Ingenuity and Creativity

I was just reading an article provided by the Wall Street Journal to Yahoo online. It said that fully 20% of the men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working. It doesn’t address the employment of those over 54 which we might expect to be worse. The article goes on to quote the President’s economic advisor as saying that when the economy has fully recovered about five years from now the improvement will be that one 1 in 6 men will be out of work. Doesn’t feel like it will be that much of an improvement does it?


It does say that many of the jobs that have gone away, will never return. Many of them production line work or construction, but office workers are being affected too.

We can’t expect the government to help us out. They don’t really know how to cope with this state of affairs either. The only solutions they seem to come up with are only digging the hole deeper. The bailouts we are funding may be creating a few jobs, but not in the number we need. Government created jobs for the unemployed doesn’t really make sense either. That’s the government creating jobs that the taxpayer is funding. So those new jobs the government creates are being paid for by the people who are being employed in those jobs, with considerable additional support by the already overburdened taxpayer. We have to stop the madness.

We have gotten use to being taken care of. We have allowed our minds and imaginations to go soft , thinking that we will be taken care of in times of trouble. In times of trouble we are the ones we need to turn to. Government was designed to govern. Too make laws that protect us and keep the country from sinking into anarchy. The government was not meant to be our caretaker, nor should we expect or want it to me.

We need to do what we have been best at, applying our ingenuity and creativity to solving the problem. We the people, not the U.S. government need to do this. We are the most affected. The government pays lip service to the problem but then goes blithely on and exacerbates it by continuing to spend money we don’t have.

Nor is Corporate America the answer. Public companies do not have very much loyalty to their employees, if any. Their loyalties are to their stockholders. The stockholders attention is on short-term result, the bottom line and ROI. So when those quarterly and annual reports come out and ROI is not good, management looks around to see where it can save money. Let’s see, are the top executives going to vote to slash their exorbitant salaries and bonuses? Not likely. Are they going to decrease the size of upper management, possibly, though not likely. Why would they vote themselves out of a job? Guess where they are going to turn to next? Hello! The middle and lower echelons of the work force have come into their sights. Surprise! Oh, don’t worry. The work is not going away. There are just going to be fewer people doing it. A few of those jobs may come back when the bottom line picks up. Maybe, but probably not.

So it now falls upon the ones who have been most affected to ferret out the solution to this problem. The world has changed. It has moved on. We can no longer expect the old ways to work. We cannot expect to be taken care of.

Will we rise to this challenge? There is no choice. We have to. When we started this country we made do with what we had and in doing so forged a better more prosperous life. We invented and developed ways that made our lives easier and more efficient. We developed industries that put people to work, work in which they could take pride. We need to do it again.

Rhetoric aside, if we are to survive and thrive we must do it again.