Cynthia Tucker: As jobs melt, rich just chill

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/index.html

If you are a middle-aged software designer still looking for work a year after a layoff, or a former Enron manager now selling shoes in a department store, or a seamstress laid off when a textile mill shut down, you might think President Bush's program for economic recovery isn't working. You'd be wrong.

The president's economy policy is working just as he planned it. The stock market is bouncing back, sales of Rolexes and Range Rovers are humming right along, and compensation for CEOs is still in the stratosphere. Among the president's friends, there is little anxiety about the kids' trust funds. (Notice how well Halliburton has been doing since the invasion of Iraq?)

Bush's multibillion-dollar tax cuts largely benefited the wealthy while doing little to produce jobs for average workers. Conservatives fiercely defended the tax cuts as redress to rich capitalists who paid most of the taxes and who would create jobs if given appropriate incentives. They neglected to mention that many of those jobs would be created in other countries.

So far, the United States has lost 2.5 million jobs during Bush's tenure, threatening him with the worst record of job losses since Herbert Hoover. The recession may have ended two years ago, but the economic pain continues for many working families. While economists (most of whom have not yet lost their jobs) continue to predict that job growth is right around the corner, hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers are so discouraged that they have given up even looking for a job. Others struggle along with part-time work and full-time bills.

best and not complain. Just keep on trying.

You can't imagine how bad it feels to be unemployed for over a year now. And I'm even a person who can roundly criticize everything there is to fault about materialism, and conventional value systems.
I know what it means to live by my own values.

But being without work makes you feel so deeply pointless, it is very hard.

And one of the worst things about it is that I found out that it really doesn't matter how good a job you do. Our country isn't about that. It's about who you know. Ask my husband (corporate attorney), he's unemployed too.

I talked to a Social Security 800 number service person today, for my elderly mother-in-law, and I have never, in over 50 years of existence, been treated with such incompetence and contempt. It's not about how well you do your job anymore; it's about something else . . . .

how cheap you do it.

I had two terrible experience with big corporate service in the last few days.

First, Fedex can't do their job and don't care about it

And Motorola has outsourced their call cener to mexico, I believe - terrible service from people who don't need to care if its good.

And don't let any of their crocodile tears tell you otherwise.

That's partly how they allow themselves to do what they do; by working themselves into abject pain for those get chewed up by their bad management, that gives them permission to go right ahead doing whatever they want to do. "See I'm a good person, I feel so bad for . . . . ., I must be a good person, so I can go ahead and buy this Hummer (or whatever) because I'm a good person."

before the tax cut:

(paraphrase)

"The rich have lots of money now and they are not investing. What makes anyone think that if they had more they would invest that money?"

(end paraphrase)

My view of supply and demand is that the demand comes first. What do the rich need to buy that can stimulate the economy? The poor and middle class need food, housing, transportation and education. Buying those things stimulate an economy.

If his education is a sample of what comes out of the Yale and Harvard, I would say that the Ivy League is overrated.