The root cause of high American unemployment: Lazy Employers

Ever wonder why the American economy has been so tight? Why there have been so few jobs out there? Many people will flat out say "It's the economy" but not tell you the underlying causes. It started out with banks screwing homeowners over with loans specifically crafted to go haywire at a certain point, leading to numerous foreclosures of homes, businesses, and business building facilities, which in turn resulted in job loss. But the recovery has been incredibly slow and cumbersome given how quickly the economy tanked. Why?

Since the economy tanked, employers have started doing the unthinkable: they first raised education requirements. People who offered simple minimum-wage jobs decided to require associate's and even bachelor's degrees just to flip burgers and stock shelves! On top of that, employers for higher-paying jobs that already required degrees like that went even further to tack on experience requirements. A bachelor's degree AND five, ten years of experience on top of the education, which alone GIVES people the experience needed? That's absurd.

Every time employers pull these greedy shenanigans, they hamper the economy's recovery tenfold. Why? Because it creates a vicious cycle. The more red tape you tack on that application, the harder and more expensive it gets for people to obtain the experience and education necessary. This in turn sends shockwaves throughout the economy, artificially deflating the demand curve for products and thus causing more employers to join this vicious bandwagon.

Politicians, of course, have tried to curb this approach. The Republicans have tried to use a top-down approach of sending stimulus to billionaires who run businesses. The Denocrats, on the other hand, have put more emphasis on handouts: free health care, vague Social Security disability laws that can be exploited by lawyers to waste the funds on temporary ailments, and government-sanctioned unemployment insurance. However, neither of these approaches are truly effective.

What handouts do, regardless of who they're given to, is make people more and more greedy and lazy. Billionaires, as we've seen with the automotive jerks, tend to greedily waste stimulus money on parties, booze, beer, and, oh yeah, luxury items instead of actually using it to create new jobs. Poor people? They tend to be conditioned to expect handouts instead of knowing that with the right money AND a purpose given to them for the money in question they can truly make a difference.

This, of course, brings us right to the only way this economy can possibly be fixed on a prompt basis: the competition approach. What does this entail? An antitrust tax. A progressive tax that of course falls hard on billionaires, yes, but falls especially hard on billionaires with known market monopolies who throw up unfair barriers to entry for competition that is able to employ more people. And of course, that tax revenue from those monopolies should be put towards an extensive small business scholarship fund. Guess what? Redistributing money from monopolies to competition, not just from the rich to the poor, allows the competition to in turn grow their business and compete with the former monopoly that was once keeping them out. More competition, of course, means a greater number of employers, and thus a greater number of people who can handle the high job demand, ultimately plummeting the unemployment rate.

See, what employers need to realize here: It's their fault that the economy hasn't recovered. It's their fault for placing red tape on the job market as a way to get around taking risks and thus wasting their entrepreneurship out of pure greed. The only way the economy will ever recover is if employers step up to the plate, take the risks that entrepreneurship entails, hire the potential employees that need hiring the most, and put more experienced staff to work training the inexperienced staff instead of minding their own business. Only then will the economy improve, and it's unfortunate that employers can't see this.