And now for something completely different. I've never been out of work.

[trof]

I was born in 1941.
I had my first 'real' job at 12 or 13 in a grocery store.
I've worked (not always for a 'living') ever since.
I have NEVER not been able to find a job.

Until I got on my final career path (airline pilot 30+ years) I held a WIDE variety of jobs.
Some weird ones.
Trampoline instructor.
Artist's model. Partially nude, not entirely.


And... newspaper gofer, advertising salesman, reporter, editor.
Bartender, yardman/grasscutter, warehouse worker, purchasing agent, lifeguard.
Not necessarily in that order.

My point is that the current economic/jobs situation is like nothing I've ever seen.
Just NO jobs.
I was always able to get SOME kind of job.

Highly qualified people just can't find work.
What changed?

[physioex]

1. I share your frustrations.....

I think the fact so many manufacturing jobs have gone to China combined with the Internet which allows the outsourcing of service jobs is simply too much. I don't think things will get better for at least another decade. Sorry to be so pessimistic.

[Booster]

5. If Congress would work with Mr. Obama on stopping tax credits for corps sending jobs out

and giving those (or bigger) tax credits for bringing the jobs back, I'll bet that would work. And timing is everything. I've been reading that the people in China are at least beginning to think about forming unions and if they ever do then it might push the corps to come back - now they have no incentive to bring the jobs back, but we have to work on their love of money.

[Booster]

2. I think the biggest problem was outsourcing of mftg jobs & a lot of tech/eng jobs.

In a word a whole lot of "Rmoneys".

[Warpy]

3. The demand side got choked off

Oh, they kept it on life support for a while with those unlimited credit cards that required only token payments per month, but even at that rate, a debt limit gets reached and people simply can't afford anything but subsistence and the credit card bill, if they were disciplined enough to stop spending before it cut into the food budget too deeply.

Wages have been suppressed since the mid 1970s. Inflation, which they've lied about by fiddling with the market basket, has been a lot higher than anything they've admitted to. And we've lost major industries and with them, the unions that kept wages and benefits intact.

In short, the plutocracy's mad scramble to use wealth to fill that empty place inside themselves has killed the golden goose that generated it. Economies work from the bottom up. Once you starve the bottom, the whole edifice first stagnates and then collapses.

Were I to put a motivational poster into government offices, it would say "It's the DEMAND, stupid!"

[Peepsite]

4. What changed?

I think it was something called the "republican revolution", or was it the "raygun revolution"
Been happening here on the ground while you were flying over apparently.

[Siwsan]

6. I think there are jobs, out there, but a lot don't pay a living wage

My niece has a journalism degree and works at a day care for minimum wage. At 50, my brother was lucky to have found a job but he only works part time, at minimum wage. He worked in the film industry, in Los Angeles, and moved back to Michigan with the plan to work in the growing film industry, here and be close to the family again. Then our moronic governor canceled the film incentives, and all of the work dried up.

I am eternally grateful to have the job that I do. Even though the pay could be better, I make it a point to live below my means and save every cent I can, because my whole life's situation could change in a nano-second.

[freshwest]

7. University professors and other professionals are doing menial work. Lot of people need jobs.

[NYC_SKP]

8. '41? Damn, I though I was old! Anyway, knock wood, same here, never jobless...

...or hopeless, and I think that taking jobs at 10 years old and younger helped that.

What also helped was doing my best and getting job offers WHILE in jobs that I was just about ready to leave anyway, for having learned 75% of it.

Grow up working on farm> Machine Shop> Shutter Shop> Carpenter's Apprentice> Underground Construction> Landscape Design> Interior Design> Architecture> Industrial Design> Education/Educator, etc...

Everything led to everything else, but I was never too proud to do some painting, roofing, yardwork, plumbing if I needed to.

