Here’s What to Give Up for Lent

Now let’s take a little break, from real-life Tom Clancy thrillers about disappearing airplanes, and from foreign despots doing remarkably accurate Adolf Hitler imitations (the election results were legitimate, that’s all the territory we want, we need to protect speakers of our language from harm which their country’s government couldn’t provide, and more).  It’s Lent, during which it was once a common custom for people to give things up.  So what would I like our conservatives and liberals to skip for at least its 30 remaining days?

Conservatives, give up complaining about Obamacare.  It’s the law, it’s moving forward (even if more than a little clumsily), and it’s crystal-clear that by decade’s end it will be as well established as Social Security and Medicare are now.  The stance against it is Wrong Side of History #1, and, if you can’t find something constructive to concentrate on, at least find something else to carp about.

Liberals, lay off harping about global warming, climate change, or whatever you’ll want us to call it next.  Your proselytizing reminds me of door-to-door religion sellers – if you’re confident about what you’re saying, then why do you need to convince others?  Some people who doubt that the whole package – not only that we know beyond any sane doubt that the planet is getting warmer, but that humans, especially Americans, are causing it, and that that is bad, and that the problem will go on indefinitely otherwise, AND that people can viably make the difference between salvation and disaster – is doubtlessly correct are not scientific Neanderthals.  Hush, and let the facts, if they truly support your position, speak for themselves.

Conservatives, it’s overdue by at least 16 months, since the 2012 election results were final, to dam the steady stream of criticizing Barack Obama.   He’s scheduled to be our president until January 2017.  Do you want to impeach him, remove him from office, and replace him with a Republican?  Sorry, can’t.  Running him down on each issue that comes up (Charles Krauthammer’s column, for one, while putting the occasional ball in the center-field stands, could be titled “What Obama Did Wrong This Time”) will NOT help your 2014 or 2016 causes – most moderates have just plain had enough of that stuff.

Liberals, and your guru Noam Chomsky, take time off from accusing conservatives of hating the poor.  Just because they don’t support destroying half a million jobs by raising the minimum wage, or trying to raise everyone’s prosperity to middle-class status, doesn’t mean they’ll drop their often devout Christianity by letting them starve.  Focus more on the right parts of that.  If you hadn’t asked for the sun, the moon, and the stars, more food stamps and longer unemployment benefits would have been a slam-dunk by now. 

Conservatives, on same-sex marriage, it’s time to give up.  Quit.  Fold your hand.  Leave the playing field.  That is Wrong Side of History #2.  Government licenses and humane rights, such as visiting your life partner in the hospital, are not sacred anyway.  And, if the experiments in Colorado and Washington prove nondisastrous, get ready to do the same thing with marijuana legalization.        

Liberals, for at least the next several weeks stop attributing all human differences to race, sex, or sexual orientation.  People are different in vastly more ways, and more important ways, than those things, which don’t explain everything.  I doubt you’re ready to believe that all groups aren’t 100% biologically or even culturally equal in interests, priorities, drive, and therefore economic outcomes, but at least stop dumping everyone’s actions on their genital type, skin pigmentation, or who they want in bed with them.

Conservatives, at least briefly table the gun-control paranoia!  So you think Obama, like every other Democratic president since Andrew Jackson, wants to ban guns?  OK, document it.  And then don’t believe it.  Even if everyone in Congress lost what was left of their common sense, the avowed blue-steel Democrats there would see that anything like that would get laughed out of committee, even if it bizarrely got that far.  And no, restrictions on things like giant ammunition magazines in public are not sinister precursors to such a law, any more than driving a mile west to your Atlanta grocery store means you’re headed to Los Angeles.

Liberals, did you think you were escaping blame for resisting change?  Hardly.  Through the next month, please stop equating the unions in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution, when labor and management were true opponents and neither employers nor employees knew when workers should and should not be pushed or endangered, with public-sector organizations today.  As the Japanese knew decades ago, once unions are in place they should be fully cooperated with, but advocating expanding their scope, especially by evoking images such as the widows of workers dying in steel mills getting denied even that day’s pay, is Wrong Side of History #3.

Conservatives and liberals, consider, over the next four weeks and two days, that the jobs crisis might be not only permanent but a higher priority than any of these.

