A capitalists panel at the Sioux Falls Downtown Rotary meeting yesterday confirmed that the biggest economic issue challenging South Dakota businesses is the lack of workers:
South Dakota Retailers Association Executive Director Nathan Sanderson said that workforce is still the number one issue that businesses are facing, and that doesn’t look to change headed into next year. What has changed is that supply chains have improved this past year, and they’re operating near pre-pandemic levels. He said that’s a good sign for small businesses in South Dakota, but still high levels of inflation will play a bigger challenge next year.
“Most businesses, high level, would identify workforce still as their number one challenge, inflation as number two, and supply chain as number three,” Sanderson said [Cooper Seamer, “SD Retail Landscape Gearing Up for Challenges in 2024,” KSFY, 2023.12.11].
Let’s compare those factors with the economic assessment Governor Kristi Noem provided in her budget address last week. Noem claimed that South Dakota is “feeling the impact of burdensome regulations from the Biden Administration.” Sanderson doesn’t cite federal regulation as issue #1, #2, or #3 challenging South Dakota retailers.
Noem asserted that “job numbers will continue to grow” thanks to her bad-plumber ads, but Sanderson says job numbers still aren’t growing fast enough and the lack of workers remains the biggest challenge to doing business in South Dakota.
Noem said multiple times that “inflation has risen”. While Sanderson says “high levels of inflation” remains the second-biggest problem for retailers, he should acknowledge that inflation has been decreasing since June 2022. Even with a small up-hiccup this September, the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes have knocked down four-fifths of the pandemic-recovery inflation spike that began in early 2021 from the ridiculously (and dangerously?) low levels of 2020.
Noem didn’t mention supply chain issues, perhaps because she can’t make political hay out of one of the Biden Administration’s noteworthy successes: helping supply chains work out their pandemic kinks. Supply chain problems drove much of the inflation spike, so by strengthening supply chains, President Biden has helped ease inflation.
Sanderson cites three big challenges to South Dakota retailers: workforce, inflation, and supply chains. The last two are national problems, and the federal government is fixing them. The first and biggest, lack of workers, is a chronic issue in South Dakota, and the millions of dollars in advertising featuring Governor Noem as comic spokesmodel aren’t fixing it.
Shouldn’t a workforce shortage be driving wage inflation? (Which in turn drives price inflation.)
Inflation discussions will be infuriating to me because they are done through the lens of the owner class: how can the investor/owner/stockholder’s tribulation be minimized when reducing inflation instead of looking at how to bring down inflation without devastating the living conditions of the working class.
‘Worker Shortage’ really means nobody wants to work for me for the crappy wages I’m offering.
Offer plumbers $1,000,000 signup bonus and you won’t have a plumber shortage.
‘Skilled Workers’ means I only want to hire those that other companies invested time and money into training.
Affordable HOUSING….HOUSING….HOUSING and huge lack of in South Dakota. There’s your HUGE elephant in the room issue South Dakota continues to ignore in the labor shortage.
Worker shortage is everywhere. It’s not a Blue or Red thing. It’s a population thing. For all of you “pro-choicers” out there, consider this.
What if the 52 million Americans that have been aborted hadn’t been? Where would the workforce be today? Where would tax flow be? Where would the funds of Social Security, Medicare etc be?
Yes, I know. Some would be on the govt doles. But consider if we had 52 million more Americans today.
The worker shortage can be solved by addressing and solving these 4 issues
Wages raise them
Affordable housing build this
Affordable health coverage publicly funded
Quality and available day care.
Build it, they will come or maybe even stay.
Forcing women to bear children is not a moral solution to a workforce shortage. Granting amnesty to undocumented workers and speeding up border processing of migrants are moral solutions.
Clint suggests that punishing women with 20 years of indentured servitude to an unwanted squatter will solve labor shortages down the road. He suggests this because he thinks the women had sex without god’s blessing. I am in favor of retroactive abortion of folks like Clint.
Is there really a worker shortage or is there an owner glut? Do we have too many people who believe they need to be the ones in charge? Are there essential services that we are going without? I know that the answer to these questions is SOME yes, but that also means that our owners need to give up the fantasy of ownership.
Retroactive and mandatory abortions of magats. Save their pea brains from a life time of interfering with other people’s lives.
I would like to second everything about Cory’s comment @ 2023-12-13 06:54!
It’s pretty simple, really. There are lots of workers out there if you have the right policies. Here they are: pay more and increase immigration.
