On His Jobs Tour, Obama Touts Amazon Jobs That Are Literally Out Of Reach [View all]

[onehandle]

Those jobs that President Barack Obama just touted Tuesday afternoon in Chattanooga, Tenn., are literally beyond reach of most of the people who might fill them.

The president visited an Amazon warehouse on the city's industrial periphery to spotlight a hopeful surge in recent hiring, part of his campaign to urge job creation as the fix for middle class decline. But the first part of landing a job is getting to the workplace. Getting to the Amazon warehouse is a formidable challenge for anyone lacking a car: The Chattanooga bus system doesn't go there.

This disconnect between available jobs and the public transit system is a problem across many major American cities. It is a problem normally discussed in isolation, as if public transportation were some sort feel-good, clean air-generating pursuit for endangered species-loving people who eat wheat grass. In reality, our shortage of public transportation represents a full-blown crisis at the center of the explanation for how millions of Americans have found themselves exiled from working life.

Nearly 40 million working-age Americans reside in parts of metropolitan areas that effectively lack public transportation, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. Another Brookings study found that in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas, nearly half of all jobs were more than 10 miles beyond the downtown core. Two-thirds of the jobs in these cities were beyond range of a 90-minute commute using mass transit.

For people who can afford cars, the takeaway from these numbers is straightforward: Drive to work and hope you keep earning enough to pay for gas, insurance and any unplanned maintenance. Even for people in this group, the risks can be considerable. Many people fall into joblessness when their car breaks down, depriving them of the means to get to work -- a downward spiral that can extend all the way down to homelessness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/on-his-jobs-tour-obama-to_b_3678474.html

Note: I am not a President Obama basher. But celebrating the centralization of low paying jobs in giant warehouses out of reach of the vast majority of Americans is 'Bush'-league. Like Walmart, Amazon is killing thousands of small businesses. Yes, some smaller businesses sell their wares through Amazon, but it is less than 10% of their sales.

There are an embarrassing number of DUers celebrating this.