Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Stockpiling Workers?

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Hiring is up, apparently, and hours worked by employee is down.

[E]ven as employers cut hours, they are also adding workers—something they don’t usually do when contraction looms. Payrolls rose by 339,000 in May and by nearly 1.6 million for the year to date. Layoffs were nearly 13% lower in April than in the average month in 2019, according to the Labor Department.

How does that work, exactly? This is how.

The expense and trauma of hiring have left employers unusually eager to avoid shedding staff they will need when business picks up again, according to [Managing Director and Senior Economist at Nomura, Aichi] Amemiya.

Companies this time around are stockpiling workers against the turnaround and rise of the underlying economy. This is an expense more and more employers are willing to bear during the current slowdown and potential recession in order to be ahead of the curve on the other side, rather than chasing the recovery as has been the case in past slowdowns/recessions.

Another Government Shutdown?

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That’s what the Progressive-Democratic Party Representatives and Senators are threatening if they can’t continue their spendthrift ways in the upcoming budget negotiations.

[House] appropriators are expected to propose federal spending levels lower than the threshold in the Biden-McCarthy deal….

Two things about this: the spending level limit agreed in the debt limit deal is a ceiling, not a floor; it’s entirely legitimate for any budget to come in with even lower spending. The other thing is that cuts in spending (not merely reductions in spending growth) are critical to our nation’s weal.

Nevertheless, the Progressive-Democrats are playing their threats and lies game. House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D, CT) has made Party’s threats explicit:

This moves us in the direction of, you could say a CR [continuing resolution], but in October, we’re looking toward a shutdown[.]

Nice little government you got here, says the Congresswoman, be too bad if somethin’ was to happen to it.

HAC member Pete Aguilar (D, CA) demonstrated Party’s lack of integrity:

This is an agreement that the speaker made directly, and he took pains—remember?—to get everybody else out of the room and to get to a deal with just him and the president. And now he’s walking away from that deal[.]

Aguilar is lying. There’s no other way to put a claim that a budget proposal that’s entirely within the limit agreed in the debt ceiling deal breaks that deal. His claim is cynically and deliberately false. Then he assured us that the [Progressive-]Democratic-led Senate would ignore any appropriations bills that come[s] in under the caps set in the debt limit agreement.

The Progressive-Democrats want to shut down our government if they can’t have their way? I’m down with that.

Pro-Green Hysteria, or…?

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The Biden White House recently has canceled or delayed some projects that are critical to American economic prosperity and to American economic independence from our enemies.

On Tuesday [6 Jun] the US Army Corps of Engineers revoked a Clean Water Act permit granted by the Trump Administration for the NewRange copper and nickel mine in Minnesota’s Duluth Complex.

That copper and nickel is critical to the Biden administration’s push for a green transition to battery cars (and to a host of legitimate electric and other projects). Green aficionados objected, despite the fact that the region already is well-mined for iron ore, and in entirely environmentally sound ways. No more mining.

And:

[Biden’s] Interior Department last month delayed a decision on whether to let Alaska build a 211-mile road to a critical minerals mining area.

The Trump administration had approved this one, but green aficionados objected. Hence the delay.

And:

[L]ast Friday [2 Jun] Interior removed from oil and gas development hundreds of thousands of acres of public land in New Mexico within 10 miles of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

The folks affected by that development project, the Navajo Nation, badly wanted and whole heartedly approved it for the tens of millions of dollars in oil and gas royalties it would have produced for these Native Americans (whom the Left and the Progressive-Democrats in Congress and the White House pretend to favor). But green aficionados objected. No oil or gas development here, and no prosperity for Navajos.

These project cancelations and delay mean that, in the words of The Wall Street Journal‘s Editors, [t]he US will have to import the minerals from arsenals of autocracy like Russia and China.

Are these moves motivated by Biden’s pro-green hysteria or by Biden’s softness toward the People’s Republic of China? Or maybe both?

“Be More Like Europe”

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That’s the mantra of the Left-Wing extremists who have become the center Left, and that was the rationalization of the Progressive-Democratic Party, of which those extremists have become the center, as Party pushed, those years ago, Obamacare, their precursor to socialized medicine.

Today, there’s this, from the part of Europe that is Great Britain. GB’s National Health Service, the Party’s model for what they want Obamacare to become has achieved this milestone:

More than 18,000 people died in Scotland last year [2022] while on NHS waiting lists[.]

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar pointed out that the NHS wait list death toll (already far too high IMNSHO) just six years ago was 7,868.

This is what socialist medicine does to honest citizens.

That’s Easy

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians claim they want to prevent a future [debt ceiling] standoff by trying to defuse the borrowing limit as a weapon.

Congressman Brendan Boyle (D, PA), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said there is an increasing number of Democrats who want to fundamentally change the debt-ceiling process, with many colleagues recognizing it is “just insanity to keep doing this over and over and over again.”

Boyle also said this, as though it were a bad thing:

Because we have been fixated on this issue for months and months, we are dramatically behind on all the rest of the legislative work that Congress has to get done.

Actually, the only things Congress has to get done, and it would take very little time were Party to stop being obstructionist, are to pass a budget and then lower personal and corporate income tax rates across the board and pass the dozen separate appropriations bills that give effect to that budget.

As I wrote during an earlier debt ceiling fight,

Getting this profligacy [in spending] under control—eliminating that profligacy—is the only way to get rid of budget deficits, and the elimination of those deficits—not their reduction, but their elimination—is the only way to avoid having to repeatedly increase the amount of our borrowing, the only way to eliminate the “need” to repeatedly raise the debt ceiling….

Eliminating debt ceiling fights should be perfectly straightforward to do. However, those politicians are congenitally incapable of reducing spending. They still can’t even say the words “cut spending.”