The Grass Doctor

How can so many Americans be out of work, yet we experience no shortages in services or products?

Assuming we have the asking price to pay for the services/products. Glut of labor - labor market saturated? Is the market saying we have enough labor currently employed to allow businesses to make record profits ($1.66 Trillion dollars in just the past quarter alone), go gangbusters for 5 quarters in a row, with bonuses & CEO pay at record levels? Wonder what the unemployed is supposed to do - useless baggage of society? I hope not. They are estimated at numbers in excess of 14.5 million. WOW. You would think that pulling that many people out of the workforce would have business, CEO pay, & bonuses down and there would be shortages of things. Guess not. Shortage of cars, TVs, food, houses, boats, furniture, barbers, lawn care pros, carpenters, plumbers ...anyone? As long as you are one of the chosen with a job and can pay.

Public Comments

1. Welcome to Obama time.
2. Lowered Demand. Less people buying, means less stuff has to be made, meaning less people have to be employed.
3. The problem is that deregulation has moved our industrial base to China, and much of our service base to India. You can't have an economy that is based only on consuming. The republicans just don't seem to understand that. You have to make something for other people to buy.
4. As the hemorrhaging of job losses to China continue, there will come a day when we can't afford Wal*Mart.
5. "As long as you are one of the chosen" ?????? You lost me right there.
6. Everyone in China is hard at work.
7. My town has one of the highest unemployment rates in PA. There are jobs, as a matter of fact the local manor is handing out CNA's like they're candy... The unemployment rate is still climbing. We have a factory that tops Englands Industrial stock market, pays well, endless mandatory over time... People would rather not work it.
8. One of the many problems we face is the ability to over build anything that you can imagine. Invent a new widget and somebody will build a billion of them in their garage, with four employees. Every piece of technology ever invented was designed to replace humans, now we need to spread the wealth around and let the machines produce our goods.
9. what happens is a lot of businesses, start to down size when the money gets tight. a lot of them realize that they can do as much with 90% of the staff they had. or many convert some of their full time employees to part time. for the most part, it gets rid of a lot of wasteful down time. also with employment down, people with out jobs are not spending as much even with unemployment insurance. they arent worried about cars and tvs, they are worried about mortgage and gas bills. so that leaves a lower number of people to purchase leisure goods thus making the extra supply unecessary