Veteran’s Day

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I first posted this in 2011; I added to it in 2014.

Thank you for all who have, and are, serving.  And because I couldn’t have said it better, I’ll let Mike Royko, late of the Chicago Tribune, via Coastal Courier, say it from his 1993 column.

I just phoned six friends and asked them what they will be doing on Monday.

They all said the same thing: working.

Me, too.

There is something else we share. We are all military veterans.

And there is a third thing we have in common. We are not employees of the federal government, state government, county government, municipal government, the Postal Service, the courts, banks, or S & Ls, and we don’t teach school.

If we did, we would be among the many millions of people who will spend Monday goofing off.

Which is why it is about time Congress revised the ridiculous terms of Veterans Day as a national holiday.

The purpose of Veterans Day is to honor all veterans.

So how does this country honor them?…

…By letting the veterans, the majority of whom work in the private sector, spend the day at their jobs so they can pay taxes that permit millions of non-veterans to get paid for doing nothing.

As my friend Harry put it:

“First I went through basic training. Then infantry school. Then I got on a crowded, stinking troop ship that took 23 days to get from San Francisco to Japan. We went through a storm that had 90 percent of the guys on the ship throwing up for a week.

“Then I rode a beat-up transport plane from Japan to Korea, and it almost went down in the drink. I think the pilot was drunk.

“When I got to Korea, I was lucky. The war ended seven months after I got there, and I didn’t kill anybody and nobody killed me.

“But it was still a miserable experience. Then when my tour was over, I got on another troop ship and it took 21 stinking days to cross the Pacific.

“When I got home on leave, one of the older guys at the neighborhood bar — he was a World War II vet — told me I was a —-head because we didn’t win, we only got a tie.

“So now on Veterans Day I get up in the morning and go down to the office and work.

“You know what my nephew does? He sleeps in. That’s because he works for the state.

“And do you know what he did during the Vietnam War? He ducked the draft by getting a job teaching at an inner-city school.

“Now, is that a raw deal or what?”

Of course that’s a raw deal. So I propose that the members of Congress revise Veterans Day to provide the following:

– All veterans — and only veterans — should have the day off from work. It doesn’t matter if they were combat heroes or stateside clerk-typists.

Anybody who went through basic training and was awakened before dawn by a red-neck drill sergeant who bellowed: “Drop your whatsis and grab your socks and fall out on the road,” is entitled.

– Those veterans who wish to march in parades, make speeches or listen to speeches can do so. But for those who don’t, all local gambling laws should be suspended for the day to permit vets to gather in taverns, pull a couple of tables together and spend the day playing poker, blackjack, craps, drinking and telling lewd lies about lewd experiences with lewd women. All bar prices should be rolled back to enlisted men’s club prices, Officers can pay the going rate, the stiffs.

– All anti-smoking laws will be suspended for Veterans Day. The same hold for all misdemeanor laws pertaining to disorderly conduct, non-felonious brawling, leering, gawking and any other gross and disgusting public behavior that does not harm another individual.

– It will be a treasonable offense for any spouse or live-in girlfriend (or boyfriend, if it applies) to utter the dreaded words: “What time will you be home tonight?”

– Anyone caught posing as a veteran will be required to eat a triple portion of chipped beef on toast, with Spam on the side, and spend the day watching a chaplain present a color-slide presentation on the horrors of VD.

– Regardless of how high his office, no politician who had the opportunity to serve in the military, but didn’t, will be allowed to make a patriotic speech, appear on TV, or poke his nose out of his office for the entire day.

Any politician who defies this ban will be required to spend 12 hours wearing headphones and listening to tapes of President Clinton explaining his deferments.

Now, deal the cards and pass the tequila.

– Mike Royko

Next, because this is a day of remembrance and of honoring our surviving veterans, take another moment to visit here and take in Mark Toomey’s piece.

And follow his advice at the end.

Important Statistics

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The employment data published last week had some important statistics.

Net job gains totaled 165,000 in October, according to the Labor Department, far more than economists had expected. The August and September data were revised upward by a total of 84,000, reinforcing the story of 3.4% GDP growth in the third quarter that ended September 30.
Labor-force participation rose while the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1% from 4.2%.

These statistics can be useful, but they’d be much more useful were important context-providing statistics, along with their meanings, also published in the jobs reports. [F]ar more than economists had expected illustrates how useless “economists'” expectations are on immediate data. No “expectations” can be counted reliable when they’re based on badly incomplete data, and the data informing jobs reports are badly incomplete on the initial collection—see the two-month lag in getting complete enough data to comment on—form an expectation about—jobs data.

Beyond that, there are two important statistics, Critical Items for me, that clarify the meaning of the unemployment rate number. One of them is the labor-force participation rate blithely glossed over in this house editorial. This rate came in at 61.9% for October, meaning that of all the folks of working age, 61.9% of them were actually interested in getting a job or have one. That’s the snapshot. The better datum is the trend. Since June 2026, seasonally adjusted (which smooths out a lot of noise), this rate has risen slowly but steadily from June’s 61.5%. More folks who could work are actively seeking or are finding jobs. An even longer trend—reaching back 10 years—is available here. The current short-term trend, while encouraging, remains below that long-term trend. We may be recovering, finally, but it’s a bit early to draw that conclusion. Or expectation. Data reaching back to 1950 are available here.

