By Michael Randle
We have already written about the void in labor availability and we have for years. That’s been an issue for more than a decade, but it hasn’t been brought to the attention of the mainstream folks – or even some so-called experts — until recently.
Some very smart people still are not familiar with our worker shortages or the reasons behind the shortages. I was tooling around town one Saturday morning this summer, listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” when some Ted Talk dude was interviewed. His Ted Talk subject was about the fact that young couples are reluctant to have children because they do not believe they can afford a child. Uh, truly? That is not news, there, amigo. Ha estado sucediendo durante años!
He went on to “reveal” that the challenges in the labor department facing this country “could” have a dramatic effect on the economy as a whole, including funding of social services most of us have paid for, including Social Security and Medicare.
Really? And the Ted Talk editors approved him as a presenter? That means the Ted Talk program’s upper management – and even its editor — does not know much about the issue because it has been around for a long time in this country, most notably in the Northeast and Midwest, two regions that are losing population to the West and the South each year in herds.
So, again, we have written repeatedly about the labor situation, which is dire. Then the pandemic arrived and to the fault of no one, the nation’s economy hit rock bottom the first half of 2020 and improved slightly in the second half.
Since, it has been revived, but few are sure of where the economy is going, up or down. We are not in a recession, as some claim. We may be soon enough. But the lack of knowledge of where we are going is so disturbing if a “Ted Talk” presenter is just getting the message that was clear-as-day eight years ago.
