Monthly Archives: September 2023

Some Labor Day Questions

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First published in 2015, I’ve updated it for today.  In an ideal world, I’ll be able to update it again next year, with a yet more optimistic tone.

The Wall Street Journal asked some questions on Labor Day 2012, and supplied some answers.  Here are some of those questions and answers, which remain as valid this Labor Day.

  • Q: How are America’s workers doing? Not good. Over the past decade, over the ups and downs of the economy, taking inflation into account, the compensation of the typical worker — wages and benefits—basically haven’t risen at all. … The Labor Department recently said that 6.1 million workers in 2009-2011 have lost jobs that they’d had for at least three years. Of those, 45% hadn’t found work as of January 2012. … Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday that unemployment is still two percentage points higher than normal….
  • Q: Things ARE getting better, though. The US economy is creating jobs, right? Back in December 2007 when the recession began, there were about two jobless workers for every job opening.  When the economy touched bottom in mid-2009, there were more than six unemployed for every job.  At last count, the BLS says there were 3.4 jobless for every opening.
  • Q: How much of this elevated unemployment is because the unemployed just don’t have the skills that employers are looking for right now?  …the bulk of the evidence is a lot of the unemployment really is the old-fashioned kind: the kind that would go away if the economy was growing at a stronger pace. Mr. Bernanke said as much at the [2012] Jackson Hole conference….

In 2019, the jobs situation was drastically improved.  The overall unemployment rate was at an historic low, and there were more job openings than there were folks to fill them.  The black unemployment rate was at a record low.  The Hispanic unemployment rate was at a near record low.  The women unemployment rate was at a near record low.  Wages, both real and nominal, were growing.

These two questions remain relevant for this year.

  • Q: What about the COVID-19 virus situation? It hit us hard last winter, when we knew nothing about it, and much of the data we did have had been falsified, with other, critical, data withheld from us by foreign entities for critical weeks. However, the initial spike has collapsed, and the latest, end-of-summer surge is waning. The fatality rate, given an infection, is a small fraction of 1% for most age groups and in the 3%-5% range for those in their 60s and older. Vaccines are on the horizon, and mitigating treatment techniques and drugs are in effect that greatly lessen the severity of most infections and shorten significantly hospital stays, and decrease drastically mortality rates for those hospitalized. It also turns out that children are the least harmed by this virus, neither likely to pass infections among each other nor to adults; schools can re-open for critically important face-to-face teaching and learning, and many of them are. Associated resurgences of infection are turning out to be minor.
  • Q: But What about the Delta Variant? What about it, indeed. The existing vaccines—they’ve been in use for months—work nearly as well against this version as they do against the original versions. On top of that, empirical data suggest that this variant is less lethal, if more infectious, than the original versions. Children get infected from this version more than they did the original versions, but more than almost not at all remains right next door to not at all. And it’s still not lethal for children beyond a few sad anecdotes. It’s only government bureaucrats and pressmen that are hyping the thing.
  • Q: But what about the economy? This was a politically-forced, not an economically-induced, shutdown of our economy, and so it can be re-opened just as politically or by simple business decision to do so. And it is, in broad swaths of our economy. GDP is on a sharp rise, the unemployment rate is around 8.4%, which is well below the Panic of 2008 rate, and the current rate is falling. The employment participation rate is rising again. Businesses are reopening, furloughed employees are being recalled. At this point, it’s only government welfare payments and reburgeoning regulation that’s holding our economy back.

Substitute any of the evolving variants to the Wuhan Virus for the reference to the Delta Variant. We’re still stuck with an unbelievable CDC and a variety of vaccine and mask mandates that have no grounding in science, or even in the data being collected.

We now have a burgeoning inflation, most especially in the necessities of life: food, shelter, energy for heating/cooling our shelter, and fuel for getting to work. And today, in 2023, years after the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation, that jobs picture is not so good: we’re only just recovering the jobs lost to the Federal, State, and local governments overreaction and lockdown response, and with that inflation, real wages have fallen for most of those years; only in the last couple of months have wage raises exceeded each month’s inflation.

Labor Day is here, and this time around, it represents the traditional beginning of the mid-term election campaign season. Our economy and our nation can be recovered, if we all get to the polls and vote for members of Congress who will take seriously fiscal and regulatory responsibility—which means reduced spending and reduction of regulations on the books.

