Economic Development in Milwaukee Falls Far Short of Meeting Our Needs

Laborers vote with their feet when firms offer no security

By Michael Rosen Dec. 3, 2011 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin’s manufacturers are facing a skilled labor shortage of machinists, operators, craft workers, distributors and technicians. In response, the Milwaukee 7, southeastern Wisconsin’s regional development organization of business and community leaders, has announced a public relations campaign.

News flash: It will take a lot more than branding to solve these labor shortages.

Any solution must start with defining the scope of the problem. Why is there a shortage of the kind of skilled workers that for decades made Milwaukee a destination for manufacturers?

Outsourcing is a huge part of the answer. One day after the M-7′s announcement, Dana Corp. announced it was closing its Milwaukee operations and moving more than 150 jobs to low-wage Kentucky.

Similarly, the Thermo Fisher Scientifica in Two Rivers, which already had moved hundreds of jobs to a Reynosa, Mexico, plant, announced it may shut down entirely.

The list of companies that have offshored or outsourced production reads like a who’s who of Wisconsin’s manufacturing: Briggs & Stratton Corp., A.O. Smith, Rockwell, Badger Meter – and many more.

The loss of family-supporting manufacturing jobs has been going on since the early 1980s. Milwaukee’s working families have had their lives turned upside down by plant closings, downsizings, outsourcings and offshoring. Their experience in manufacturing has meant job loss, declining wages and benefits and economic insecurity.

Take my former student, John. He did everything we ask young workers to do, earning two journeyman cards while working and attending Milwaukee Area Technical College full time. John left Briggs when it began moving jobs to low-wage states and Mexico. But his new employer, Rockwell, began outsourcing to nonunion, low-wage plants even before it eliminated all hourly workers last year. So John started over again at Harley-Davidson. But, a year and a half ago, Harley laid John off.

John’s experience is unfortunately not unique. Almost everyone with roots in this community has a father or mother, aunt, cousin or uncle who has experienced the instability that characterizes manufacturing employment. Nationally, manufacturers shed 2 million jobs during the Great Recession. Wisconsin lost 58,300 manufacturing jobs, 11.6% of its total, between December 2007 and June 2009, the official end of the recession. The state continued to lose manufacturing jobs for several months even after the recession ended. By September 2010, Wisconsin had lost 69,800 manufacturing jobs, 14% of its total.

Laid-off manufacturing workers have summed up this experience with their kids, nieces and nephews. As Mario, a nursing student now after being laid off from a foundry after 16 years, told me, “I have a family, and I need a job with security.”

His attitude is reinforced by the occupational programs at MATC that are most popular and have waiting lists: culinary arts, automotive, heating and air-conditioning, physical therapy, barber and cosmetology, occupational therapy and nursing.

What do they all have in common? These are jobs that cannot be offshored.

Our working-class students are voting with their feet by choosing careers that provide more secure employment. They’ll continue to do so until manufacturers offer the same level of security they find in other occupations or sufficient compensation to justify the insecurity that has characterized manufacturing employment.

What can be done to address this? Manufacturers need to:

• Abandon human resource strategies that treat employees like variable costs instead of the strategic assets they are. Offering security will attract students to skilled manufacturing careers.
• Revive apprenticeship programs that were eliminated or downsized in the 1980s under the illusion that automation would result in workerless factories.
• Insist that state government restore the 30% slashed from Wisconsin’s technical colleges in the last budget. Technical colleges train the very skilled and technical workers that manufacturers need. Yet, over the past 20 years, their state funding has been cut by more than 50%.
• Support public school investments in reviving technical education and participate in the state’s youth apprenticeship program.
• End free trade deals that provide countries that do not have or enforce labor and environmental laws, an unfair advantage over responsible American manufacturers.

Solving labor shortages requires more than public relations.

Henry Ford recognized this when he doubled his hourly workers wages to $5 a day. Ford’s 400% turnover rate and 10% absentee rate vanished as hard, undesirable work was transformed into desirable employment and at the same time created a market for his cars when his workers finally could afford them.

Wisconsin had a similar experience in the 1990s when hospitals were facing acute nursing shortages. In response, they increased nurses pay and instituted incentives such as signing bonuses. Enrollments in nursing programs soared, technical colleges invested in nursing education and students flocked to occupations that promised employment security and decent compensation.

It’s ironic that the area’s business leaders, who are among the fiercest proponents of market solutions to most problems, are reluctant to use pricing to solve the skilled worker shortage. Any Econ 101 student knows that pricing efficiently allocates resources.

John Schmid of the Journal Sentinel recently blogged that prices should rise in response to shortages – causing quantity supplied, in this case skilled labor, to increase. Think about crude oil, nurses or Green Bay Packers tickets in the secondary ticket market.

As Melanie Holmes, a vice president at Manpower Group, said, “The No.1 reason why employers are having trouble filling these positions is they’re not offering pay that the candidates are demanding.”

I applaud the M-7′s decision to focus on advanced manufacturing. But it will take more than glossy brochures and television ads to persuade the next-generation workforce that becoming a skilled manufacturing worker is a stable and secure career path.

Michael Rosen is an economics professor at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

At least 25 top United States companies paid more to their CEO’s in 2010 than they did to the federal government in taxes

Where Pay for Chiefs Outstrips U.S. Taxes

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI Published: August 31, 2011

Verizon’s chief, Ivan Seidenberg, earned $18.1 million in 2010; the company got a tax refund.

John Donahoe, eBay’s chief, collected a compensation package over $12 million, while eBay got a $113 million federal refund.

The companies — which include household names like eBay, Boeing, General Electric and Verizon — averaged $1.9 billion each in profits, according to the study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal-leaning research group. But a variety of shelters, loopholes and tax reduction strategies allowed the companies to average $304 million each in tax benefits — which can be taken as a refund or used as write-off against earnings in future years.

The chief executives of those companies were paid an average of more than $16 million a year, the study found, a figure substantially higher than the $10.8 million average for all companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.

California Representative Maxine Waters Makes Demands on President Obama

President Obama: Please Come Out Swinging, Call Congress Back and Start with a Plan to Rebuild Our Infrastructure

The American people are suffering and are asking for leadership . The present strategy toward  Congress just isn’t working. If Republicans won’t cooperate or compromise then isolate them for all to see.  Last week Rep. Maxine Waters set the tone demanding action now.

On Sunday David Axelrod, President Obama’s political advisor speaking on ABC, muddled through a defense of the President’s present lack of action. Axelrod was embarrassingly without vision or a plan.  We need a jobs plan that the American people can wrap their arms around. If Republicans won’t support it, take the fight to the American people.

Following is a video of Rep. Maxine Waters calling on  President Obama to take action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP44ngv9hZI

Anarchy in the UK

London

Maria Margaronis August 9, 2011 from the Notion, a blog of the Nation magazine

Perhaps the whole point of a riot is to defy explanation: it’s an eruption of the irrational, a shattering of glass and boundaries, a testosterone-fueled roar that briefly flips anger and emptiness into something like ecstasy. What’s in the minds of the young men (and women, too) in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool who’ve sent great sheets of flame rising into the August night, devouring local businesses that it took years to build; who’ve turned plate glass to spiderwebs with one crack of a brick; who’ve gone home with their backpacks stuffed with cell phones, Nike trainers, X-boxes and Wiis? Well, wouldn’t we like to know, we middle-class types with access to a blog and an analysis, a “network” and a future?

Today Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson returned reluctantly from their  vacations to confront the arson and looting that have spread through Britain’s cities over the last three nights, like a pair of Eton prefects summoned to contain the fifth form. Parliament has been recalled for the second time this summer (the first was over phone hacking by Murdoch’s News International); 450 people have already been arrested; Cameron has promised 6,000 more police on London’s streets this evening. But will it be enough?

Missy, who works at a small shop selling jeans and sneakers down the road from where I live, shrugs when I ask her what she’s going to do tonight. The metal grille was down and properly locked yesterday; “they” trashed the place anyway. “They know the shop,” she says. “They went straight upstairs where we keep the expensive stuff, the £300 jeans.” A few blocks on, outside a smashed-up cycle shop where twisted bikes lie like skeletons on the pavement, a forensic expert carefully dusts glass with fingerprint powder. Does she think she’ll find anything? Another shrug. In Dalston, next to Hackney which saw some of the worst rioting, the Turkish Kurdish community have taken charge themselves, standing guard outside their shops, some of them with baseball bats.

The blue touchpaper that lit the conflagration was the killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black father of four, by armed police in Tottenham, one of London’s poorest boroughs, as he rode in a minicab; he had a handgun but there’s been no claim that he made a move to fire it. A small crowd of local residents gathered at the police station to demand explanations; though the protesters were peaceful, the police were not forthcoming. By nightfall, against the wishes of Duggan’s relatives, rioting had broken out in Tottenham and elsewhere. Police cars and a double decker bus were set on fire and shop windows were smashed, mostly by teenage boys.

What began as an outburst of anger against police violence soon morphed into an orgy of nocturnal “shopping” as kids broke into sports and electronics shops, cellphone stores and supermarkets. A brave woman in Hackney gave a streetcorner sermon amid heaps of litter, excoriating the rioters for turning grief to greed: “This is about a fucking man who got shot in Tottenham. This isn’t about having fun on a riot and busting up the place. Get real, black people, get real. If we’re fighting for a cause let’s fight for a fucking cause.” But in the deprived neighbourhoods of Britain’s crumbling cities, consumerism is a more accessible dream than commitment or community.

And so it has gone on, night after night since then, frightening, unpredictable and uncontainable. The police are overwhelmed; the politicians nervously continue to plough their furrows. “Sheer criminality,” says Home Secretary Teresa May, as if any attempt to understand what’s at the root of all this rage would imply condoning it. Labour politicians flirt with the temptation to blame government spending cuts, as if such fury could build up in a matter of mere months. Of course the cuts don’t help: they are the final straw, the irrefutable evidence that the poor are now dispensable, outside society. Nor does the larger sense that nobody’s in charge, that the economy’s in freefall, that bankers have been looting the public purse for years, and that our leaders have no idea what to do about any of it. There is a doomsday feeling on the streets of London: time to grab what you can, burn it down and live for now, because who knows what’s coming for us all tomorrow.

But it’s taken years to brew the toxic mix of hopelessness, frustration and disenfranchisement, envy, anger and boredom, greed and selfishness, humiliation and recklessness that’s erupted in Britain this week–years in which the gap between rich and poor grew wider, racism was allowed to fester, consumerism and celebrity culture replaced community. While we in the middle classes got on with our oh-so-busy lives, averting our eyes from the poverty just a few blocks away, sending our kids to schools where there are other “motivated parents,” talking politics, we allowed the rifts in our own neighbourhoods to deepen until they became almost unbridgeable.

This morning, down the road, people stared at the broken shops, shaking their heads in disbelief. “It’s mad,” they said. “Just mad.” Small groups of women set out with brooms and dustpans to sweep up the broken glass. There is a kind of solidarity taking shape, a wish to protect what we have, now that it’s under threat. People are talking to each other, asking if everything’s all right. The challenge, when all this dies down, will be to stay awake, to keep on doing that, until solidarity spreads.

 

Present Economic Crisis and Subprime Mortgages

Subprime Contagion

Christopher Hayes August 10, 2011 Nation magazine

I moved to Washington in July 2007, at a time when what was then quaintly referred to as the “subprime crisis” was starting to cause some consternation on Wall Street and Capitol Hill. With housing prices falling, banks found themselves holding on to packages of subprime loans that were hemorrhaging value. Every day, it seemed, another bank announced it was writing down a bunch of these loans, which were just starting to be called toxic assets, and the total of such write-downs was, by July, already tens of billions of dollars.

One of the first stories I wrote for The Nation from DC was a dispatch from a Joint Economic Committee hearing, at which Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke sought to calm the nerves of lawmakers made anxious by the cascade of worrying headlines. Bernanke acknowledged that some of the trends in the subprime market were worrying, but he said that the problems were, at least for the moment, contained. There was, he told the committee, “scant evidence of spillovers from housing to other components of final demand.” In other words: yes, there are some clouds on the horizon, but no, the sky isn’t falling.

But Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings, whose Baltimore district was facing as many as 12,000 foreclosures a month, found Bernanke’s tone just a bit too calm for his liking: “As I sat here and I listened to you, it seems like you have painted a very rosy picture…but if you came and walked through my district, Mr. Chairman, I think people would be surprised that you seem so calm.”

Bernanke was defensive: “Congressman, first, I don’t know how you got the impression that I was unconcerned about foreclosures.”

“I didn’t say you were not concerned,” Cummings shot back. “I just said you seem to be pretty calm about it.”

We now know Cummings was right: Bernanke and everyone else at the helm in Washington and Wall Street should have been a lot more panicked. But our governing and financial elites’ removal from the on-the-ground ravages of the subprime market meant they were very slow to recognize the magnitude of the unfolding disaster. The ship sprang a leak in the lower decks, flooding the servants’ quarters, and no one up top much cared. The cocktails continued to flow, the band continued to play and the party rollicked on Wall Street throughout the housing bubble, even as working-class homeowners in Baltimore drowned, as their lives and wealth and equities and homes were destroyed. But the water kept coming in, rising deck by deck, until eventually the music stopped, the party ended and, even if only briefly in retrospect, it looked like the entire thing might go down.

Given what a close call it was for those on that top deck, you would think the most important lesson they would take away from the near miss is this: you ignore the fate of those on the bottom deck at your peril. An economy divided into “subprime” and “prime” is dangerously precarious. The predations tolerated in the former will, sooner or later, come to wreak havoc on those who inhabit the latter.

And yet, astonishingly, four years later this lesson has gone almost entirely unheeded. Our governing institutions responded with nearly unprecedented swiftness and force to save, and then revive, the pillars of the prime economy—the banks and corporate America. Yet they are leaving the subprime economy to fend for itself, to suffer through the worst privation in seventy years. “If your personal wealth is predominantly in capital markets,” says Damon Silvers, a lawyer at the AFL-CIO who served on the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, “well, then, you had a hell of a scare, but you’re 70 percent of the way back to where you were in 2007. If your personal wealth is predominantly in your home, you’re fucked. And approximately 80 percent of people in the US, their only asset is in their home.”

The bet that those who run the prime economy are making is the same one they made during the years that preceded the crash: that they can continue to profit enormously even as the broader economy fails to deliver for the majority of its participants. The last time around, this produced a housing and credit bubble that ended in ruin and almost took the financial elite with it. It’s very difficult to imagine this latest iteration producing a better result.

In fact, it was precisely this ominous thought that largely drove the panicked August selling on Wall Street. Even financial markets and the investor class are waking up to the fact that there’s only so much that corporate profits can grow if American consumers don’t have jobs or assets and are still neck deep in debt. Much as they may wish to finally and definitively detach the prime economy from the subprime one, the two remain stubbornly tethered.

The market panic was the first inkling of what, for our elites, is a long-overdue realization, one they’ve done everything in their considerable power to avoid in the post-crisis age: that extreme inequality isn’t just bad for those on the bottom; in the long run, it’s ruinous for those on the top as well.

Stock Market Nose Dive: Response to Republican Policies Cause Markets to take Worst Dive Since 2008

“…uncertainty created by the debate in the United States to raise the debt ceiling had unnerved European markets as United States investors had become increasingly reluctant to lend to European banks.

Stocks Dive on Fears of Global Slowdown

By GRAHAM BOWLEY Published: August 4, 2011 NYTimes

Stocks around the world fell sharply Thursday on intensifying investor fears about a slowdown in global economic growth and worries about Europe’s ongoing debt crisis, which is centered now on Italy and Spain.

Stock market indexes in the United States and Europe dropped more than 4 percent as Japan intervened to weaken its currency and the European Central Bank began buying bonds to try to calm markets.

At the close, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 60.27 points, or 4.78 percent, to 1,200.07. The Dow Jones industrial average was off 512.76 points, or 4.31 percent, to 11,383.68, and the Nasdaq was down 136.68, or 5.08 percent, to 2,556.39.

There have been 17 days since the beginning of 2008 with single-day drops of 4 percent or more – 13 in 2008 and 4 in 2009.

Following accelerating falls over the past two weeks, the stock market is now officially in “correction” territory, defined as a drop of 10 percent to 20 percent since the latest peak.

The S.&P. 500 has fallen 10.6 percent since its recent high of 1,363.61 on April 29, underlining the new negative investment sentiment about the economy and Europe.

“We are now in correction mode,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor’s. “We could have another couple of weeks to go before it bottoms.”

The last time the market was in a correction was last summer, when it fell 16 percent before recovering.

A fear haunting markets is that the United States economy may be heading for a double-dip recession. And even after a second major rescue package for Greece and the agreement to raise the debt ceiling in the United States, investors are concerned that world leaders have not done enough to address fragile underlying economic growth, while Europe’s debt problems have moved on to the much bigger economies of Italy and Spain.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond giant Pimco, said investors were selling risky assets like stocks “globally prompted by concerns about the weakening economic outlook, spreading contagion in Europe and insufficient policy responses.”

With Thursday’s dive, the three major American indexes had erased all of the gains made so far in 2011, with the S.&P. and Nasdaq markedly below the start of the year.

In afternoon trading, the Dow, an index of 30 blue-chip stocks, was about 9.4 percent off of its most recent closing high of 12,810.54, reached on April 29. But it was 18 percent below its all-time high of 14,164.53, on Oct. 9, 2007.

Unnerved by policymakers’ apparent inability to get ahead of Europe’s festering debt crisis, European stock markets turned sharply negative across the board.

In Britain, stocks closed down 3.43 percent. In Germany, the DAX index dropped 3.4 percent. In France, the CAC 40 closed down 3.9 percent.

“This is the worst it has been in Europe,” said Jens Nordvig, currency economist at Nomura Securities in New York. “The current rescue package was not enough to cope with the size of the problems posed by Italy and Spain. We need a new framework that can cope with those two countries, and without it markets are on their own and are falling.”

Major indexes in Italy, Spain, France and Switzerland all closed Thursday more than 20 percent below their 2011 highs, while Germany was off nearly 15 percent and Britain’s decline was more than 11 percent.

The selling has extended to many other markets. Mexican stocks are off almost 14 percent from their highs earlier this year, and Brazil’s major index has lost more than a quarter of its value.

Yields on Italian government bonds, already above 6 percent, rose sharply, adding to concerns that the nation’s current debt position is unsustainable. Yields on Spanish debt also increased. This was despite large-scale intervention by the European Central Bank, which for the first time since March began buying bonds in an apparent attempt to prevent the region’s sovereign debt crisis from engulfing Italy.

The markets had expected some concrete action from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Italian’s worsening debt situation in public remarks late Wednesday. But they were disappointed when he defended the country’s fundamentals and said current packages were enough to foster economic growth. The Italian stock market opened up but then slipped sharply.

Since many of Europe’s banks hold the bonds of countries like Italy and Spain, concern is turning to the health of the banking system as these bonds drop in value. With warning signs flashing that some European banks are struggling to fund themselves in increasingly expensive credit markets, the E.C.B. also moved to help weaker banks by expanding its lending to institutions in the euro area at the benchmark interest rate. Bank stocks nevertheless fell sharply in Europe.

Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the E.C.B., said the bank had acted in response to “renewed tensions in some financial markets in the euro area.”

He said that uncertainty created by the debate in the United States to raise the debt ceiling had unnerved European markets as United States investors had become increasingly reluctant to lend to European banks. “It’s clear the entire world is intertwined,” he said. “What happens in the U.S. influences the rest of the world.”

But the E.C.B.’s steps were not enough to help Europe’s bond markets.

Laurent Bilke, an analyst at Nomura in London, said the E.C.B. had been buying government debt of Portugal and Ireland in order to calm these markets. But it had not been buying Italian and Spanish government debt, and that had unnerved investors.

He said the E.C.B. council had also not been united in its decision to take extraordinary measures to intervene in the markets, and that fact had spooked markets.

Minnesota State Government Shuts Down

Republicans Fight for Corporate Power Grab Following Wisconsin, while the poor and middle class are hurt.

The post and live blog below are a collaboration between Patch and HuffPost reporters.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton (D) and top Republican state lawmakers failed to reach a budget deal to avert a government shutdown ahead of a midnight (CST) deadline.

“I really believe I’ve done everything I possibly could and offered everything I could possibly think of,” said Dayton addressing the state of the negotiations from his office on Thursday night. “This is a night of deep sorrow for me because I don’t want to see this shutdown occur.”

The Democratic governor and state GOP lawmakers had been engaged in contentious talks to close the state’s $5 billion budget gap — much of it left behind by GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, who declined to seek a third term in the 2010 election.

To see the full Huffington Post report go to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/01/minnesota-shutdown-2011_n_888363.html

The Rich Get Richer

More for Millionaires

By Al Lewis Wall Street Journal

Just what America needs: richer rich people.

Collectively, U.S. millionaires are going to go from $39 trillion to $87 trillion in wealth by 2020, according to a study the Deloitte Center for Financial Services and Oxford Economics released last week.

Not a word about what happens to hundredaires, thousandaires or even hundred-thousandaires. Perhaps they’ll keep looking for jobs, losing homes to foreclosure and filing for bankruptcy. Or maybe all those trillions will one day trickle down.

Meantime, there has got to be at least one bespectacled, brainiac problem-solver in Washington thinking, “Hmm, trillions? We only need $14 trillion to end the nation’s debt crisis. Thanks, Deloitte.”

Deloitte, however, is not pointing this out for the tax man. This is for bankers, insurance peddlers and wealth managers, so they can find the trillions and collect a fee.

For all the economic misery in the news, there remain nearly 7.8 million households in America with $1 million to $5 million in assets, 2.3 million households with $5 million to $30 million and 496,000 households with more than $30 million, according to the study.

Deloitte projects the assets of these millionaire households will more than double by 2020. Why? Simple compounding of reasonable investment gains.

“There’s a lot of accumulated wealth already,” Andrew Freeman, one of the study’s co-authors, explains. “The existing pot just carries on growing. It’s a bit like a supertanker that keeps on moving.”

The rich get richer. The income gap widens. And pretty soon there’s a totally unjust disparity between the millionaires and the billionaires.

“Being a ‘millionaire’ in the U.S. is no longer viewed as the milestone of success that it was in the past,” the study notes.

So if you’re in one of those $52,000-a-year-median-income households, you really need to get with it.

America’s definition of rich is so rich, it isn’t funny. It only took $100 million to land on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 1982. Bob Hope got on it for cracking jokes. Today, you need $1 billion. And not even Jerry Seinfeld makes that cut with his paltry $800 million.

I already know two words some of you are thinking of emailing me: class envy.

Let’s be clear: I don’t hate the rich. The rich hate me. They hole themselves up in gated communities. They join exclusive clubs. They buy their own planes so they don’t have to sit next to me in coach. And they often pay a lower tax rate than me. Yet I am rooting for them.

I had feared that by 2020, most of the world’s millionaires would be in China. First goes the manufacturing, then the services, then the jobs, then the millionaires, then the nation. But not according to Deloitte.

