Jobs Paradise?

As many of us are aware, the lack of good paying jobs with worker autonomy and respect from employers are very few and far between.  Bob Herbert reminds us that with just a matter of weeks before election day, there is still time left for Obama and McCain and their campaigns to focus with greater intensity -- in all fairness the Obama campaign has done far far better on this issue -- on what should be the most important issue of this campaign, according to Herbert. "It’s not just the economy, stupid — it’s jobs."  And he is right. 

We need jobs with affordable and deep coverage health care, good pay where people can afford to live a decent quality of life, credit and debt reform that does not just support the companies but more importantly helps the average worker reduce their debt.

We’ve been living for years in a fool’s paradise atop a mountain of debt. The masters of the universe on Wall Street lost all sense of reason, no doubt. But most of us have been living above our means through the magic of easy credit, ever lower taxes, ever rising property values, stock market bubbles and the gift of denial, which we used to assure ourselves that the bills would never come due. We’ve even put our wars on a credit card.

The burden of debt for a typical middle-income family, earning about $45,000 a year, grew by a third in just the few years from 2001 to 2004, according to the Center for American Progress. The reason for this unsustainable added weight was the rising cost of such items as housing, higher education, health care and transportation at a time when wages grew only slightly or not at all.

In other words, work was not enough.

As for the debt burden of the federal government, don’t ask. (But you might want to ask your grandchildren how they plan to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

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What we haven’t paid close enough attention to for many years (a period in which we’ve been oddly obsessed with the financial lives of the rich and famous) is the fact that there haven’t been enough good paying jobs to sustain what most working Americans view as an adequate standard of living. This is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. economic system.

With the latest financial meltdown, there has been widespread outrage over the excessive compensation of top corporate executives. Where has everybody been? The rich have been running the table for the better part of the past 30 or 40 years.

Example: The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans rose 228 percent from the late 1970s through 2005. The story for working families over that same stretch was one of constant struggle to just stay even. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reported last year: “The earnings of men in their 30s have remained surprisingly flat over the past four decades.”

The need for reform, real reform, reform that would support the average American home - not just taking care of the top one percent... could not be more evident.  The nature of American life is undergoing a massive transition and shift.  While Obama at least has his eyes on the economic prize, McCain is worthless on this most important issue.  Tell me your surprised! As Rolling Stone made clear the other day, John Sidney McCain III has lived a charmed life that makes George W. Bush look positively proletarian.  Herbert is right:  'its the job, stupid!' ...or more correctly, 'the lack of good jobs, stupid.'