Happy Labor Day.

Electrifying Transportation

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A Wall Street Journal editorial centered on California’s idiotic push to fully electrify cars and trucks—yes, including heavy duty freight trucks—within the next dozen years, has this tidbit, which is canonical in exemplifying such foolishness anywhere in the US:

One trucking company wanted to install charging stations for 30 trucks at a terminal in Joliet, Illinois, only to be told by local officials they would draw more power than the entire city.

And this, specific to California and its already existing green ideology:

In January northern California utility PG&E told a charging provider that one of its large fleet customers couldn’t charge its trucks on summer afternoons owing to a power crunch.

A power crunch which PG&E knew six months in advance was going to occur. It’s clear: neither facts nor the fiscal or quality of life costs of ignoring them matter to the mainstream Left. They’re right, and if you have questions about that, they’ll enthusiastically disabuse you of your questions. Never mind that

[a] Southern California Edison executive recently said some fleets are powering chargers using diesel generators so electric trucks don’t go unused.

Pay no attention to the zealot behind the door.

Mistake

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wants Republicans currently investigating Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden (D), and the rest of his family to broaden their investigation to include ex-Secretary of State and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and ex-President Barack Obama (D).

…this is really about the weaponization of government, the collapse of the rule of law, and its replacement by the rule of power. And that really involves three principles. It involves Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

This would be a mistake, as it would unnecessarily dilute the investigative resources available to the House committees conducting the Biden investigations, possibly fatally to those investigations. The broadening, at best, would draw out the Biden family investigation unnecessarily through that dilution.

Gingrich is right about the weaponization and the supplanting of law by power. However, the optimal way to investigate that larger matter is to separately investigate Clinton and Obama, and then tie those three investigations together into the outcome that is that weaponization and power grab.

This will be a frustratingly slow process, but it’s the best way to get to the final truth and get the relevant folks tossed from political life for their misbehaviors and the remaining jailed for their crimes.

The Political Center

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Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) and his daughter are looking to form a project that would promote centrist policies and candidates in future endeavors and elections. Their project is Americans Together, and it’s intended to be a politically active nonprofit entity.

In a memo that was shared with potential donors and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, the project proposes a coalition that would “mobilize the middle” and support a shift toward the political center.

The Manchins’ move, though, misses an important underlying assumption: what is the middle, the political center?

The Progressive-Democratic Party, with its extremist ideology—

  • no effective southern border
  • voting “rights” and welfare support for illegal aliens
  • sanctuary for illegal aliens
  • identity politics
  • ideology indoctrination of our children from kindergarten through graduate school
  • ever expansive and intrusive government

—has been dragging what used to be our nation’s center steadily Leftward at least since 2008.

Drug Price…Foolishness

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President Joe Biden (D) and his associates over in Medicare have identified the drugs of which he’s willing to pretend to negotiate the price. The particular drugs aren’t important; what matters is the precedent being set regarding the Progressive-Democrat-run administration’s view of what constitutes negotiation in Party’s lexicon. Readers interested in which drugs are targeted for now can find the list at the end of the linked-to article.

What’s important here is this.

The naming of the 10 drugs subject to price negotiations kicks off a lengthy process. Drugmakers have until October 1 to say whether they will join in the negotiations.
If they don’t negotiate or accept the price resulting from it, companies face a tax of up to 95% on a medicine’s US sales, or they can pull all of their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

And this:

Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price will incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. This is extortion, not a negotiation.

That’s not negotiation, that’s “Take our price, or pay even more through our usurious, if not confiscatory, taxes.” The outcome will be a stifling of medical (not just for medicinal) innovation in the US. Instead, innovation, such as might remain, will be pushed overseas, in large part to nations that don’t themselves innovate very much, having come to rely on American developments which they then heavily subsidize for their own citizens.

Some of those drugs, too, will be pulled from Medicare/Medicaid coverage, along with all of the other drugs a company makes available through those programs, which will price them out of reach of those most in need—those with the ailments being treated by those medicines and who lack the money to pay the full price.

That is, until Party takes the next obvious step and taxes those medicines’ sales revenues earned outside of Medicare/Medicaid, to be followed by Party’s diktat that those medicines must be offered through Medicare/Medicaid.

Which will result in those medicines no longer being manufactured in the US at all and no longer being sold at all in the US, regardless of their manufacture.