NPR Reported this morning that worker productivity is down

I was in the car when I heard it and I did not catch the source or the specific reporting period, but NPR reported this morning that worker productivity is down by what I believe they said was an annualized rate of 1%. That fits nicely with the unmentioned deflation that should scare the living daylights out of every worker in the country.

At any rate the idiots at NPR suggested that falling productivity might be a good thing, that it might spur increased employmnet. Yeah, that's the ticket, when workers produced less hire more of them. How about increasing productivity per worker - because thats what it is, an average output per worker, it is not an indication that workers are slacking on the job - by taking some of those obscene and relatively untaxed "profits" that owners and management are sucking out of enterprises as "Profits" and reinvesting it in modern tooling and manufacturing procedures, the traditional stuff of increased productivity per unit of labor. How would that be for a novel change? How about a tax code that rewards reinvestment of profits by industry and taxes the living daylights out of the unearned income of dividends, another novel concept to be sure.

Have a nice day.