Set Your sights on this number: 113,000. That how many jobs the U.S. economy needs . . . to finally recover all the jobs lost in the financial crisis. Get ready, because we are about to get there . . . .” –CNNMoney, Annalyn Kurtz, 6/4/14
The government and media do their best to paint a happy face on depressing economic realities. One recent was the report that the U.S. will soon regain all of the 8.7 million jobs lost in the economic downturn beginning in 2008.
Statistically speaking this is true, but in terms of what has really happened in the economy, it is highly misleading. The main reason is that most of the jobs replacing the ones lost have are not nearly as good as the ones replaced. As noted in The Washington Post last year (2/28/13), almost 60 percent of the jobs lost paid middle income wages, but only 27 percent of the newly created jobs were in this category.
About 40 percent of the jobs created have been in just three low-wage sectors (food services, retail, and employment services) where many workers, according to the Post article, “do not earn enough to adequately support their families, even at a subsistence level.”
Another key reality the report obscures is that today we have 15 million more people of working age in the work force than we did in 2008. Many of them are immigrants, and their competition with native-born Americans for jobs suppresses wages for everyone. Still, mass legal immigration continues at the highest sustained level in our history, and the Obama Administration keeps promoting illegal immigration by refusing to enforce our immigration laws.
Immigration enthusiasts constantly claim that we owe the “American Dream” (a comfortable standard of living)) to virtually anyone who wants to come here. They don’t seem to have noticed—or perhaps don’t care—that the American Dream is becoming less and less attainable for Americans, and immigrants too for that matter.
As a consequence of downward economic trends, Americans now are more likely to doubt the Dream than believe it. A recent poll (commissioned ironically by CNNMoney) found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the Dream is beyond their reach. And 63 percent doubted that most children today will make more than their parents.
If we want to keep the American Dream, we will have to wake up to some realities. The need for genuine immigration reform is at the top of the list.