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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (24587)	10/17/2004 2:49:50 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

As my husband is fond of saying back in the late 70s you couldn't buy a job. We had double digit inflation and double digit unemployment. CETA was Title I legislation passed along with what we know as Humphrey Hawkins in 1978 or 79. What you are familiar with is the part of the legislation that requires the Fed Chairman to report to both houses of Congress twice yearly. It has now expired. The gist of the legislation was to create largely community service jobs using the Title I money allocated and to put an additional requirement on the Federal reserve to conduct policy in such a way as to promote full employment. Back then it was assumed that the Fed couldn't fight inflation without sacrificing jobs, that unemployment was the logical outcome of raising interest rates to cool demand for funds, that inflation was in fact made worse by low rates of unemployment. In other words the Philips curve was in full force even though it had been largely discredited by numerous economists. The Philips Curve is a little like Newtonian physics in that it works great in most situations and is not per say wrong just not applicable in a whole universe of conditions. The CETA program was a total joke even though it was suppose to follow the tradition of the WPA. We were in a depression of sorts, an inflationary depression. It was set up with the idea that it would give jobs to those who had the hardest time getting one, the disenfranchised as it were, but what happened in practice is what happens in most of these programs, the people who got the jobs were not those who walked into the office and applied who were most in need, but those who happened to know someone who knew someone who was working as a supervisor. The jobs were mostly "make work" jobs that offered little in the way of training for the private sector and required little from the people holding them short of showing up every day. What is the worst part of these low paying "make work" jobs is that people don't get exposed to others who might lead to the next better paying job. In order to make progress it helps for people who have grown up in say a situation where no one in their immediate circle of family and friends works at a decent good paying job that requires skill and training to be exposed to people who have these kinds of jobs, to be exposed to people outside their immediate circle. A private sector job can do that no matter how crappy the job might be. In high school, during the summers, I worked as a domestic for a wealthy family. I took care of the kids,cooked, and cleaned. There is no lower paying job in America than that one ($30 a week plus room and board for 6 days a week) but I was exposed to people who are very successful and they, willingly or not, passed on a great deal of their knowledge to me. Plus I learned how to speak and dress, two skills you need to get a job that pays a decent salary. The most important thing I learned was that they weren't any smarter than I was, that I could do what they did. At any rate those of my friends who took these CETA jobs didn't make the early connections they needed to continue up the ladder. I can look back at my first real job in my chosen profession, photography, as a photographic assistant to a photographer. It was the most important connection I ever made. About five years ago I made a list of all my clients and traced them back to the original contact and 95% came from that photographer who is still a client of mine. An enormous amount of my success is due to my association with just one person. When you aggregate people who are largely on the outside into these government jobs programs this is the equivalent of segregating them into a ghetto. The unspoken message is that without government assistance they can't compete, that they aren't good enough to compete in the real world. The exact same thing happens to people who get jobs beyond their ability due to family connections. They (as well as everyone else in the company) see themselves not as having gotten their success through their own personal accomplishments but through some accident of birth. Real confidence and self worth comes not from simply making money but from knowing you earned what you made through your own hard work.