Category Archives: jobs

It’s Not Even That

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The Wall Street Journal thinks President Joe Biden’s (D) write-off of $10,000 worth of student loan debt is a “forgiveness coup.”

It has that effect, but I don’t think Biden is operating that deviously. This is nothing more than Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate nakedly buying votes for this fall and 2024. It’s the bread part of bread and circuses, with the circuses being staged by his Party supporters in Congress alternately touting his having bypassed Congress to do this and bleating that he didn’t go far enough in the doing.

But at what cost is Biden buying those votes? Purely fiscally, he’s forcing us taxpayers to pony up $300 billion to make good on Biden’s largesse, according to Penn Wharton, and as much as twice that according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Politically, the move seriously angrifies a major fraction of us American citizens and voters. Perhaps chief among these are the majority of us who have no student debt to pay off: we never went to college/university; we went to work, instead, vis., in the trades, without which no house, no office building, no road, no mine or well, no part of our nation’s infrastructure gets built. Or we went to other than Ivy League schools to get quality educations in marketable areas of study, didn’t borrow to do so, and got jobs. Or we went to Ivy League or those Other Than schools, borrowed, and paid off our loans—because we got degrees in marketable areas and so got jobs.

We are the folks Biden and his syndicate are explicitly tapping to cover his forgiveness. We’re the folks who have demonstrated a grand capacity to pay off debt, so Biden is calling on us to use that skill some more.

Morally, it’s costing those bailed-out students the practice of actually keeping their own commitments, and it’s trapping them into the welfare cage of being too used to government welfare to get out of it. Because that’s the easy way out for them, and that’s what this sort of “forgiveness” teaches them.

There’s also the potential financial cost to these bailed out persons: now they have money to buy their first house, start a family, buy a car, …? Who’ll lend them the money? Are they now too great a credit risk, expecting as they might, simply to be able to walk away from that loan, too, when repaying it becomes inconvenient to them? Who’ll be willing to hire them, with potential employers looking askance at their willingness to walk away from inconvenient commitments.

The answers to those last questions will unroll only over the next few years—possibly to no serious effect, possibly to the great detriment of these persons, and thence to our economy.

One other thing is certain: colleges and universities will raise their tuition and other charges to absorb this Progressive-Democrat donation. That will leave none of us in the real economy better off.

An Interesting Exercise

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced that Chicagoans can look forward to her planned bump in their property taxes of 2.5%, effective next year.

Maybe the increase is warranted, maybe it isn’t. Here’s the exercise. Lightfoot needs to release, for each of the prior five years, detailed line-item allocations of budgeted property tax collections and the production schedule for each of those allocated-for items.

In parallel with that and for each of those same five years, she needs to release detailed line-item actual expenditures, supported by receipts for each expenditure, for every step of the supply/expense chain from allocation through intermediate purchases/expenses—including identifying intermediate and final suppliers, wages suppliers paid for production of each item at that stage of the chain, the services and hard goods bought, the date of each purchase, the date of actual delivery of each purchase—through to final allocated-for product delivery and the date of that final delivery. For those projects not yet completed and those items not yet finally delivered, she needs to release the originally scheduled dates, their current status, and concrete, measurable reason(s) for the delay, if any.

The exercise, also, would be as informative as it would be interesting.

Just the News Has a Question

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The news outlet ran a poll over the weekend. The question was this:

How concerned are you that additional IRS funding through the Inflation Reduction Act will lead to more audits for typical taxpayers?

As of Sunday morning, the enormously unscientific poll—consisting solely of JtN readers—was running 96% Extremely concerned.

Keep in mind that the IRS has been targeting Conservatives and conservative organizations at least since early in the Obama administration (if not sooner; that’s just when it became exposed).

Keep in mind, too, that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, since Obama’s first Presidential campaign, have characterized typical taxpayers as merely bitter Bible- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country, as irredeemable and deplorable, as 15% of us being just no good.

How is this even a question?

Term Limits

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There are a number of term limits proposals on offer regarding politicians.

Then, as James Sherk pointed out in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Career employees fill almost all federal jobs. Only 4,000 of the 2.2 million federal employees are political appointees. Career federal employees consequently do almost all the work of government.

Here’s my term limits offer, this one regarding civil servants/career federal employees—and I’d apply it to Federal contract employees, also.

Term limit all of them—say 10 years—and after that term, they’d no longer be eligible for Federal employment in any guise whatsoever. That won’t actually hurt them: with the valuable experience of those 10 years of government employment under their belts, they’ll have no problem finding employment on the private economy.

One more limit: cap Federal civilian employment at one million, including individual contractors. Only the uniformed military should have no cap, but should remain sized to the threat faced.

Think, too, what that would do for us taxpayers, who are on the hook for those already enormous government pensions.

A limit on initial eligibility: a minimum of 10 years of employment in the private sector, unrelated to government work, in order to be eligible for Federal employment or contract work. Yes, that includes entry level secretaries/administrative assistants.

Jobs

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Some statistics indicate a strong and growing jobs situation in our economy. Other statistics…not so much.

A couple of the latter, for instance.

The labor force participation rate has dropped for the second month in a row in the face of burgeoning inflation and wage growth that isn’t keeping up, so that real wages—what your money actually can buy in the grocery store and gas station and for your home in the form of electricity—are shrinking drastically.

According to BLS—the Bureau of Labor Statistics—the labor force participation rate, the per cent of Americans able to work and who actually are working or looking for work, stood at 62.1% in July. That’s down from June’s 62.2%, which itself was down from May’s 62.3%, and all of which are down from the nearby peak of March’s 62.4%. Folks seem to be giving up on finding work that will pay them enough to keep up with the Biden administration’s inflation, which stood at 9.1% year-on-year in June, up from May’s 8.6%.

The other statistic is this one [scroll to MULTIPLE JOBHOLDERS, near the bottom of the table, and keep in mind that the data presented are in the thousands], which seems reflective of the actual state of our economy and stands in opposition to the…optimistic…talk coming out of the White House. Of those folks participating in the labor force,

part-time jobs and multiple jobholders increased by 384,000 and 92,000, respectively….

This is the cost of President Joe Biden’s (D) war on our oil-, natural gas-, and coal-energy industry, given that energy is at the core of everything we do, and that oil and natural gas also are key to our materials industries, from fertilizer (see food price inflation) to automobile, including battery car, production to clothing, and on and on. This also is the cost of Biden’s explosion of regulation, which drives up the cost of simply operating a business to produce any of that stuff, and his insistence that the key to driving down inflation is to throw money at it (see his current $739 billion Build Reduced Back bill debated and passed in the Senate over the weekend).