Would you believe that the
only new source of jobs since the Chimp took office has been in health care? The situation is not only worse than we've been told by the Bushmen and MSM, but even worse than I believed.
From Business Week:
What's Really Propping Up The Economy
Since 2001, the health-care industry has added 1.7 million jobs. The rest of the private sector? None
a simple fact: Without the health-care industry the nation's labor market would be in a deep coma. Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago.
Take away health-care hiring in the U.S., and quicker than you can say cardiac bypass, the U.S. unemployment rate would be 1 to 2 percentage points higher.
Almost invisibly, health care has become the main American job program for the 21st century
. . .
There's another enormous long-term problem: If current trends continue, 30% to 40% of all new jobs created over the next 25 years will be in health care.
, . .
using health-care spending to create the vast majority of new jobs, while beneficial in the short run, is not desirable over the long run. A well-balanced economy needs to provide a wide variety of jobs, not just positions for doctors, nurses, and medical technicians.
I would expect to find that the great majority of jobs created in the health care system are in the subprofessional to warm body range. . . home health care attendants, nursing home attendants, etc. with no formal academic qualifications required and pay pretty close to minimum wage, i.e. service industry jobs that don't pay enough to live on.
The article goes on to say that new IT jobs are not being created, which isn't news to people in IT, that we're essentially borrowing from foreign countries to finance the health care jobs, and that health care can be made more efficient in terms of labor through investment in new technology. I tried to keep the quotes within "fair usage", I recommend you RTFA to get the rest of the bad news.
It appears that the "improving economy" isn't creating new middle-class jobs. Actually, I believe that the economy isn't really improving, what's showing up in the numbers is simply the result of upward transfer of wealth from the rest of us to the top 1%.