Tag: Recovery X

Take Our Jobs

Agriculture in the United States is dependent on an immigrant workforce. Three-quarters of all crop workers working in American agriculture were born outside the United States. According to government statistics, since the late 1990s, at least 50% of the crop workers have not been authorized to work legally in the United States.

We are a nation in denial about our food supply. As a result the UFW has initiated the “Take Our Jobs” campaign.

Farm workers are ready to train citizens and legal residents who wish to replace them in the field, we will use our knowledge and staff to help connect the unemployed with farm employers. Just fill out the form to the right and continue on to the request for job application.

There you go, Tea Klan. All yours, and training is included. We can also put you to work building Rand Paul’s underground electric fence.

Take Our Jobs

Whither Transit

muppetpants:

Looks like the streetcars have effectively been killed off after already spending millions.  Good news is unallocated funds will go to building playgrounds in Georgetown!

Uh, no. The economic impact of transit construction is well known:

  • According to US DOT director Norman Mineta, every $1 billion invested in the nations’ transportation infrastructure supports approximately 47,500 jobs.
  • Transit capital investment is a significant source of job creation. In the year following the investment 314 jobs are created for each $10 million invested in transit capital funding.
  • Transit operations spending provides a direct infusion to the local economy. Over 570 jobs are created for each $10 million invested in the short run.
  • Tri-Rail of South Florida expects its five-year public transportation development plan to spawn 6,300 ongoing system-related jobs.
  • New York’s East Side Access project is expected to generate 375,000 jobs and $26 billion in wages.
  • In 2000, the average downtown vacancy rate for cities without rail was 12.8%, but 8% for all cities with rail transit.

Playgrounds: not so much. Terrible, terrible decision with far-reaching, all-bad repercussions for the DC economy.

Whither Transit

Peak Water

This is, perhaps, the most charged sentence ever written on the innernets:

Eventually, [the Ogallala and Central Valley Aquifers in the US, along with a number in China and India, which are being drained at a rate that far exceeds their recharge] will tail off to [reach usage rates] something in the neighborhood of their recharge rate.

Sensible! Except the recharge rate for the Ogallala, which, like all of these aquifers, charged over geologic time frames, is ~0.024 inches per year (in the Texas portion, anyway; Kansas manages a rate approaching 6 inches).
Good luck with achieving a usage rate below that with a population of ~0.5 million folks (per 2000 census) and a large, water intensive agricultural economy (in fact, ~30% of the groundwater destined for agricultural use in the entire US comes from this very same place).
And it’s not just Texas that’s sort of attached to drinking the stuff. The Ogallala services a bunch of population centers right up the red core of these United States. As in: they get their water from it exclusively. Because no other source exists. 82% of those folks in its boundary, which is all of Nebraska, large chunks of Kansas and Oklahoma, and the panhandle of Texas.

Anywho: peak water. Everybody west of the Mississippi better start thinking, hard, about where their water is going to be coming from long term. I, for one, am all for letting the market decide what the price of an acre foot of water ought to be in, say, Nevada. After all, we’ve been underwriting their water-drenched lifestyle via Reclamation and Corps of Engineers projects for decades. We’re told the days of “Big Government” are at an end. Fine. We’ll start with repricing the desert West’s water supply to a acre foot pricing schema that might actually pay for a few of these projects this century and properly move use to the family farmer the damned things were meant to benefit in the first place. Then we’ll see just who wants dread guvmint all up in their grill.

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

[…]

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day

[…]

While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.

The United States Military proving again that a military junta may well be the only remaining avenue by which we achieve reasonable, empirical reality based, and forward looking governance and policy in these United States.

Optimistically assuming that demand for [helium] continues to grow only a few percent each year, and that the entirety of the globe’s remaining natural gas reserves will be processed for their helium, the NRC report estimates there will only be enough to last another 40 years.

Lee Billings, writing for Seed.
Articles like this make me think we are going to be back to living in caves and trading hides along the riverfront inside of a century. It sounds like apocalyptic science fiction, but perhaps there is a narrow window of opportunity for any global civilization to either figure out how to efficiently get off its particular rock (and access vastly greater industrial resources that (hopefully) reside nearby) or be stuck there, forever.
Seems like we’re deep down in the slowness more every day.

Hopey Changey

James Fallows positively nails it:

the significance of the vote is moving the United States FROM a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage IF they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… TOWARD a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage. Period.

-and-

this [set of reforms and all the attendant process arguments] will not seem anywhere near as poisonous seven months from now as it does today. Jobs jobs jobs is what will matter most then.

So very true. If unemployment is at or near 10% in 2012, Obama will not be reelected. Period. If the economy continues to pick up this year, Democratic losses come November will be not-so-bad…not that they’ll be presented that way, of course. Anything short of a 100 Democrat Senate will be treated as an Historic Upset of the “normal order,” which, of course, currently has many Democrats representing historically red districts. But, back to Fallows:

There are countless areas in which America does it one way and everyone else does it another, and I say: I prefer the American way. Our practice on medical coverage is not one of these.

