Category: Economy

The necessity of more skilled IT professionals

The necessity of more skilled IT professionals

Today’s kids need to consider a role in IT.  Here is a quick paragraph from a recent Wall Street Journal article.

It doesn’t hurt their cause that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that there will be one million unfilled jobs for programmers in the U.S. by 2020. And that may be an underestimate, … He adds that the more software and hardware humans create, the more jobs in software there are, as new platforms like smartphones and drones spawn their own software ecosystems.

The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have

The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have

With the move to $15 or higher minimum wage, you can bet there will much more “shadow work” that will be moved to consumers or lost to automation. Shadow work is all the unpaid jobs we do on behalf of businesses and organizations: We are pumping our own gas, scanning our own groceries, booking our travel and busing our tables at Starbucks. Shadow work is a new concept, so as yet, no one has compiled economic data on how many jobs we, the consumers, have taken over from (erstwhile) employees. Yet it is surely a force shrinking the job market, and the unemployment it creates is structural.

This is not blaming our current POTUS. It is simply a natural progression of companies trying to reduce costs and increase productivity. As technology improves, it is even easier to allow consumers or robots do the work of the manual worker. If you don’t make your money with your mind but instead make it with back-breaking work or by “smiling” to the consumer, your job is severely at risk especially if you want to be paid more money simply because you can run a cash register and fetch a paper-wrapped sandwich from a food slot.

More reading: The Second Job You Don’t Know You Have – Craig Lambert – POLITICO Magazine

The Obamacare Escalator

The Obamacare Escalator

I originally wrote this on my Facebook page. I am embedding that post below, but also putting the text here (including fixing some grammatical mistakes from the original post).

In 2009 White House economists tried to sell ObamaCare as a health cost-control bill, and some liberals still claim the recent spending deceleration is a result of the law even though it is really due to a bad economy.

On Wednesday, the actuaries at Health and Human Services released their new annual projected measurement of national health expenditures for last year and through 2023. Spending in 2013 grew at a relatively low rate of 3.6% which still outpaced real economic growth. They expect the rate to climb to 5.6% in 2014 and continue rising by 6% a year, on average, through the decade.

Health spending as a share of the economy rose to 17.2% in 2013 from 16.2% in 2007 and will hit 19.3% in 2023, assuming that GDP grows as much as the auditors project. In other words, healthcare will soak up nearly one of every five U.S. dollars instead of one of six. Taxpayers will finance 48% of that spending a decade out, up from 41% in 2007.

I have argued for years that the reason for healthcare expense growth is not the need for a single payer. Rather it is a combination of

  • The obstructionist policies of our trading partners (the US finances most medical research but foreign nations restrict the pricing of those same medicines).
  • The severe obesity of our people compared to the rest of the world.
  • The cost of medical malpractice coverage (unheard of in most of the world).
  • The high cost of treating trauma injuries due to gun shot wounds.

So we know that Obamacare didn’t end the lack of insurance coverage in the US. We also know that it is not going to bend the cost curve. What good does it do?

Here is the WSJ article that gave me the information for this post.