It's getting hard to stay upbeat: "University of Michigan economists say the state's hard times will stick around for the rest of the year and into 2010. Economic forecaster George Fulton says he and colleague Joan Crary 'see some improvement, but it will continue to be slow and difficult.' They predict unemployment will average 15.8 percent in 2010, the highest rate since the current counting system began in 1970."
If these numbers hold, Michigan will run a jobless rate about 50 percent higher than the national average. At some point, though, a natural economic process should occur: People will leave where the jobs aren't and go to where the jobs are. Based on the economic trends, I'm convinced that Michigan cannot sustain 10 million people. Could the state be prosperous at 8 million is the real question for policy-makers. Being smaller is not automatically a bad thing.
More important than the size of the population is what are the economic opportunities here? Things are just not looking good at all, much fuss was made recently about the Orion GM plant
reopening but the rate of pay will
be at the new $15.00 an hour. A survivor wage but not exactly prosperity.
Related to this is an interesting
article in todays New York Times
about how the job retraining of laidoff auto workers in Michigan has been largely a bust as many of them can't find work for what
they retrained for and nobody really seems to have a clue here as to what exactly the jobs of the future are in Michigan. "No worker left behind" is largely a
joke.
Posted by: JRS | July 06, 2009 at 04:07 PM