There you are.  If nothing else, let’s all heed the proverb about not speaking unless we can improve upon the silence.  If you don’t like that one, at least consider what Tom Lehrer said:  “I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.”

Janet Yellen at the Fed – So Far, So Good

When Janet L. Yellen’s name first reached the general public, it was because she was a novelty.  It’s sad that 2014 someone’s sex is more important than his or her qualifications, but it’s hardly rare.  She was frequently described as a woman who was a major candidate to replace Ben S. Bernanke as Chair of Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or, as otherwise known, chair of the Fed. 

That is an extremely responsible position.  In my mind, it would contend only with the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice for not only the effect it has on others but in its need for prudence and sobriety.  The Fed’s monetary policies affect the prosperity of the majority of Americans, and the decisions are the most complex imaginable.  A fellow graduate student, in physics instead of sociology, told me he didn’t want to study the social sciences because they had “too many variables” – we can all agree that economics is in that category.  Many of its factors are worse than that – they are simply unknown, lost in the murk of human behavior.  So in many ways it is a wonder that none of the past few decades’ Fed leaders, from Paul Volcker through Alan Greenspan and Bernanke, have made a clearly catastrophic error. 

Yellen, a Harvard economics professor at age 25, had been president and CEO of San Francisco’s Federal Reserve Bank for six years when she became the Fed’s vice chair in 2010.  After President Obama went through a remarkable amount of time deciding that Yellen was the right choice for the top job, he officially nominated her in October and she started the job last month. 

Beyond the prime credentials, what is she like?  She is a Keynesian, believing in the ability of circulating money to boost economic activity.  She is known as being more concerned with jobs than with inflation.  That is now a very good thing.  Earlier this year, she went out of her way to point out that long-term joblessness had not improved as much as the unemployment rate, and touched on the damage it did to long-out-of-work people’s careers.  That is also good.  She maintained in 2012 that the economy needed more stimulation, and, back in 1995, called moderately high inflation “a wise and humane policy.”  Accordingly, she has received some criticism from the right, such as being called “entirely too easy money” by investor Julian Robertson. 

That is understandable, but not to the point.  American inflation is dormant, and has been for a long time – in fact, it has been over 23 years, since November 1990, that it has exceeded an annual 6% even for a month.  On the other hand, even if you don’t think the job shortage is permanent, you must admit that employment is recovering very slowly, well over an official 6% almost five years after the last recession’s end, with measures such as the share of adults working having not improved at all. 

Since taking office, Yellen has said that any end to the federal bond-buying program will be based on a variety of economic indicators.  That is favorable also, as is continuing another of Bernanke’s well-judged policies of keeping short-term interest rates close to zero.  She acknowledged that raising the minimum wage could cost as many as one million jobs, a fine response from the first Democrat to hold the office in thirty years.  She said that bad February weather had made a significant dent in the economy, and on that we will see, probably in three weeks with March’s jobs data. 

In all, early indications on how Yellen will be for American jobs are clearly positive.  Not only does she have the right emphases, but her words on the minimum wage show that she may not be bound by party doctrine.  We can continue to expect, and probably receive, more solid performance from the Fed chair’s office.  As for inflation, we should not worry – even if the fundamentals hinted at all that it might return, she will not get carried away.  After all, her predecessor and de facto mentor Bernanke, though once known as Helicopter Ben for his statements about increasing the money supply by throwing it out from the air, saw inflation go nowhere during his eight-year tenure.  From here, Janet Yellen looks like a winner.

AJSN: America Almost 20.3 Million Jobs Short on Neutral February Jobs Report

Dull.  Nondescript.  Undistinctive.  Unsurprising.  Inconclusive. 

Those words could be used to describe this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics federal employment issue.  The 175,000 net new jobs were almost exactly the 172,000 estimate offered in The New York Times’s Economix blog.  The headline seasonally adjusted unemployment rate went up, though only a tenth of a percent to 6.7%.

