Taking a page from John Roberts, Jeb Bush solves the problem of workers working part-time who want to work full-time: The way to create full-time jobs for part-time workers who want, but can’t find, full-time jobs is for part-time workers who want, but can’t find, full-time jobs to start working full-time. [With awesome update!]
My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours.
— Jeb Bush, in an interview published today in the Manchester, NH Union Leader
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Anyone who discounts 6.5 million people stuck in part-time work & seeking full-time jobs hasnt listened to working Americans @hillaryclinton
— Jeb Bush, on Twitter later today, responding to a Tweet by Hillary Clinton that included a chart from the Economic Policy Institute showing stagnating wages in the face of dramatically rising worker productivity since the 1970s.
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The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
— John Roberts, writing for a 4-1-4 Supreme Court plurality in 2007 in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, saying that voluntary-student-participation school race desegregation/integration plans in Seattle and Louisville (in two separate cases argued together) violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Okay, these aren’t quite the same thing, but one reminded me of the other. Roberts conflated remedial government policy with longstanding private-sector race discrimination that resulted in the need for government remedial policy. Bush, by contrast, identifies a problem (people who work only part-time because they are unable to find a full-time job) and thinks that’s the same as proposing a solution to the problem (how to create an economy in which everyone who wants a full-time job can get one).
Which I suppose is why everyone interpreted his comment to mean what the statement says. They assumed he knows the difference between problem and solution, between coherence and tautology, and therefore was suggesting that the way to bring about 4% annual growth in GDP is for workers to decide to work 24/7. Silly them.
Of course, also, by his decision to use the term “productivity,” he unwittingly walked headlong into the stark facts of wage stagnation in the face of significant worker-productivity gains in the last forty years. For which Occupy Wall Street, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are grateful. I am, too.
This guy is dumber than a rock. The Koch brothers badly need to find a smarter puppet. Soon.
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UPDATE: Reader Sandwichman and I just exchanged the following comments in the Comments thread to this post:
July 10, 2015 11:53 am
Dean Baker at the Guardian (not Dean’s headline):
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/jeb-bush-work-longer-hours-economy-socialist
Beverly Mann
July 10, 2015 1:23 pm
Well, with due respect to Dean Baker, Sandwichman, I think that what Bush is suggesting is not that we emulate the old Soviet Union but instead current Russia. And that countries such as Germany, Holland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Austria do so, too. See the chart published yesterday by Hunter Schwarz online at the Washington Post.
Wow, no wonder Germany’s GDP growth has held up so poorly, and that that country’s unemployment rate was so much worse than this country’s during the aftermath of the 2008 international financial-industry crash! [This is sarcasm, folks. Germany’s economy held up way better than ours.]*
Seriously, folks, here’s the list:
- Mexico: 42.8 hours
- Costa Rica: 42.6
- Greece: 39.3
- Chile: 38.3
- Russia: 38.2
- Latvia: 37.3
- Poland: 37.0
- Iceland: 35.8
- Estonia: 35.75
- Hungary: 35.7
- Portugal: 35.7
- Israel: 35.6
- Lithuania: 35.3
- Ireland: 35.0
- United States: 34.4
- Czech Republic: 34.2
- New Zealand: 33.9
- Italy: 33.3
- Japan: 33.25
- Canada: 32.8
- Spain: 32.5
- United Kingdom: 32.25
- Australia: 32
- Finland: 31.6
- Luxembourg: 31.6
- Austria: 31.3
- Sweden: 30.9
- Switzerland: 30.1
- Slovenia: 30.0
- Denmark: 27.6
- Norway: 27.4
- Netherlands: 27.4
- Germany: 26.4
Yup. Definitely prefer Russia’s economy to Germany’s! Sounds like a winning argument for Bush.
