Category Archives: jobs

What’s Their Plan?

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What is Democratic Party’s plan, exactly, for getting our country out of its debt hole, out of its economic hole that’s deepening that debt hole and ruining individual American lives?  What is Barack Obama’s plan?

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney and his supporters out-raised Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama and his supporters last month by $100 million to $75 million, marking the third straight month the Republican candidate has out-raised the Democratic candidate.

In response, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out the following, more in support of the Democratic Presidential candidate than any Democratic Congressional candidate:

BREAKING NEWS: Mitt Romney and the Republicans brought in a whopping $101 million in July.

You and I both know that Mitt Romney will sell America out if he becomes President — giving more tax breaks to his Big Oil and billionaire backers.

The only way we can stop them is to close this fundraising gap – starting today.

Please do your part — make a donation of $3 or more right now to back up President Obama with a Democratic majority.

The reality is simple: If Mitt can bury us under a wave of corporate special interest cash, we will lose in November.

But if everyone who’s been waiting to give pitches in a few dollars, we can start closing the gap today.

http://dccc.org/Close-The-Gap

Thanks for all you do,

Robby

Robby Mook
DCCC Executive Director

Well.  I guess, being a poor, dumb conservative, I just don’t understand.  What was that Democratic Party plan, again?

A Quibble that Tells the Truth

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This is from the White House’s very own blog, from the personal keyboard of Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers:

The household survey showed that the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% in July (or, more precisely, the rate rose from 8.217% in June to 8.254% in July).  Acting BLS Commissioner John Galvin noted in his statement that the unemployment rate was “essentially unchanged” from June to July.

And so is our economic recovery “essentially unchanged” from 2009 to 2012.

You Can’t Build This, Either

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Paul H Rubin, Professor of Economics at Emory University, had some thoughts on President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” oratory.  After giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and allowing that he really meant, without denigrating the accomplishments of entrepreneurs and other businessmen, that government needed to help private enterprise with infrastructure, Professor Rubin added a few items of interest in the infrastructure milieu.

  • the Obama administration, in its first three years, adopted 106 major regulations that cost over $100 million, compared with 28 such regulations in the Bush the Younger administration, and it has 144 more in the pipeline.

Of more immediate impact, with regard to the infrastructure of roads and bridges, the administration’s attitude toward other necessary components of our transportation infrastructure is clear.  It has

  • refused to allow a private company to build the Keystone XL pipeline
  • reduced permits for offshore drilling
  • slow-walked permits for drilling on Federal land
  • increased EPA regulation of pollutants, well past the point of diminishing returns, yet
  • committed to spend billions on California’s riderless bullet train to nowhere

Concerning another area of necessary infrastructure, access to capital, there’re these:

  • regulations needed to implement Dodd–Frank are not even being written, negatively impacting business’ ability to reasonably predict their fiscal future—so some won’t lend, and others won’t borrow.
  • increased minimum wage discourages hiring entry-level workers, or older workers into low-value jobs
  • Obamacare increases uncertainty regarding future labor health-related costs

And so on.  RTWT.

You Didn’t Build That

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Now President Obama has an ad out in which he tries to walk away from his earlier comments that business owners—especially small business owners—didn’t build their businesses, that they owed government for their success.

Now he’s insisting that what he was talking about was Big Government “investing” in education and training, roads and bridges, research and technology.  And more:

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.

No.  Today’s successful schools are charter and other schools to which parents send their children by choice.  These schools are run by private businesses; they’re not government organs, as today’s public schools are.

Private enterprises built the roads and bridges; Big Government didn’t send in the Seabees or the Army Corps of Engineers to build our transportation network, or to maintain it, except in the direst of localized emergencies, like post-Katrina.  Even then, though, the government’s constructors have been adjuncts to the private construction companies.  It’s true that Big Government funded significant portions of those build-out and maintenance projects, but the Government’s “investment” was heavily inflated: the privately run construction companies were—and are—required to pay “prevailing” union wage rates; the companies are not allowed to bid competitively.

It was Xerox that built the Internet, for instance, not Government, as Obama claims, and Xerox built it so they could share internal data on internal computer networks more easily, not “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.”

And that “unbelievable American system that we have?”  That’s our free market economy that private individuals, singly and in groups, built up since our inception as a nation.  Big Government had no role in that.  Little Government had the important role of staying out of the way of our private, free enterprise, only enforcing laws against cheating and the like.

As an aside, President Obama had a closing refrain in his “You Didn’t Build That” speech: Americans often work together to do things they can’t do, or do as efficiently, alone.  But who was he talking about in this “working together” of his?  Not Americans working together on their own initiative—forming companies or charitable organizations, for instance—oh, no.  Obama was talking about Big Government as the “together,” a Government that does things for us.  Not at all anything about Americans working together without government…help.

Outsourcing

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Outsourcing isn’t necessarily bad, when it’s done for appropriate reasons—that is to say, for sound business purposes.  Outsourcing lets a company lower its own costs, so that it can prosper.  That prosperity both facilitates customers’ ability to get their needed products at lower cost and it facilitates the company’s ability to grow—and so to hire more labor.  This is true whether the outsourcing is to another company that uses American labor or whether the outsourcing is to an overseas company.  A lot of  the difference between those two types of outsourcing depends on labor costs and on government regulatory and taxing costs in those two areas.

Moreover, potsful of American businesses have global reach and need facilities in other countries: sales staffs, managers, production, and so on.  This is business in the 21st (and 20th) centuries.  Likewise, potsful of European, Asian, South American companies do business in the US, with salesmen, managers, production, and so on here; many of their employees are Americans.  Are those companies “outsourcing?”  Should they take their marbles and go home?

But what happens when it’s Federal dollars—your and my money collectively—and not private enterprise’s that are being spent, and that are claimed to be getting spent on jobs promptly available for Americans?  As Governor John Sununu pointed out in a recent interview with Andrea Mitchell,

When you’ve sent $500 million to Fisker and it goes to Finland immediately. When you send the solar money and it goes to Mexico. When you send the turbine money and it goes to Denmark. And we can go on all day. There is $29 billion worth of purchases that came out of this administration, outsourced jobs to foreign countries. Mitt Romney outsourced zero. Obama outsourced 29 [billion dollars].

Here are a couple of examples, albeit from a Republican-sponsored Web site, among other sources:

The People’s Republic of China:

North Carolina-based LED maker Cree Inc got $39 million in stimulus money in January 2010 and opened its first plant in the PRC.  Over half of the company’s employees are in the PRC and Cree’s CEO Says the company’s strategy is “Cree Chip, China Heart.

Sempra got a $337 million loan guarantee for an Arizona solar plant, putting American taxpayers on the hook for the loan.  However, the solar panels will be supplied by SunTech, a Chinese solar panel manufacturer.  While it’s true that SunTech has built a solar panel plant in Arizona, it will supply, at its peak, 10% of the panels for the Sempra project.  The other 90% will come from factories in the PRC.

Japan:

According to a 2010 report from American University, Eurus Energy America, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Eurus Energy, got $91 million in stimulus monies to build a wind farm in Texas, but the wind farm was built with 180 wind turbines built by the Japanese company Mitsubishi.

There are lots of others in those $29 billion.