It’s Called DEFLATION Folks

Courtesy of Karl Denninger, The Market Ticker 

It’s Called DEFLATION Folks

Never mind the man behind the curtain, who won’t utter the word:

The Labor Department reported Thursday that productivity jumped at an annual rate of 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter, even better than an initial estimate of a 6.2 percent growth rate. Unit labor costs fell at a rate of 5.9 percent, a bigger drop than the 4.4 percent decline initially estimated.

In the real world this means:

• Work harder and get more done.
   
• Get paid less.
   
• Suck it up, don’t complain, or you’re fired.

That’s all.

And by the way, reduced pay per unit of work spells DEFLATION.

Now here’s the problem: We have huge public-sector labor unions that are resisting this force.  Yet this force is exactly what has to happen in order to bring the economy back into balance.

We have “advanced” promises made to these people – $200,000+ pensions and other similar obscenities – even though doing so is a ponzi scheme that is impossible to maintain.  We have continually cow-towed and pandered to these unions, including educators, police and fire and all other manner of public sector employees with wage increases that exceed growth in aggregate output per-person when one counts both salary and benefits.

This, of course, cannot continue.  It is yet another example of the expanding gap that opens up between two exponential functions – for those who have forgotten my favorite pair chart (two exponential curves, one with a slightly-higher exponent than the other), here it is again:

I understand that everyone wants to avoid taking the pain.  I understand that everyone claims that “its not fair!”

None of this changes the facts.  You cannot continually offshore your better-paying labor to China for the purpose of being able to have a $30 DVD player, destroying the $40/hour skilled job base and replacing it with $7/hour burger flippers and espresso-shot-pullers, and maintain the ability to commit compound annual growth rates of 5, 6, 7% or more to public-sector employees.  Doing so inevitably destroys the tax base necessary to meet those commitments, and once the destruction has occurred it cannot be un-done.

You cannot falsely-report “growth” that is in fact no such thing, but rather is simply the addition of more debt, thereby creating false demand that never existed on an organic basis, and continue this process forever.

The person who loses their job can continue to spend as if they have not – for a while.  They can run up…

Read the original story at Phil’s Stock World