Other great comments in the thread include this one by Frank Stain:
July 10, 2015 9:55 am
“This should not pass unnoticed: in trying to wriggle out of his “people need to work longer hours” gaffe, he characterized people working 30 hours a week instead of 40 as “getting in line and being dependent on government.” The scroungers! ”
Why does Jeb Bush hate stay-at-home moms?
And this one by Sandwichman:
July 9, 2015 10:28 pm
McCarthy, eh? Now I remember who Jeb reminds me of. Not Joe but Charlie.
Actually, I came this-close to adding, after my comment that the Koch brothers badly need to find a smarter puppet, that Charlie McCarthy would qualify. Wish I had!
Updated 7/10 at 2:25 p.m.
*Bracketed comment added 7/11 at 1030 p.m.
Pethokoukis over at the American Enterprise Institute agreed with Bush and was adocating that just this morning…i suggested we pass a law requiring every company and government agency employing more than 20 to increase their payrolls by 5%…
Seee “Keeping Bugs Away”
http://mlkshk.com/p/KSOY
There is also the small things about increased productivity….if no one can buy stuff, then all you end up with a pile of stuff, and no real “growth”.
Apparently, there are good words and phrases for the right that we need more of, “productivity,” “work longer and harder” and “workforce participation.” And there are bad words and phrases that we need less of, “income redistribution,” “unions,” “government programs” and “taxes.” And there is no connection or interdependence between them. That we can have policies that freely choose between the good things and the bad things.
“This guy is dumber than a rock.”
Nah… a sack of hammers. Because a rock simply lacks sentient being. A sack of hammers, however, is a non-sentient product of sentient cluelessness.
“i suggested we pass a law requiring every company and government agency employing more than 20 to increase their payrolls by 5%”
rjs don’t say this even in jest. Because Mr. Sack o’ Hammers will propose to finance it by cutting corporate rates to zero. And probably by offering companies in addition a $100,000 grant for every $23000 job they create.
(After all that has been the bottom line of just about every State based Economic Development program instituted by a Republican governor over the last couple decades. And yes Governors Jindal, Walker and Christie I am looking at you, why do you ask?)
it could be worse than Jeb, or Rand, or Marco, or even worse than the Governors Jindal, Walker and Christie that you’re looking at, Bruce…check out this YouGov poll
This should not pass unnoticed: in trying to wriggle out of his “people need to work longer hours” gaffe, he characterized people working 30 hours a week instead of 40 as “getting in line and being dependent on government.” The scroungers!
This wasn’t a secretly video’d talk to right-wing backers. This was in a public statement to try to deflect criticism from an earlier public statement.
“getting in line and being dependent on government”
“getting in line and being dependent on government”
“getting in line and being dependent on government”
Rather than pass a law to have companies hire 5% more people; let workers work 32 hours, get paid for 40, and hire more people to work the other 8 hours?
run75441,
I posted this at EconoSpeak:
http://econospeak.blogspot.ca/2015/07/if-youre-explaining-youre-losing.html
One way to increase opportunities for involuntary part-time workers to work more hours is for those who are working 47 hours a week or over 50 hours a week to be working shorter hours. Heaven forbid! According to an August 2014 Gallup Poll, full time workers in the U.S. reported working an average of 47 hours a week, with 39% of full-time workers claiming to work over 50 hours a week — almost as many as the 42% who say they work an FLSA standard 40-hour week.
I would take those figures with a tablespoon of salt. People lie about how hard they work. They think saying they work incredibly long hours makes them appear better than everybody else. Actually, it makes them look unproductive. Nevertheless, the Gallup results have held steady for the last 14 years at close to those numbers. If people are padding their hours for the pollsters, they are at least consistent about it.
If those superfluous seven hours per week were “lumps of labor” they could readily be redistributed to involuntary part-time workers and the unemployed eliminating both unemployment and underemployment! But of course, there is not “a fixed amount of work to be done” and the mere fact of redistributing work opportunities would increase productivity and output thus exacerbating the problem of insufficient demand unless that redistribution of hours was accompanied by a substantial redistribution of income in the form of higher wages.
