Daily Archives: 9 August 2016

Employment

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Employers added 255,000 jobs last month while wages for private-sector workers matched their strongest annual pace of growth in seven years. More Americans joined the labor force, keeping the jobless rate steady at 4.9%.

That’s part of the best two months of hiring all year.  This is all good news, right?

Not so much.

The increase in the labor force participation rate was only a tenth of a point to 62.8%, still the lowest rate in 40-ish years—two generations.

Over the course of the year, GDP rose by all of 1%–another historically low rate, one that’s typical of our economic performance these last eight years of Democrat economic policies by abnormally low for GDP growth rates coming out of recessions over the last 70-ish years.

Businesses continue to cut their own investment, now for the third straight quarter.  That’s future growth, future employment, and future productivity growth—and future competitiveness—that won’t occur.

Don’t be fooled, either, by the week’s and the recent months’ rise in the stock market.  The stock market and our underlying economy are tied together, but the ties are very loose: either the market will fall back to the tepid level of our economy, or the economy will perk up, finally.  But neither can be expected to occur any time soon or with any accuracy in timing prediction.

Press Hypocrisy

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I wrote a short time ago about the press’ dishonesty.  Here’s an example of its hypocrisy, in the form of a Boston Globe op-ed.

Throughout the piece, the paper decried personal attacks against the Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Supporters of Donald Trump, recently joined by elements of Bernie Sanders’ supporters in Philadelphia, insisted that Clinton be “locked up[,]”

they wrote.

The paper also made its obligatory attack on Israeli politics by decrying personal attacks on Yitzhak Rabin…20 years ago.

[Protestors] called Rabin a murderer and depicted him in a Nazi uniform.

Then back on our Presidential campaign, came the BG‘s bleat,

As the final 100 days tick away, it’s important to appreciate the possible consequences of this type of toxic discourse.

That was their tie-in of those personal attacks on Rabin those 20 years ago—so they could insinuate (without the moral or intellectual courage to say so outright) that the assassination of Rabin was the result of those personal political attacks and to imply a similar threat against our current candidates.

The BG, though, carefully ignored the character assassinations the Left was inflicting on Republican Party Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, followed by the assassination attempt on him—also in an incident wholly unrelated to campaign character assassinations.

The BG piece, in its high dudgeon and regardless of any supposed actual assassination attempt today, also carefully ignored the steady drumbeat of character assassinations the Democrats have carried out against Republicans—and more generally, other groups of Americans of whom Democrats disapprove—over the last eight years.  For instance,

  • Democrats’ repeated accusations of Republican Congressmen as being unpatriotic
  • Democrats’ decrying police as acting stupidly
  • Democrats’ accusations of Republicans as terrorists
  • Democrats’ accusations of Republicans as hostage-takers
  • Democrats’ slur of conservative Americans as nothing more than bitter, gun-toting, Bible-clingers in flyover country
  • Democrats’ IRS attacks against conservative non-profit organizations

And, with a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the BG piece closed with this:

[W]e may need to ask again and again, “Have you no sense of decency?” And then, insist on it.

Not caring a whit that the question was asked by Tennessee then-Senate Republican candidate Rand Paul in response to a slur by his Democratic Party opponent Jack Conway.

The Boston Globe‘s example, sadly, is all too typical of the modern hypocritical American…press.