[JHB]

9. No top line

Some people can make big bucks focusing on improving their bottom line. **cough Mitt cough**

But there's no "top line", no counterbalance to change the financial math, nothing to discourage siphoning every last buck upward. Through the first half of your life we had high marginal tax rates that reinforced the principle of diminishing returns on incomes up in the economic stratosphere. Even with the vaunted loopholes to shelter income and dodge taxes, they still had to circulate it more to wind up keeping more of it.

That's the main strength of a highly progressive tax system: not the direct levy, not "soaking the rich", but in changing the math about what makes economic sense. (there were other things too, like a stronger union base, and actual Stalinist police states in the world to make RWers look like obvious loons when they called the president "socialist&quot

We built up an immense amount of wealth in that time. And during the second half of your life, a string of bait-and-switch economic policies have facilitated bleeding that wealth from the people who created it and shuffling it into the pockets of those who Republicans now like to call "job creators".

Not surprisingly, the job creators are doing a lousy job of it.

[HiPointDem]

10. kr. capital strike.

[pitohui]

11. 2 billion people when you were born, 7 billion people plus robots, computers today

there are not enough jobs for all the people in the world who require jobs and there never will be again -- automation means a factory once full of ppl runs on a fraction of its former staff

also we have a global economy because of ease of transportation, you can't get a job cutting grass because a mexican or a guatemalan does that for less than minimum wage, you can't get a job tending bar because here in new orleans anyway it's a closed shop/bartender's union because otherwise the market would be flooded with cheap bartenders, can't get a job as a lifeguard because you are supposed to "volunteer" and work for nothing, and so on

look at the post in the lounge, for the fortyish lady who is unemployed and unlikely at her age to find another job in her field (planning) again...she is told over and over again to "volunteer," so wow, the double whammy of working for nothing AND helping to take away other people's chances

it is damn hard to get work and to get paid, and the armies of people worldwide who are willing to work for nothing are today's scabs

even the cop in the "breaking news" story, his answer to the elderly people who couldn't hire people for chores wasn't to raise money and put some good people to work doing those chores, HIS ANSWER WAS TO GET "FAITH-BASED" TO DO THE JOB FOR NOTHING AND TO KEEP UP THE CYCLE OF CONTINUED SLAVERY

too many ppl, and because there are too many ppl, too many of them are willing to be slaves because they think if they kiss up then they will somehow break out which of course is ludicrous, you don't hire a person willing to work for nothing when you have real money on the line and on the table, you don't take the guy who wrote the $5 article when your business gets huge and hire him to write up the $50K white paper, nope, the slave ends up discarded having served his purpose...to depress wages for everybody else who would like to accomplish something and break out of bottom

too many people, too many delusional people, too many people willing to be exploited, in a world of 7 billion everyone is pretty much on their own because there are too few jobs/resources for too many hands

[tularetom]

12. Born the same year as you and I've noticed the same thing

I have a son and a son in law, both middle aged, both former police officers, who spent long periods of time being un- or under-employed. I have two adult grandkids and neither one has what I would consider a full time job, except being a mom. My teenage grandson packed peaches last summer but that job disappeared this year.

People of our generation were very fortunate. We entered the job market at the time of the greatest economic expansion in American history and retired before the shit hit the fan. Like you I was never unemployed although some of the jobs were seasonal or part time (summer surveyor/firefighter for the forest service, reserve cop in college, cannon fodder for the US government from 1959 to 1962).

What changed gradually over the past four decades is the globalization of production and the technology revolution that allowed skilled jobs to be exported to countries where trained tech workers were plentiful and cheap.

[RebelOne]

14. Born in 1939. And I have had numerous jobs in many professions.

I was a copy editor for 35 national hunting and fishing magazines until 2010 until the company eliminated my position. So I just decided to retire. My sole income now is my social security.

[ileus]

13. Me either since I was 16 in 1986

Started working a summer job, Once in college I had PT job, FT ever since 1992.

[OnionPatch]

15. The corporations decided they didn't like paying a living wage.

So they sent the jobs overseas to any place they could find a cheap and desperate labor pool. Our own government has been helping them do it. So much for "We the people".