You guys are such Communists. I just hope Joe McCarthy doesn’t read this blog.
McCarthy, eh? Now I remember who Jeb reminds me of. Not Joe but Charlie.
http://i2.listal.com/image/853519/600full-charlie-mccarthy.jpg
Dumb da dumb dumb. With our electorate, he might win.
RJS not only did I see that poll I actually put up a new Front Page post on it.
But seriously. Even given that Trump is a racist narcissist that has every monomaniac in history crying out from beyond the grave “Hey What About Me!” I have a hard time coming up with a single policy arena where he would actually be worse than the rest of the field.
I wish I wasn’t serious here. Sure he has a secret surefire plan for destroying ISIS that is bound to be horrific. But is he really anymore likely to drop the Bomb on Iran than any of the other guys in the field?
I am not saying I am for the guy. Just that having narcissistic personality disorder is maybe better for world piece that the kind of neo-con psychopathy that infects just about everybody else.
“This should not pass unnoticed: in trying to wriggle out of his “people need to work longer hours” gaffe, he characterized people working 30 hours a week instead of 40 as “getting in line and being dependent on government.” The scroungers! ”
Why does Jeb Bush hate stay-at-home moms?
Which would you rather vote for a blow hard, or a female who was fired from first government job for lying, with the behavior seeming to continuing to this day.
Dean Baker at the Guardian (not Dean’s headline):
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/jeb-bush-work-longer-hours-economy-socialist
Well, with due respect to Dean Baker, Sandwichman, I think that what Bush is suggesting is not that we emulate the old Soviet Union but instead current Russia. And that countries such as Germany, Holland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Austria do so, too. See the chart published yesterday by Hunter Schwarz online at the Washington Post, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/07/09/jeb-bush-said-americans-should-work-more-hours-but-how-many-hours-do-we-have-left/.
Wow, no wonder Germany’s GDP growth has held up so poorly, and that country’s unemployment rate was so much worse than this country’s during the aftermath of the 2008 international financial-industry crash!
“Actually, I came this-close to adding, after my comment that the Koch brothers badly need to find a smarter puppet, that Charlie McCarthy would qualify. Wish I had!”
Actually Mortimer Snerd would be the better choice for a first step up for either Jeb or Scott Walker, seemingly both Koch brother favorites. Charlie was more the clever wiseguy character. Neither “candidate” can claim that description. That would, however, leave Edgar Bergen in the company of disreputable puppet masters with selfish intent. Why is it that we have not heard more about the infamous “phone call” to Walker from his master’s voice? it would fit in nicely with today’s NY Times article regarding Scott’s intellectual training, “Scott Walker, Viewed as ‘Authentic,’ Aims for ‘Smart’ in the 2016 Race.”
What phone call to Walker from the brothers? I haven’t heard anything about it.
And, yeah, I got a big kick out of that NYT article yesterday, saying that two words that no one uses about Walker are “smart” and “sophisticated,” and that for the last two months he’s been taking a crash course of sorts about, y’know, the basics of things that a president would have to, um, know. They’re hoping that he, unlike Sarah Palin, will pass the course.
Wow. I mean, these people are pushing someone for president who needs a crash course on basic, critical things a president would have to know in order not to further reveal his utter stupidity and cluelessness?
Patriotism! A clueless moron for president!
i think this is the story of the phone call Jack is refering to, Bev:
Scott Walker Gets Punked By Journalist Pretending To Be David Koch
he was pretty anxious to get his marching orders..
Yes, that is the incident I was referring to. Walker takes a phone call from a guy claiming to be one of the Koch brothers and is all over himself to grovel at the sound of a voice. One thing Walker knows is who it is that’s got the butter for his bread. But all I’m reading lately is that the Koch guys are in the Bush camp. Maybe they’re simply hedging their bets. But why is no one in the media going back to the phone incident as the best example of Walker’s true allegiance, and some what less than brilliant attention to detail.