivate them to work when work is available.

As we move more and more into a technology based economy, you’re going to have a larger percent of this nation permanently unemployed simply because of the lack of discipline within this society that fails to set high scholastic expectations for its youth.

Ah, did you not read my post.

My dad was unemployed from 2005-2006. Not because he was lazy but because of declining strength of the manufacturing sector. And even those precious $7 an hour jobs you mention are not continuous, they are usually seasonal.

Finally are you not familiar with the "natural rate of Unemployement". Thats the lowest Unemployement can reasonably go and stay there. Its usually around 4.9%-5.6%. Jobs are created and eliminated in all environments and that 4% also contains those that are in transition. The onyl exception was when the Unemployement rate went to 1% and that was during World War two. Everyone was in the army or working the assembly lines to produce the weapons.

So you admit we have a structural unemployement problem, yet you still make your blind calls to cut off the lazy. This is like populism of the elite, blame the paupers for there poverty and then blame them for there troubles with dogmatic adherance to blaming them even though there role as the cause of your troubles have no basis in facts. Sounds like populism to me, just of a different color.