That said, let's be honest: There are a lot of military folks who are just nuts, especially as we've seen the Pentagon lower the bar on who may enter. (Felons are alright, so long as they're not gay.)
The prison group should really be divided into two categories: Those in for serious crimes (murder, rape, etc), and those in for petty and sometimes victimless crimes (drugs). The US throws a lot of people in jail for really stupid reasons, consequently making them far less likely to become gainfully employed when they leave, and many in that camp would, I suspect, become gainfully employed. They'd likely not have been rich if they'd avoided prison, but many would at least have working-class jobs that paid the bills. Knowing quite a few people who work (or have worked) in and around the prison system, my impression is that it destroys a lot people who could've done good things.
So both are fair points, I think, and certainly if we standardized the measures we'd find the differences in unemployment much smaller and perhaps even nonexistent. If I had to pin down a real unemployment rate with those factors in mind, I'd put it at about 6%, give or take a bit. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
To really get a handle on job market comparisons we'd have to allow for all the differences: how much of the US military is really a work programme for poor people? How much of the French free college education is about reducing the numbers of unemployed? What about the UK hiding people in disability, unnecessary workers in state supported jobs across Europe and the US. How much of the US military spending is really just supporting jobs that would be otherwise lost in key electoral districts? The Irish health system is fucked partly because there are a pile of useless admin staff scattered across the country doing make-work so that there are jobs in country towns. How does that distort the job market? To what extent?
All countries, whether inadvertently or on purpose, distort their unemployment pictures with the public sector, and we'd have to take on quite an accounting project to get the full story.
My main point was that we couldn't look at it in a static model, in which those in prison or in the military would be unemployed but for being in prison or the military. Certainly many would be, especially among the prison population. I don't deny that for a moment. But many would not be. A lot of it is simply a matter of resources being shifted one way or another -- or, in the case of prison, taking people, some who would be productive, and making them unproductive.
As always, macroeconomics doesn't lend itself to clean mathematics. It's murky. Better to focus on trends and how the degree of impact from different variables may affect things than to say "X means y." It's sort of like trying to call the point at which we hit recession. We can all see a recession coming in many cases, but when it actually hits is anybody's guess. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
Yes, frankly, I think macro-economic indicators (as far as I understand them), are a mess, along with methods of observation. The trouble is the big numbers are wheeled out and used to keep everyone's mind rolling on the same tracks. I think it's worth taking them apart and putting them together again to see what they're made of, and particularly identifying where and how they're made of bs, or don't mean what they're plugged to mean.
Now, if income growth is lagging for such a large number of people that the indicators clearly don't mean shit, I'd think we start to see dissatisfaction in polling on the economy. And, indeed, that's exactly what we've seen in America. The press hasn't understood it, but anyone who's familiar with the important numbers can tell exactly what the public is so pissed off about: The typical American's income changes have ranged from falling to only slightly rising over the current business cycle. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
How much of the US military spending is really just supporting jobs that would be otherwise lost in key electoral districts?
Much of it. Especially when Congress starts talking about base closures every few years, it's primarily an issue of moving money from the fast-growing urban centers to the long-declining rural areas. The small towns can't compete with the Philadelphias and Bostons, let alone the New Yorks, on labor supply or skill level, and they tend to be towns that were built around a single industry or even a single factory. Now that those industries are gone, they cling to military bases. It's basically a redistribution mechanism. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