Here are a few more policies that would assist in attracting workers. Housing and child care must meet the needs of the workforce. Failure of state and local governments to meet those needs ends up turning workers away. Employers need to have training departments that can quickly get workers productive, and incentives that keep workers from job hopping.
I didn’t say ANY of that. You’re adding and assuming your own thing. I simply stated that if Roe V Wade was not there and the 53 million Americans weren’t aborted it is pretty clear to see that from an economic standpoint we’d have workers, more tax revenue and a balance to off-set growth of spending and entitlements and the worker shortage.
Don’t view this by your political lens. Simply add the number of Americans to the equation. Then shut up.
I don’t believe 57 million viable babies would have been born. I don’t know any woman who has had an abortion just because. I know several who have aborted dead babies, deformed babies that would not have survived, and babies from rape. Where did you get that number and why do you think women should suffer?
Is health care only for men? I say outlaw the Viagra or any meds that enhance sexual performance for men. Maybe God wanted some men limp and fatherless. And why in this country are men not responsible for their offspring?
No, Clinton, you don’t get to make a claim and then deny its moral implications. You implied in your first response and said clearly in your second response that the nation would be better off economically if it has never legalized abortion. That claim says those of us seeking to restore abortion rights are promoting economic harm. I responded by asserting that the moral harm of reducing women to gestational slavery outweighs the economic harm you allege. In other words, rather than simply adding numbers to the equation, I also add moral considerations. I can’t just take your numerical claim and “shut up”—you only desire my silence because you want readers to consider your statement as a somehow unassailable argument that legalizing abortion is a bad idea, an argument that you further try to shield behind the specious claim that you’re not being left or right or political in any way (“Oh, look at me, I’m not some political player making a political argument, I’m just an independent citizen making an independent economic observation”). My response to your unavoidably political claim is necessary to prevent others from picking up your claim and using it as a political cudgel against women’s rights.
Pulling us back to the main topic, consider Clinton’s comment in the context of an argument I could make to why South Dakota is chronically short on workers: “If Governor Kristi Noem weren’t there and thousands of decent, talented young people weren’t driven to move away to the Twin Cities or Denver or other more tolerant places, it is pretty clear to see that from an economic standpoint we’d have workers and more tax revenue.”
First, I wouldn’t dodge the moral and political implication of that claim. My claim states as clearly as Clinton’s that the condition I posit, the “if” clause” is a state of affairs that I advocate and want others to embrace. Kristi Noem should be gone from the political scene, not promoting her party’s narrow-minded exclusivity and driving people to move away.
Second, my hypothetical involves less doubt about the economic impact. The aborted babies Clinton tries to imagine into the workforce are humans de novo, with no known characteristics other than their moms didn’t want to become pregnant at that time. The emotional, health, economic factors mitigating against their desire to bear those pregnancies could make that fetal pool of potential workers less likely to succeed socioeconomically than the general population. Any individual can defy expectations and statistical assumptions, but speaking of millions of unwanteed pregnancies requires us to engage in statistical assumptions, which here suggest Clinton’s fancied influx of workers from forced pregnancies may not have been the net economic gain he wants us to believe.
My hypothetical, on the other hand, deals with adults that we lose, rational actors responding to socioeconomic factors. Noem and her party make narrow-minded statements and policies. They and their cronies build the state on promises of low taxes and low wages, which starves public resources and stacks the employer pool with similarly minded firms inclined not to invest in workers. Reasonable people with talent and the ability to seek other options do so elsewhere—and the influx of alleged Freedom™-seekers never seems to fully replace them—leaving a depleted local labor pool with a disproportionate number of people who lack the spirit, talent, or resources to pursue new opportunities—i.e., people who tend to be less innovative and productive, further sandbagging the South Dakota economy.
Third, South Dakotans have tested Clinton’s hypothetical and proven it doesn’t work. South Dakotans have the highest fertility rate in the nation. We spent the last generation having fewer abortions and more babies. By Clinton’s logic, South Dakota’s workforce should be relatively strong—we should at least have a less drastic worker shortage than other states that are all dealing with the same problem of the post-WW2 Baby Boom retirement. Instead, the workforce shortage remains as bad as a decade ago, when Governor Daugaard spent $5M on Clint’s old firm Manpower to recruit workers to know lasting avail.
Those three points support my overarching claim that both the Governor’s and now Clinton’s efforts to lay South Dakota’s economic underperformance at the feet of national liberal politics ignore the facts that (a) national liberal politics are this state’s real bread and butter and (b) we keep wasting some of the bread and butter with specific local socioeconomic and cultural malfunction.
Zombie foetuses will fix worker shortages? Who knew?