Thursday, December 9, 2010

jobs without a bubble

The unemployment rate is still high. As a band-aid, it looks like unemployment benefits will be extended for the long-term unemployed, and all politicians say their #1 priority is to create lots of jobs.

I keep wondering, what kind of jobs will they be?

It used to be that the U.S. could count on the manufacturing sector to create good-paying jobs, but factories have shut down and manufacturing has been shifted to other countries where labor is cheap. Then in the '90s, there was the dot/com bubble that burst somewhere around y2K. In the middle of this past decade, real estate and mortgage companies were booming but that all crashed circa 2008 and it's hard to see real estate coming back big anytime soon.

So is there another boom coming that politicians can see that the rest of us can't see? Or do they think, "A job is a job", regardless of whether it pays enough to support a family or sustain middle-class lifestyles?

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