The other statistic is the employment-population ratio. This statistic compares the number of folks who actually have jobs—that subset of the labor-force participation ratio—came in at 59.3% for October. This, too, is a snapshot; the trend since June 2026 has been growth from June’s 59.0%, with a brief downward excursion in July that was more than recovered from in August. Graphs showing the employment-population ratio reaching back to 1950 indicate that the current ratio is consistent with the historical trend; although it’s considerably below the period 1983-2008

These context statistics indicate that the employment component in our economy is sound and improving, or recovering well, depending on perspective.

Of course, a horsefly in this ointment, also mentioned by the editors, is wage growth not keeping up with, much less exceeding, the inflation rate. Americans’ real wages have been falling, meaning our ability to buy stuff like food and fuel or to pay our rent/mortgages and utility bills has been shrinking. Don’t look for government tax and spending increases to correct this.

Go Big?

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Wyoming’s Republican Senator-elect (there were a few) Harriet Hageman wants Republicans to use their waning days of majority-ness in both houses of Congress to go big: pass multi-year budgets to protect agencies that Democrats want to defund and to codify President Donald Trump cuts to foreign aid that the left wants to restore.

I think we ought to do another reconciliation package and fund some of these programs and agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target.
We did it with reconciliation for the Department of Homeland Security just this summer. So yes, we have the ability to do that. We need to target those agencies that we know that the Democrats are going to target from the standpoint of trying to either destroy them, undermine them or fundamentally change where they go.

She has other big moves, too.

Hageman said there are other major actions the House and Senate could achieve…including five Congressional Review Act resolutions that would reverse what she called “horrific policies” encoded in California state regulations that affect the whole country.

All of that forms one route. A major problem with it, though, is that laws enacted by one Congress do not bind subsequent Congresses. The Progressive-Democrats are fully capable of using their enormous majorities in each incoming house to rescind those lame duck budgets and foreign aid cuts.

Still doing that would be a big move.

The biggest big, though, would be for the current Senate Republican majority to pass a rule that would require two-thirds of the Senate (not of Senators) to change a Senate rule. This would necessarily include changing the Senate filibuster rule. Preserving the Senate filibuster would continue the requirement for a measure of bipartisanship to pass a bill and thereby preserve the Senate.

Notice that the question here isn’t so much bipartisanship per se, as it is to preserve some power of the minority and, with that, prevent the devolution of the Senate and the Congress as a whole into a tyranny of the majority, a tyranny flowing that majority’s ability simply to ignore the minority and pass whatever measure suits its fancy.

A Senate Judiciary Committee Report on Court Packing

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With the Progressive-Democratic Party having gained a strong majority in the Senate, it’s useful to recall many of that Party’s politicians’ promises to stack the Supreme Court by adding as many as six Justices to it. That recollection makes it imperative to further recollect an earlier move to stack the Court and a Senate Judicial Committee’s near-unanimous rejection of the move.

This bill  is an invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this country.
…
It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive and legislative brunches of the Government, and we assert that independent courts are the last safeguard of the citizen, where his rights, reserved to him by the express and implied provisions of the Constitution, come in conflict with the power of governmental agencies. We assert that the language of John Marshall, then in his 76th year, in the Virginia Convention (1829-31), was and is prophetic:

[Spelling and punctuation in the original] Advert, sir, to the duties of a judge. He has to pass between the Government and the man whom the Government is prosecuting,; between the most powerful individual in the community and the poorest and most unpopular. It is of the last Importance that in the exercise of these duties he should observe the utmost fairness. Need I express the necessity of this? Does not every man feel that his own personal security and the security of his property depends on that fairness? The judicial department comes home in Its effect to every man’s fireside; it passes on his property, his reputation, his life, his all. Is it not, to the last degree, important. that he should be rendered perfectly and completely independent, with nothing to influence or control him but God and his conscience?

…
It is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.

That’s from a report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, with its strong-majority membership of Democrats—its 7 June 1937 REORGANIZATION OF THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY report, an ADVERSE REPORT, regarding President Franklin Roosevelt’s (D) court packing bill.

Unfortunately, those were among the last of the Democratic Party politicians who aspired to a measure of integrity and of country before party. Today’s Progressive-Democrats, demonstrated by their drive to pack the Court with activist justices who will view our Constitution only as a collection of suggestions, are interested only in Party power and their personal power within it.

The Committee’s report can be read here.

 

h/t Senator Ted Cruz (R) via his Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas

Referenda Weren’t Part of the Blue Tsunami

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In all of the voting that produced the collapse of the Republican Party in the last week, there were some bright spots where the people spoke directly for themselves rather than indirectly by electing politicians to speak for them. The people passed a number of conservative-oriented referenda.

  • Iowa…voters approved a constitutional amendment to require a two-thirds legislative majority for raising income taxes on residents or businesses.
  • Ohio…voted to shore up the state’s voter ID requirement by putting it in the constitution.
  • North Carolina…approved a constitutional amendment to cut the maximum income-tax rate to 3.5%, from 7%.
  • North Carolina also approved an amendment on voter ID.
  • Washington state approved a measure.
  • Colorado is on a path to Colorado’s barring biological males from competing in girls’ sports and a separate measure banning gender surgeries on minors also is ahead.
  • Arizona is on a similar path to protecting female athletes.
  • Kentucky voters amended their constitution to prevent lame-duck pardons.

However, even that silver lining is deeply buried in dark clouds; there’s still this:

  • Colorado voters repealed the state’s groundbreaking Taxpayer Bill of Rights and may saddle themselves with a progressive income tax.
  • Washington looks to have rubber-stamped a millionaire’s tax.
  • Arizona and California said no to voter ID.
  • Montanans and Michiganders voted for new restrictions on free speech under the guise of “campaign-finance reform.”