Lordy, where to begin. How about that we’ve outsourced 50% of IT jobs to India, and outsourced another 40% of the jobs to H-1Bs who work here, and the resulting 10% jobs still held by Americans are paid at 50% of the salary levels of the 1990s? Nursing and construction jobs can’t be outsourced, but are performed by legal and illegal aliens, again eliminating jobs for citizens and cutting the salaries by half or more for those who do get work. I’ve been doing contract IT work but have not found a decent-paying gig for six months, but have never filed for unemployment – not sure whether I qualify or not. So, I don’t show as unemployed.

But the economy, and jobs, and the financial breakdown, are three distinct but overlapping areas. In regards to the real estate crisis and whether the economic infrastructure can last, how about this:

http://townhall.com/news/business/2010/01/31/watchdog_bailouts_created_more_risk_in_system

The Federal Reserve is spending $1.25 trillion to hold down mortgage rates, and millions of homeowners have refinanced at lower rates.

So, the federal reserve has pumped yet another TRILLION into the markets over the last year, to keep us as strong as we are – with 10% or 17% or 25% unemployment, underemployment, whatever it is.

I’m not sure what that means – must they continue to pump like that or we sink, or have they bought everything there is to buy, and do they have to unwind it at some point, or is it all wonderful and OK and magic? All I’m really sure of, is that billions of that trillion are going as compensation to the likes of Goldman-Sachs, and when it comes to that, I only wish Obama would live up to his leftist post-colonial self-image – or I wish the Republicans would get on board whatever wagon they need to get on to save the capitalist system from these outrages – before it comes down to pitchforks and torches on both sides.

Um, do I have a bottom line? I dunno. I just want to revert to my first point. There are a lot of influences of globalization in our current problems, both in jobs, and in finance. Greenspan blames the Chinese for loaning us our money back at too low rates! Greenspan was also a proponent of the H-1B program, that has helped cut salaries in IT by 50% in ten years, 75% over twenty years (OK, maybe some of that was going to happen anyway as a “maturing industry”). Not to mention steel industry outsourced in the 1960s to 1970s, consumer electronics and automobiles outsourced … no manufacturing, and we wonder at a jobs problem?

So I can’t see any small or easy solutions.

“Stimulus” won’t do it, the money will just flow overseas.