Rahvin writes:
Often it's not even bad advice, AE. A person graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree any time in the past 3 years or so would have had a lot of trouble finding employment - millions of people, many of them with the same degrees and experience were being laid off from their existing positions and even they haven't all been able to find work yet.
Interesting, that my friends younger brother graduated from college in late 2008, with a liberal arts degree from a smaller state school (James Madison University). He ran into the same problem. But with Iraq and Afghanistan employing out military industrial machine, he looked in to the military. As a college graduate he went to OCS, and is now getting ready to make Captain. He works in for the Navy in their HR department, it is a total poag job, almost the same as the corporate office job that he thought he would get anyway, and making good money. We are always fighting wars with someone over their resources (I mean to liberate them), an people always overlook the military.
Those who have found work have often found it working minimum-wage jobs where their degrees are irrelevant in food service, retail, etc.
Sometimes you really can do everything right and still get screwed over.
Yeah. I graduated in 2002 with a BS in history and geography, it was 2006 till I got a job in the field I wanted. I worked as a pizza delivery guy, and a bouncer; I was doing whatever it took to get by. And yeah it sucked, but I wasn’t going to whine and cry about it, because that doesn’t pay the bills either.
And what happens? More and more people without jobs. Without jobs, those people apply for unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other government assistance, draining public coffers. Without jobs, they pay less taxes as they buy less (local and state governments often rely heavily on sales tax) and make less money (meaning they often won;t pay any income tax because they literally can't afford to pay any more tax and still eat). Lower tax revenue means less money for the unemployment insurance and food stamp programs that are keeping those people fed and housed (even if barely). The state and local governments then need to lay off their own workers because they don;t have the tax revenue to pay them. With even more unemployed people out hunting for very, very few jobs, competition becomes even worse. Local businesses see revenue drop because a significant portion of their customers lost their jobs. Many of them close. More unemployed, less tax revenue, more unemployed... Now the state can't afford to pay all the teachers, so many of them get laid off and children get pushed into more and more overloaded classrooms. The schools can't afford to pay for supplies, either. More unemployed, less tax revenue, kids set up for less success in the future. Now the state can;t afford to fix roads or pay all the firefighters...
Yeah but are we
entitled to all that stuff? All that stuff is a relatively recent thing. My grandparents didn’t have all of that. Its pretty much just been my parents and me. Maybe the system we thought was Ideal was not sustainable.
How long could you live in a your home if you were laid off because your employer suffered in the down economy? A year? Six months? Six weeks? How long do you think it would take you to find a new job if that happened?
I work for uncle sam. If the economy kills him and his business, I think we have some real problems to deal with. I have set myself up to be pretty employable, I do not think it would take any longer than a month or two to find another job.
But for some reason our society as a whole seems to want to ignore the lessons of the past. People claim that "government is bad" and use that axiom as reasoning to limit or even dismantle regulations that have protected us for years, regulations that gave us the most prosperous economy in the world for two generations.
Well they are very bad at running things.
How is it "good" that Bank of America can take my savings and use that money to make risky investments, where I and others can lose everything if those investments go south, and where I and others don;t see a dime if the investments do well?
Well it is a place to store your money. I guess you could just keep it at home in safe, or something. As far as you loosing money from bad bank investments, I would guess you have to be observant on which bank you choose to bank with.
Hard work used to pay off. Now, exploiting your neighbors pays off, and hard work gets you a wage that stagnates while your cost of living rises, slowly drowning you in expenses.
I don’t see things having changed that much, that seems to have always been the game.
Glad you stopped lurking and started posting.
™ Version 4.2
(1)
