Get A Real Job!

As I sat reading the upteenth article on the US credit crisis, a thought occurred to me. Is the real cause of this crisis a lack of decent jobs in the US? In other words, did Americans start borrowing so much because 1) their jobs stopped paying them wages which could support middle class lifestyles? And 2) those companies that provide the things which constitute middle class life (homes, cars, clothes, vacations) recognize this and responded by protecting their revenues and margins by simply extending a ton of credit to their poorer customers?

We now know Wall Street enabled this by packaging debt and selling it to pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and hedge funds. Investors were told that models had backed up the soundness of securitized debt. In hindsight, this claim was gibberish.

Thus, the US economy was an unsustainable and destined to blow up from too much debt, too much speculation, but most importantly too few real jobs.

I realize this isn't such an original thought. However, it doesn't seem policy makers, business leaders or the press have asked themselves, how we move forward with an economy that provides decent paying job? Instead the focus just seems to be about shoring up balance sheets and wondering what sort of forward growth rate is realistic in the "new normal."

I'm pretty sure a robust recovery will require a new industries like clean tech. But it will also require a workforce that is educated enough to finally be able to hold these post industrial jobs. For the past 20 years, many of these new jobs have gone to folks who originated from outside the US. Nothing wrong with that. There was a need for workers that couldn't be met with our own workforce, as it is.

But going forward, I think we might be able to avoid things like credit crises and the possibility of losing our status of being the world's super power, if we invest in our own people and provided incentives for real job growth and new industries. Certainly, 30 years of outsourcing jobs to low cost areas, propping up consumers with free money and letting Wall Street become the path to riches hasn't proven sustainable.