Although official joblessness rose, the American Job Shortage Number (AJSN) decreased over 300,000, mostly on smaller counts of discouraged workers and those not having looked in the previous year.  The total number of additional American positions that could be quickly filled is still almost 20.3 million, with its components as follows:

AJSN FEBRUARY 2014	Total	Latent Demand %	Latent Demand Total
Unemployed	10,893,000	90	9,803,700
Discouraged	755,000	90	679,500
Family Responsibilities	251,000	30	75,300
In School or Training	275,000	50	137,500
Ill Health or Disability	173,000	10	17,300
Other	848,000	30	254,400
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year	3,216,000	80	2,572,800
Not Available to Work Now	572,000	30	171,600
Do Not Want a Job	85,968,000	5	4,298,400
Non-Civilian, Institutionalized, and Unaccounted For, 15+	10,110,009	10	1,011,001
American Expatriates	6,320,000	20	1,264,000
TOTAL			20,285,501

Those in school or training dropped, a strange thing to happen between January and February, by 72,000, while those saying they just plain didn’t want to work also found an unusual decrease, of 58,000, as did the non-civilian, institutionalized, and unknown group, off 449,000. 

Two of last month’s favorable changes held their gains; the labor force participation rate and employment-to-population ratio, more important in assessing the availability of work than the unemployment rate, stayed at 63.0% and 58.8%.  The number of people working part-time when they would prefer full-time improved to 7.2 million, while the count of long-term unemployed, officially jobless for 27 weeks or longer, gained back nearly all of its January loss and now stands at 3.8 million.  Seasonally unadjusted unemployment stayed at 7.0%. 

Compared with a year ago, the AJSN is now almost 1.5 million lower.  Almost the entire reason is fewer people unemployed, down 1.6 million.  Although over 3 million more are non-civilian, in institutions, or off the grid, 362,000 fewer report they want to work but haven’t looked over the past year, and 130,000 fewer are officially discouraged.  The number saying they didn’t want a job at all increased, as it is almost certain to continue doing, to 2.7 million.   

So what can we take away from this data?  First, the employment situation seems to have stabilized, with the number of jobs rising remarkably consistently with the rise in the adult population, and enough Americans choosing other lifestyles and otherwise leaving the labor force to keep official unemployment steadyish.  Second, the number of work opportunities and the number of Americans are still parting company, though slowly for now.  Third, we are not in a recession, but in our modern-day steady state.  If we think that is good enough, we should be happy – if not, today’s data gave us no reason at all for optimism.                

Unfortunately, Economic Libertarianism’s Time Has Passed

An ideology based on what some might call extreme freedom has established a renewed foothold in American political thought.  Libertarianism, which can be defined as a policy of no laws except those preventing force, fraud, or coercion, has ebbed and flowed throughout the decades.  The philosophy generally supports Democrats on social issues and Republicans on economic ones; true libertarians want both lower taxes and legal drugs, and oppose both school prayer and inflationary money policies.  They differ from populists by advocating freedom for businesses as well as people, but both dislike excessive government power.  The Libertarian Party has attracted people as diverse as hippies, motorcycle-gang members (who also don’t want mandatory helmet laws), and economists advocating a return to the gold standard.  In a sense, libertarianism is the archetypal political scheme for the freest governed country in the world, with a main strength that is clear – if people can choose to do what they want, limited only by the inherent rights of others, they will find their own niches and be happier and more successful.    

My libertarian roots are deep.  I voted for Ed Clark, the first and maybe still most high-profile Libertarian Party presidential candidate, in 1980.  I also chose Harry Browne from the same in 2000, and heavily supported Ron Paul in the 2008 primaries.  I still may be closer to a libertarian than to a consistent conservative or liberal.  Yet, because of changes we have seen, the ideology now has a fatal flaw which makes it unsuitable as a whole.  What is that?

Central to libertarian thinking is the value of free markets.  In them, people provide resources and obtain others in return.  The United States has had a long, fine run with relatively free markets, during which exchanged assets or experiences have often ended up with the people valuing them the most.  When you buy bread, you want it more than Wonder or Winn-Dixie does, and so you pay more than their costs.  If you sell old postcards at a flea market, you are saying you value the money they bring more than the cards themselves, opposite to your customers.  Paid workers in any job trade their expendable time for pay and benefits they want more. 

