Bill Mitchell — US labour market in peril as a result of political choices made by the US government

I went on a data excursion for part of today to update the flows data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. They published the latest JOLTs data last Friday (May 15, 2020) – Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary – which reveals data up to March 2020. So in a sense it is the calm before the storm. I also reconstructed some of the indicators I compile from that data set which give me a broader impression of what is happening in the US labour market. Clearly, things are going to get worse when the April data is released. We can see that by examining the Department of Labor’s weekly unemployment claimants data, which was updated last Thursday (May 9, 2020). I also updated my state table and map today. Things are looking very bleak. To me, the data tells me that the US is a failed state – incapable of using the capacity the government possesses to advance the well-being, or, in this case, protect the well-being of its people. I am also working on an extended piece on the way the Right and the Left are behaving in this crisis. As usual, the Right are organised and forward-looking putting assets into strategies that will take their agenda to another (pernicious) level. Under the smokescreen of the crisis, they are working to cement changes that will make it even harder for government to advance general prosperity. Meanwhile, the Left appear to be asleep as usual – tweeting their heads off about Biden or Sanders and have taken their eyes off the main game. We have been there before. Even though the US labour market has probably never been here before!...

Most of the American "left" (NOT)) is clueless and the rest are suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Plus, much of the political elite on the so-called left is compromised if not actually corrupt. The neoliberal right believes that the government is the enemy if it is not suborned to capital, that there is no such thing as society, only and aggregate of competing  individuals in which the deserving are justly rewarded, and that the state is a business owned and controlled by the wealthy. Not difficult to see where this is leading.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
US labour market in peril as a result of political choices made by the US government
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia