“The change is not statistically significant”

Ha, that’s funny stuff. If the number went down a full percentage point, they’d be doing somersaults and patting each other’s butts in congratulations.

The tidbit that’s missing. 54,900 jobs created in May, almost all of them part-time. 29,100 full-time jobs lost. Net gain of 25,800 primarily part-time work.

And if we ever achieved “full employment”, with everyone who could work off the welfare and unemployment rolls and working?

Would that usher in a new era of ‘prosperity’ for all?

Or would we still find that the rate prices are advancing exceeds the rate that incomes are, taking both in comparison collectively?

And if this was exactly what we did find, what do you think those charged with running businesses, and the government, would try to do about it?

They can’t employ any more people, on any more mega projects, because with “full employment” everyone’s already working. Maybe they’ll tell us we should all work longer and harder, have two jobs, or maybe three, and that’ll solve the problem. Wait a minute, isn’t that what they’re doing now? Has it solved it? Could it?

Considering that every ‘price’ is the sum total of all the ‘costs’ that went into it, with a varying but generally minor addition for ‘profit’, (without which there is really no point for any business to stay in business and continue to provide the goods or services it is providing), yet all those ‘costs’, at some time or another, were also somebody’s ‘income’, how can the one be reduced without also reducing the other?

Automate, you say? Mass production, more output for less input? Sounds good, but when we automate we no longer have 100% “full employment”. We’ve displaced the man and his ‘income’ with a machine.

But that machine still has ‘costs’, even though we don’t pay it any ‘income’. And those ‘costs’ come through into ‘prices’, and have to be paid by those who we still do pay an ‘income’ to. Even though we now have TWO sets of ‘costs’ and only ONE ‘income’ to liquidate them.

As for mass production, while it’s perfectly true that “unit costs are a function of volume”, and a larger volume produced can reduce the costs of production of each item made, it is still the TOTAL costs of ALL the units made that has to be liquidated. Or there’s no saving.

Consider it a little further, ‘costs’ can be divided into two categories ~ Capital costs, and Operating costs. Capital costs represent money that has already been spent. To buy things to make things with. They can’t be reduced. That money has already gone, it’s bought what it’s bought.

The only reduction can come from Operating costs. But those ‘costs’ are somebody’s CURRENT ‘income’. Reduce one and you also reduce the other. And already, even with 100% “full employment” and everyone who can work working, there is still no way that collective ‘incomes’ can ever equal collective ‘costs’ and the ‘prices’ that they’re based on. The best that can currently be achieved, even with 100% full employment, is that everyone is only enabled to go further and further into debt. Debt we’re never, collectively, going to be able to fully repay. And when you’re in that position, who really calls the shots? You, or who you’re indebted to?