The Economy: Everybody Hustlin’

MAKE … THAT … DOLLAR …

Times are tight.  Jobs – and dollars – are scarce.  It’s a perfect storm of overregulation, overtaxation and the perpetuation of welfare statism/ crony capitalism that sucks resources from productive enterprises and channels them into subsidized lethargy.

Oh … and all the free market solutions that ought to be implemented to turn things around will never be implemented  because the nation’s political class and corporate-fed media long ago sold out to the special interests benefiting from all the fleecing.

Anyway … (stepping off of soap box) …

If you want (another) look at the “New Normal,” at what the era of insanely big government has wrought in these United States of America, look no further than a report in The Wall Street Journal  this week highlighting data from the nonprofit Freelancers’ Union.

According to the organization, 34 percent of the American workforce – or 53 million workers – are currently employed on a “contingent” basis. In other words, they’re temps, part-timers or freelancers.

Whoa …

“This isn’t your parents’ labor market,” notes WSJ reporter Lauren Weber.

Clearly not …

Also interesting?  Officials in Washington, D.C. – while obsessing over the increasingly meaningless unemployment rate – don’t keep tabs on this figure.  Why not?  Because according to former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the number of freelancers “is likely to be large and growing and there is no political advantage in signaling that fact.”

There’s also little sense that anything is going to change anytime soon …

According to the latest data from the Pew Center, 58 percent of Americans say jobs are difficult to find where they live compared to 33 percent who say they are readily available.  When asked about “good jobs,” 71 percent say they are difficult to find compared to 26 percent who say they are readily available.