Unfortunately, an increasing share of people cannot participate in these deals on their own.  Work’s New Age Principle #13 holds that in order for markets to work, people must have money to spend.  Many Americans, over the centuries, have had only one real source for their money, selling their labor, so if people are not working, large numbers of them will not have anything to offer.  Although they may choose to raise money through other of their resources, such as selling things on eBay or renting out rooms in their homes through Airbnb, their tangible goods will run out, and those needing to raise money the most tend to have the least.  Accordingly, even a temporary jobs crisis, which in effect happened in Ireland’s Potato Famine in the 1840s, can ruin a free market system, and the jobs crisis we now face is permanent.

What happens, then, to markets?  The result must be a permanent market crisis.  It is now alleviated through safety-net programs such as welfare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits, none of which, though, true libertarians would support.  With the number of employment opportunities in relation to the population dropping, the need will only get greater, with more and more people in the position hunter-gatherers would have if their animals and plants disappeared. 

Ayn Rand, the patron saint of libertarianism, allegedly said that she would not rescue a drowning person she didn’t care about, even if it would be easy.  That is a choice we can make about our countrymen, when, in addition to their labor becoming worthless, they sell all of their possessions of value and can no longer keep houses with spare rooms to rent out.  Yet what might result for a country with more and more people without possessions, jobs, or social services, such as a new feudalism with the masses beholden to the 1% for their survival, or a Somalia-like or even Mad Max-style milieu with the security industry having the best growth prospects, are not pleasant to think about. 

The libertarian influence, progressive in the right ways, has been tremendously positive.  It is hard to imagine, to name only two things, the recent legalizations of gay marriage and marijuana without it.  Once, libertarianism promised great prosperity to go with its freedom.  From here on out, though, it will not be enough, economically, for the federal government just to leave people alone.  For too many, that kind of freedom would be only an indication that they had, as Kris Kristofferson put it, nothing left to lose.  That is not what we want for the greatest country in the world.   

Jeb, Ignore Your Mother

It’s less than two years before the 2016 presidential primaries, and the Republicans are in real trouble. 

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a month and a half ago the clear frontrunner for the presidential nomination, has fallen on his sword with the Fort Lee traffic-blocking scandal.  Even if nobody can show that he knew about the plan to punish that city’s Democratic, non-endorsing mayor, he will be left with responsibility for the actions of his subordinates and the climate of his administration, both ugly.  People don’t tolerate bullies these days, and the time of popular autocrats, such as Chicago’s old-time mayor Richard J. Daley, has long past.  Accordingly, on sportsbook.com, the site I use to determine the true chances for presidential candidates (since as they take bets on their projections, they cannot afford to be partisan), odds on Christie have worsened from 6.5 to 1 against on January 10^th to 12 to 1 yesterday.   Strangely, Christie is still listed as more likely than anyone else to be nominated, though tied with Florida senator Marco Rubio.  Over the 40 days, much of Christie’s gain has been absorbed by the overall favorite, Democrat Hillary Clinton, up to two-to-one against from 2.25.

Jeb Bush, former Republican governor of Florida, stayed the same at 15 to 1.  His chances did not improve, probably due to his mother, Barbara Bush, saying in a January 20^th-airing C-SPAN interview that he shouldn’t run in 2016.  Her thinking was that two from one dynastic family, her husband George H. W. and her oldest son George W., were enough.  But would that be best for the country?

During my 23 years in Florida, there were only two governors I liked, Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, and Jeb Bush.  One or the other had the office for nearly 16 of those years, and they had something critical in common – they did nothing destructive.  Chiles, with a reputation as a media darling, wanted a state income tax, so he arranged for a balloon to be floated in the Orlando Sentinel.  The query took the form of a question readers were asked to respond yes or no to; it was, approximately, “If Florida sales tax were reduced from 6% to 4%, and a small state income tax were introduced, the combination meaning almost everyone with incomes under $60,000 would come out ahead, would you support it?”  The vote could have been close, but it wasn’t –an amazing 97% said no.  After that, we heard nothing more about Chiles’s income tax effort.  Similarly, on his second day in office, Bush put an end to a statewide high-speed rail project, accurately considered to be a boondoggle by most Florida residents, and through his two terms did little to impede the great economic growth, high prosperity, and sub-4% unemployment rates the state then enjoyed.  Having the discipline to do nothing when nothing is called for can be hard for politicians, who want so badly to make their marks, but it’s a sign of true leadership.