In 2000, 55% of the wealth held by the world’s millionaires were held by U.S. millionaires. That figure dropped to 42% this year. But Deloitte sees the number rising slightly to 43% by 2020.

China, Brazil and Russia may fuel the growth of millionaire wealth, but the single largest population of millionaires stays here.

I’d much rather envy our own millionaires than some other country’s millionaires.

—Al Lewis is a columnist for Dow Jones Newswires in Denver. He blogs at tellittoal.com; his email address is al.lewis@dowjones.com

Corporate Welfare Takes Away Your Retirement Plans

By: Ruth Calvo Tuesday April 5, 2011 1:09 am

It’s not surprising to find that the right is planning to cut away basic systems like social security and Medicare/Medicaid.   That’s the cost of giving corporations the welfare that formerly kept their consumer base going.  This has been in the works since the origination of social security, when FDR was called an enemy to his class, and before that.

The original Great Depression was a playing out of the lack of regulation, and government servicing of corporate interests, that the dismally irrational right wing now wants to return to.  The protections of public interest and support systems that keep U.S. citizens from abandonment to the elements have kept the country prosperous by enabling all of us to contribute to the economy.   Without that contribution to the economy, corporate welfare enthusiasts are leaving this consumer economy to the elements,  a.k.a. the free market.

Workers, even though they might not have reasoned the corporate welfare connection through to the end, are waking up to the fact that their future has been taken away.  Almost half are acknowledging that retirement is not on their individual horizon.   In a poll released today, 44% say they will keep working not out of choice, but because their retirement plan hasn’t worked out.

The survey also highlights the particular retirement challenge facing boomers, who are contemplating exiting the work force just as the worst economy in seven decades left them coping with high jobless rates, tattered home values and painfully low interest rates that stunt the growth of savings.

Two-thirds of those still on the job say they will keep working after they retire, a plan shared about evenly across sex, marital status and education lines, the survey finds. That contrasts with the latest Social Security Administration data on what older people are actually doing: Among those age 65-74, less than half earned income from a job in 2008.

Rep. Gwen Moore to Hold Town Hall Meeting March 21 at UWM

Dear Friends,
 
I write to let you know about a town hall meeting I am holding on the Federal Budget next Monday, March 21, 2011 at UWM.
 
We know that where you put your money is where you put your heart.  And we need to be more aware of this than ever as budget battles play out in Washington and in Madison.
 
In Washington, we expect Republicans to follow spending cuts they have already proposed in an appropriations bill with even deeper cuts disproportionately falling on some of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters.  And in Madison, we’ve seen massive protests when Governor Walker blamed the budget in his effort to virtually end public sector unions.
 
Make no mistake about it – getting our debt and deficit under control must be a top priority.  But it is downright immoral to do it on the backs of our working families who struggle to get by every day.
 
As a share of our economy, Federal revenues are they lowest they have been in 60 years.  We cannot balance our budget on cuts alone. We become forced to make deeper and deeper cuts when Republicans in Washington and Madison insist upon corporate tax cuts and other tax breaks we cannot afford. 
 
Budgets are about choices, and to get out of this mess, everyone must share in the pain.  And economist after economist has said that drastic spending cuts will set our economy back just as it is making modest gains.
 
We’re fighting this fight in Washington and a similar one is going on in Madison. 
 
We will not recover if we deny our children education.  We will not recover without a strong middle class.  We will not recover if we leave the most vulnerable behind.

The stakes are high and the time to fight is now.
 
Please join me for a town hall meeting at UWM about the budget next Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:30 p.m.  You’ll have the chance to ask questions about how budget choices can affect you.
 
Details are as follows:
Who:         Congresswoman Gwen Moore and Dr. Andrew Reschovsky of the University of Wisconsin’s La Follette School of Public Affairs
What:        Town Hall Meeting on the Federal Budget
When:       Monday, March 21, 2011 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. 
 
Where:      University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s  Zelazo Center
                    2419 E. Kenwood Avenue,  Milwaukee  

Hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

Gwen Moore
Member of Congress