Nancy Pelosi touched on this point last night in her floor speech: that losing the fear of living insurance-free will let a thousand startups bloom. Folks locked into their current jobs simply to maintain a safety net for their kids can now think solely on the basis of how good they think their idea is. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. This is where the much longed-after “new economy” will ultimately come from.

Memo to Code Brown

Hey, what do you know, the stimulus worked, added jobs, and increased real, inflation adjusted GDP relative to the GOP approach: don’t do anything (aka: go die in the streets):

CBO estimates that in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009, ARRA added between 1.0 million and 2.1 million to the number of workers employed in the United States, and it increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by between 1.4 million and 3.0 million. Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers. CBO also estimates that real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) was 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent higher in the fourth quarter than would have been the case in the absence of ARRA.

Can’t be done

This quote is probably worth noting:

Japan Steel Works is spending 80 billion yen ($864 million) at its Muroran plant in the country’s northern island of Hokkaido by March 2012 to increase capacity to make parts for 12 nuclear reactors a year, compared with 5.5 units now, the president said.

The investment will increase annual sales from Japan Steel Works’ cast and forged steel for electric and nuclear power to 70 billion yen from the year starting April 2012, up from 45.5 billion yen expected for the current year, Sato said.

This is important, you see, because we can’t make this part in America. Despite all the hype recently given over to the idea that we’ll be steadily building new nuclear power plants (and wind turbines and solar cells and lots of other, non-carbon based energy production mechanisms) in this country as a partial offset to our ever greater carbon emissions, it’s completely clear that we can’t and won’t be building very many nuclear reactors, if any at all. Simply put, we cannot because we cannot. We cannot cast the key component here. Meaning in this country, which, as we are constantly reminded, is supposedly superior in all respects. But rather it’s over in Japan, where Japan Steel Works is currently the only place that can cast these large, integral, and functionally irreplaceable single pieces. And, oh by the way, China has an interest in cornering some or all of their current and theoretical output:

The country has 9,100 megawatts of nuclear capacity and has approved the construction of additional reactors able to generate 25,400 megawatts, Sun Qin, then-deputy head of the National Energy Administration, said last month. China will issue a plan by the end of the year to push development of clean energy sources such as nuclear, wind, solar and hydro power.

The average time it took to build China’s first 10 nuclear reactors was 6.3 years, according to a report commissioned by the German environment ministry.

Gross domestic product in China expanded 7.9 percent in the second quarter as the economy rebounded from the weakest growth in almost a decade, boosted by stimulus spending.

“Similar to road and railway construction, nuclear energy is also part of China’s plans for a recovery after the economy slowed,” Sato said.

In fact, the entire future run of this component for five to ten years (or more) is already spoken for. Recovery X all over again. We need a new economy. We need to make things, preferably things that are in demand. You want a real National Security issue of the Call to Greatness kind? This is it.

A real country with functional leadership (and, uh, leaders) would be talking about this right now. Acting, right now. It will take decades to do even begin to do anything about it. Instead, we’ll spend those decades not doing anything while China (and the rest of the world) acts. As it stands right now, China looks to have the money, the power (both political and but more importantly: electrical) to be unassailably in ascendancy over the next 50 years. The US: not so much. We’ll be lucky to still be a reasonable tourist destination come 2050.

You might just take a look at what quantity of excess electrical power-generation the United States had on hand in 1940. What are a few of the more important war and/or peace projects that we carried off with that seemingly excess power capacity? Compare that situation with today’s. Then look at China. Who is better prepared for the future? To grow and locate a new market in an X-shaped recovery, in which the “old” jobs and the “old” economy simply never return? Just saying.
Then pause to consider this: which country is currently leading the world in wind turbine production? In solar cell production? GeoThermal? Hydroelectric? I’ll give you a hint: the United States isn’t even reliably in the Top 5 of those categories. Even from a purely capitalistic position: which countries are then better positioned to profit on the grand conspiracy that is climate change and carbon emissions reduction? Is it to be thought of as an a priori harmful concept to generate power from sources other than fossil fuels? Or to make and sell equipment to others who may wish to do likewise? Judging from our national posture, one could only assume it must be.

The Chinese and others have chosen their priorities and are working towards them. We have an inwardly focused, rotting core of a political system that is doing less than nothing about even setting national priorities, much less acting on them. Wonder who’s going to come out on top in that equation? Sure as hell won’t be America, home of Free Enterprise, with special emphasis on would, as in “theoretically could”:

Czech forges have said that they would be able to retool to build large reactor vessels within about two years.

This economy can’t get back on track because the track we were on for years – featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere – simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track – a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can’t “recover” because it can’t go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.

Robert Reich. X is the new L. This elusive new economy is precisely why we should be investing, and heavily, in infrastructure and overall technological development. Nothing else matters. At all.