So, in the absence of Bush, what can Republicans do for 2016?  Though many like and almost all accept the austere preferences of the Tea Party, their leadership has to know that nobody who wants to crush food stamps, wants to deny employment benefits to people who have been looking for months and months, and calls people such as my late Republican-voting, 45-year-working father-in-law “moochers” for not refusing their Social Security benefits, will be elected.  They need someone moderate, who can at least see both sides.  Rubio may or may not qualify.  Bush’s criticism of the most conservative half or so of Republicans would fit right in, as wouldn’t the attitudes of the Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz, the two others in his party given the highest chances.    

What about the Democrats?  Our experience we have had and project to have with President Obama on jobs says one thing:  We do not want a generic, party-beholden Democrat in 2016.  That means Hillary.  As for the rest of that party’s field, it is telling that the only others with odds shorter than 50-to-1 are Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, both with more baggage than O’Hare and little crossover appeal. 

That brings us back to Jeb Bush.

Unlike most of the 2012 Republican field, he is sane, sober, non-precipitate, and grounded in reality, which is why he is often described as “the only adult in the room.”  With a Phi Beta Kappa, he has also been called “the smart one” in his family, even more than his Yale-educated father.  Along with his degree in Latin American affairs, he has a Mexican wife and speaks Spanish fluently, which, given the growth of the country’s Hispanic population, are fine credentials.  He would bring a virtual assurance of winning Florida’s 29 electoral votes.  Befitting the title of a recent Atlantic article, “Jeb Bush, Republican Savior in 2016?,” he is, or will soon be, the most sought-after non-running presidential candidate since Colin Powell. 

So what could he do about jobs?  His proven ability to take a moderate course, even when irritating what most would call his political base, tells us enough.  He could extend unemployment benefits and strengthen food stamps, while rejecting minimum wage increases, assaulting government waste better than any Democrat would dare, and, if turned down by Obama, approving the Keystone XL pipeline.  He could start a federal jobs program, convincing fellow Republicans that the infrastructure work America badly needs is not optional and working with Democrats to get approval of the labor paying much less than union scales.  He could start a bipartisan commission to research and evaluate guaranteed income, charges and payments for Internet activities, and other radical ideas that must be considered.  He could use the strength of his family and Spanish-language connections to achieve more consensuses than our current president has been disposed to do.

Could Jeb Bush accomplish all this?  I doubt it, but his chances seem better than anyone else’s.  It is much easier to imagine him, for example, pushing for the next WPA than it is to think of Hillary Clinton saying we can’t afford a higher minimum wage.  Politics, is after all, largely about hope, and, from where I am sitting, he can provide the most. 

Jeb, sometimes your mother doesn’t know best.  We need you.         

Millennials’ Late Independence: From Laziness, Immaturity, or Another Reason?

Those in the millennial generation, born between 1981 and 2000, now range from 13 to 34 years old.  Not only are they the great bulk of high school and college students, they extend well beyond the age when Americans have generally been well established in life.  Yet, as we have read, many now are not.    

Aside from age, the three transitions most Americans have used to mark truly growing up have been getting married, moving away from parents, and working steadily at a full-time job.  Although of course some never do all of these things, achieving any two of them has been for a century or longer a good indicator that someone is no longer a child or adolescent.  So how quickly have recent generations been maturing?     

As of the 1950s, half of women married by 20 and more than half of men by 23.  From there, mean marriage ages for men increased, from 24.0 in 1975 to 24.8, 25.9, and 27.0 in 1980, 1985, and 1990 respectively.  For women the age crept up to 21.9 in 1975, then grew to 22.7 in 1980, 24.0 in 1985, and 25.0 in 1990.  By 2005, average marriage ages were 27.2 for men and 25.1 for women, which became 28 and 26 by 2009.

As for living with parents, in economically poor 1940, 63% of Americans aged 18 to 24 did, but by 1960 it had dropped to 42%.  From 1977 through the 1980s the trend reversed, and more stayed longer.  By 1994, 51% of men and 37% of women 20 to 24 lived with their parents, as did, in the mid-2000s 20% of 26-year-olds.  As well, in the late 1990s almost 40% of young adults who had moved out returned for four months or more, and in 2010 the Great Recession alone had caused 10% of those under 35 who had left to move back in.

