Category Archives: jobs

“Working Off” Student Debt

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A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section posited an alternative to student debt: trade it for community service.

I would readily support loan forgiveness if the beneficiary were required to do community service for the forgiven debt.

Only so long as the community service work is low-skill, low-education work, with the student debt scofflaw—because that’s what he still would be—working directly under the controlling supervision of a low-skill, low-education person who’s had that job for a while.

Let the scofflaw see who he’s displacing with his preciousness and his debt-ducking.

Let him see the college student, during the school year, trying to earn some night shift money with which to pay for some college without “borrowing” money.

Let him see the high schooler trying to earn some summer job money and to obtain some initial, entry-level work experience for his future use in working his way up the employment and economic ladders.

On that last, especially, I employed a high school sophomore last summer to mow my lawn, edge it, and clean the sidewalk of the mowing and edging detritus. I ordinarily do my own yard work, but this enterprising young man, by his enterprise, earned the job. A student debt scofflaw would get this sort of work from me only if he worked under the hiring and firing authority of my high school sophomore contractor. Which would give the sophomore some valuable supervisory experience, too.

Which supervisory experience also would benefit those other low-skill, low-education workers for whom the community service debtors would be working.

“My Word as a Biden”

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That was then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s go-to phrase whenever he wanted to emphasize his seriousness in making a claim.

Here’s one of those serious statements:

If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise I will fire you on the spot. On the spot, no ifs, ands, or buts[.]

When White House Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo was abusive to a Politico reporter, he was suspended for a week without pay and barred from interacting with Politico reporters.

That’s an example of the worthlessness of the now-President’s word as a Biden.

Unless he’s going to stand on the technicality that he didn’t personally hear Ducklo’s abuse, or that Ducklo wasn’t directly working with him at the time of Ducklo’s abuse.

In which case that quibble would be a separate demonstration of the worthlessness of the now-President’s word as a Biden.

In the end, Ducklo was allowed to resign and slink away. Biden, choosing not to fire him, has pretty conclusively shown the worthlessness of his word as a Biden.

Well, NSS

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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka might be getting buyer’s [sic] remorse over the election of now-President Joe Biden (D).

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, wishes President Biden hadn’t canceled the Keystone XL oil pipeline his first day in office, agreeing the move will cost a thousand union jobs and 10,000 projected construction jobs.

Especially:

If you destroy 100 jobs in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and you create 100 jobs in California, it doesn’t do those 100 families much good. If you’re looking at a pipeline and you’re saying we’re going to put it down, now what are you going to do to create the same good-paying jobs in that area?

And

You know, when they laid off at the mines back in Pennsylvania, they told us they were going to train us to be computer programmers. And I said, “Where are the computer programmer jobs at?” “Uh, they’re in, uh, Oklahoma and they’re in Vegas and they’re here.” And I said, “So, in other words, what we’re going to be is unemployed miners and unemployed computer programmers as well.” I think what doesn’t get understood quite enough in the country, particularly in DC politics, is that that culture is very, very important to the people who live there[.]

NSS, indeed.

Another thing that’s carefully unaddressed by Green New Dealers and Progressive-Democrats is the timing of the destroyed jobs and when “replacement” jobs actually might become available. Even were “learning to program” or “making solar collectors” serious alternatives, they’re not going to be available for years, the Left’s empty words about programming jobs, at least, being immediately available notwithstanding.

“Employment Levels”

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Candidates to replace term-limited Bill de Blasio (D) as mayor of New York City are coming out of the woodwork like the city’s rats. The opening sentence of a Wall Street Journal article covering their plans to “job recovery” is riddled with irony.

More than three dozen New York City mayoral candidates are vying for one of the toughest jobs in the country: leading the nation’s largest city back to pre-pandemic employment levels while trying to find the funding to do so.

The candidates—the city—do not need to “find the funding” to put folks back to work. In an actual free market environment, private employers provide the funding for their own employees. They get that funding from private citizens buying those employers’ goods and services. The city—any government—is a cost center for every business in it jurisdiction, from the taxes the city exacts (some of them actually legitimate charges) to the regulations (very few of them serving any legitimate purpose, being merely revenue centers for the bureaucracy charging them) it imposes.

Returning New York City to pre-Wuhan Virus situation levels is breathtakingly cost-free—and revenue-generating for the city: get out of the way, let the businesses reopen so folks can go back to work, let schools reopen so kids can go back to school—reducing both private and public medical costs—and letting even more folks go back to work.

It’s just that straightforward. It shouldn’t be as hard as even well-meaning, but overthinking, politicians make it.

Disposability

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At the end of an op-ed in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s editors included in image promoting a short video that showed an alleged teacher along with someone behind her holding up posters saying, “Masks are Disposable. Teachers Aren’t!”

Actually, teachers are disposable, as are folks in all jobs. And, in fact, as the Chicago Teachers Union has demonstrated, teachers already have been disposed of. All that’s left in Chicago are unionists.