A college education becomes more important than ever before because it has become a prerequisite for the growing career fields such as computer sciences and engineering that need more people to fill the many positions that will be created in the near future. We all know that the college process is becoming more and more difficult which means there aren't enough people capable of doing the tasks that these jobs require because they don’t have the right. What can we do to solve this problem?
Obama is also very open about his plans to raise the federal minimum wage to $9/hour. Initially this sounds like great news, but maybe the minimum wage should have been raised a while ago. After all, Obama did say that a full-time worker making the federal minimum wage is still below the poverty line.
During his speech, Obama also mentions his desire to get the Paycheck Fairness Act passed this year. Currently, women make about 77 cents for every dollar men make. Passing this act and equalizing pay will definitely be a progressive step for America, and it is only right that we pay everyone equally for doing the same job. If we want to talk about how equal we Americans are, we should walk the walk first, right?
In the end, it sounds like Obama is quite confident about America’s job situation. What are your opinions on these policies? Will these changes work out and end up improving our economy as a bipartisan effort, or will the issue become politicized and drawn out?
6 comments:
I hate to be a cynic, but given the Obama administration's past success in really improving the job 'situation,' it seems to me that all this is fluff. Would a president really say during his speech, "I'm not confident the job market will improve." Yeah, that would fly. However, I am glad that he is trying to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. That is undoubtedly an issue that has been not touched on by much of the media. I hope it doesn't end up being a huge battle, though. For goodness's sake, I will have a hard time controlling myself if and/or when politicians try coming up with statements about why they will vote against that.
I think that as we have seen with the past congress, it will be essentially impossible for these many issues concerning job creation not to become politicized and drawn out. Like Taylor mentioned, the Obama administration didn't have a ton of success really improving the job situation in his past term, and although congress is partly to blame for that, I think it serves as evidence that Obama is going to have to fight pretty hard to get these policies passed. Still, it would be awesome to see the policies mentioned, especially the minimum wage increase and paycheck fairness act, passed, and it will be interesting to see how and if both republicans and democrats agree on them.
It's regrettable (and kind of annoying) that there's even fights in Congress over things like minimum wage. That being said, I think people still put too much weight on how much power Obama actually has to dictate legislation. He can propose to raise minimum wage and then if a bill is even created, it can be ignored or dropped in a committee. Raising the minimum wage should be a priority, as it can help revitalize the economy. Like we learned last year, putting money in the consumer's pockets gives them more buying power, which in turn gives more money to companies, who expand and hire more people, and so on.
The issue today is that people are spending as though there was no recession, but companies are reluctant to expand. So until that happens, the job market will still stagnate. I suspect that Apple bringing it's manufacturing to the United States will set a precedent for other major corporations, but at the same time I'm not going to get my hopes up. The job market will eventually improve, hopefully before we all get out of college.
Looking at this table, courtesy of the NY Times, it is evident that the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation. Like James said, issues like these should not be so politicized when the solution is obviously to make the minimum wage higher. Obama even said in the speech last night that this was one point that he and Romney agreed on during the campaign.
Maybe if the two parties can make little compromises by focusing on the smaller tweaks that need to be made, they can overcome the political cloud that makes discussion about the big picture impossible.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/02/12/us/politics/12min-wage-graphic/12min-wage-graphic-tmagSF.jpg <-- table
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