How about working full-time?  It has been several decades since being able to start at a low-level position in a hierarchical company with hopes of working oneself up has been the norm for people out of high school or college.  In fact, only half of people aged 18 to 29 had a full-time job of any kind in 2006, which fell to 41% by early 2010.  The high school part-time job, which has often led to full-time work later, is fading away; the share of those 16 and 17 years old with work experience in the year plunged from 51.8% in 1987 to 28.5% in 2007.  For the same years, ages 18 to 19 fell from 76.6% to 57.3%, and 20 to 24 from 85.5% to 76.6%.

So what is the connection between lower employment opportunities, later marriages, more time living with parents, and later independence in general?  Younger adults with jobs have long tended to move out earlier.  Opportunities for career positions, however modest, for young men were much greater in the 1950s and 1960s than since.  The 1970s were not all bad recession years, but they may have seemed that way for graduates seeking entry-level career positions, as that market segment became flooded.  The slackers of the 1990s were unemployed in large part to lack of opportunities instead of lack of ambition.  With the Great Recession damaging younger workers disproportionately, positions offered to new college graduates dropped 28% from 2008 to 2010, and for the year ending February 2011, joblessness for graduates less than 25 years old averaged 9.5%.  One 2013 study showed half of new and employed B.A.’s  working jobs requiring no degree.

What can millennials do about their economic plight?  Robert Nelson, of that generation himself, wrote an article last month in Salon, saying that what his cohort needed was to get involved more in the nuts and bolts of politics, and push for change through the electoral system.  It is not enough to do symbolic things, since, as Nelson put it, “The Tea Party has had more of an impact on American politics than Occupy Wall Street, because they focused on winning victories in the political arena rather than just banging on drums in a park.”  If there were more millennial candidates, with, for example, strong pro-jobs agendas, the generation might be able to improve its lot considerably.

People born in the 1980s and 1990s are not a group of shirkers.  They have done what any other generation would have in similar circumstances – using the resources they can call upon, such as more affluent, more tolerant parents, to offset what they can’t get.  Just as many potential young military heroes were not born between 1915 and 1925, millennials have largely been stopped by a lack of opportunities.  We all choose from what life makes available to us, and the current generation of young adults has been the most affected by the permanent jobs crisis than any other.  Before we make any negative generalizations about the millennial generation, we first need to understand that about them. 

January 2014: AJSN Well Over 20 Million Again as Lower Unemployment Rate Attracts Job Interest

When I saw this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary, I glanced at a few numbers and thought “another lousy month.”  Yes, it was that, but a few things in the report are worthy of note.

First, the main factor pushing the American Job Shortage Number up to 20.6 million was the number of unemployed, which, not seasonally adjusted, rose almost 900,000.  Second, the count of people wanting to work but not technically jobless due to not looking for at least a year soared over 400,000, while those claiming to have no interest in employment fell almost 400,000.  Those together show just how non-binding these categories are for many, in particular that some who claim they don’t want to see the inside of a workplace may reconsider when they think their chances might be better.  Third, offsetting the poorish job increase data, four key secondary factors showed real improvement.  The number of people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer dropped 232,000, those working part-time for economic reasons plunged 514,000, the labor force participation rate increased to 63.0%, and the employment to population ratio went up to 58.8%.  These numbers have not been getting much better lately, and while still inferior, could be the start of something.

The AJSN components for January are as follows:

Other changes from December include 80,000 fewer discouraged workers, 101,000 more in school or training, and 222,000 more in institutions, in the military, or falling through the statistical cracks.  The non-seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate increased from 6.5% to 7.0%.

Compared with a year ago, when the AJSN was almost 22.4 million, the American employment situation has substantially improved.  Since January 2013, unemployment is down 2.3 million, and the group of those wanting to work but having not looked for at least a year lost almost 300,000, but over three million more claim no interest in employment, and almost 4 million more were non-civilian, institutionalized, or not accounted for. 

Yes, with the number of jobs added once again not covering population increase, January was a poor month.  We will see, though, if the improvement in the long-term jobless and involuntary part-time workers will continue.  If it does, times may truly be improving.  If those figures bounce back to where they were in the fall, we will be left with no reason to see progress in American jobs.