Category Archives: jobs

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.

The Administration’s Monthly Jobs Report Interpretations

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Don’t let the fact that the following are from a political campaign presser bother you.  The data are straight from the horse’s mouth—the White House’s own The White House Blog.  Thus, these are President Obama’s words, albeit posted by his Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, Alan Krueger.  It’s a long, repetitive list; feel free to skip to the bottom of my post when you get bored.

June 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/06/employment-situation-june)

May 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/06/01/employment-situation-may)

April 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/05/04/employment-situation-april)

March 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, and it is helpful to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/04/06/employment-situation-march)

February 2012: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/09/employment-situation-february)

January 2012: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/03/employment-situation-january)

December 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/06/employment-situation-december)

November 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/02/employment-situation-november)

October 2011: “The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. There is no better example than August’s jobs figure, which was initially reported at zero and in the latest revision increased to 104,000. This illustrates why the Administration always stresses it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/04/employment-situation-october)

September 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/07/employment-situation-september)

August 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/09/02/employment-situation-august)

July 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/08/05/employment-situation-july)

June 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/08/employment-situation-june)

May 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/06/03/employment-situation-may)

April 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/06/employment-situation-april)

March 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/01/employment-situation-march)

February 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/04/employment-situation-february)

January 2011: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/04/employment-situation-january)

December 2010: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/07/employment-situation-december)

November 2010: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/03/employment-situation-november)

October 2010: “Given the volatility in monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/11/05/employment-situation-october)

September 2010: “Given the volatility in the monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/08/employment-situation-september)

July 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.  It is essential that we continue our efforts to move in the right direction and replace job losses with robust job gains.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/06/employment-situation-july)

August 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/09/03/employment-situation-august)

June 2010: “As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/07/02/employment-situation-june)

May 2010: “As always, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/06/04/employment-situation-may)

April 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/07/employment-situation-april)

March 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/02/employment-situation-march)

January 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/02/05/employment-situation-january)

November 2009: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/04/employment-situation-november)

Hmm….  Apparently all Obama has to say about his dismal unemployment record for all of these three and-a-half years is either, “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report,” or “Given the volatility in monthly employment and unemployment data, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.”  Oh, and the “Administration always stresses” this importance.

The problem, though, is that not only are Obama’s words about those dismal reports repetitive, the reports themselves are repetitive—with bad news for unemployed Americans.  So—should we also “not read too much into” all those unemployed Americans?

 

h/t Power Line

Employment Numbers

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Here are some employment and other economic numbers, as we see the continued level of success of President Obama’s policies, more than three years into his term.  Meanwhile all those jobs-related bills the House has passed since the start of 2011 continue to languish in the Do-Nothing Senate.

  • [T]he economy added an average of 226,000 jobs a month in the first quarter
  • [[T]he economy added an average of] 75,000 in the second quarter
  • The unemployment rate remained 8.2%
  • [T]he manufacturing sector contracted in June for the first time since July, 2009.
  • [F]actory hiring average[d] 10,000 a month in the second quarter
  • [[F]actory hiring average[d]] 41,000 a month in the first.

 

RINO Behavior

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The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the latest collapse of RINO stalwart-ism, this time under the guise of a bipartisan Highway Spending Bill.  This expenditure of $120 billion of what we used to call, in our cute naivety, our money passed the House 373-52 and the Senate 74-19.  You can do the math and see how many RINOs supported this, and you can read below (or at the link) the depth of the collapse of the RINOs.

For decades, a transportation trust fund financed with an 18.4¢ per gallon federal gasoline tax had covered the costs of our highways.  But in one of those unforeseen consequences, improved mileage in our cars means less gasoline bought, so the monies from that tax no longer are sufficient.  As a result, Congress is funding the present Bill with money taken from the general treasury—the one that’s already $1.2 trillion in the hole.

Republicans had been holding out for some real trades to get those general treasury dollars transferred:

  • more state flexibility over how road money is spent,
  • eliminating some of the $6 billion for white elephant transit projects,
  • streamlining environmental laws that make building roads very expensive,
  • expanding oil and gas drilling on federal lands,
  • green lighting the Keystone XL pipeline.

However.

RINOs stood meekly by and watched Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, UT) blithely strip all of that out of the bill.  Including all those jobs for the pipeline.  Not RINOs at all—eunuchs.

Showing his utter contempt—and a well-deserved contempt it is—for the other party, Reid put in 10 years’ worth of revenues (that’s taxes) and spending cuts to pay for this 2-year Bill.  Never mind these…congressmen’s…objections to the “gladly pay on Tuesday for a hamburger today” trickery that was used to “pay for” Obamacare.  They had no hope of winning that argument, so it was safe to talk tough then and look good in the shower.

On this bill, the Republicans had an excellent chance of winning the argument, but the shower water suddenly turned cold.

One of those “spending cuts” with which Reid sneered at the Republicans of both houses: almost $9 billion of budget “offsets” for this Bill will come from the wholly irrelevant—and vaporous—mechanism of allowing corporations to contribute less over the next several years to their own defined-benefit pensions.  The WSJ explained this “savings and offset” this way:

Companies under this deal would pay slightly higher insurance premiums to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.  Technically this lowers the budget deficit, because employer payments to pensions are tax deductible.  By reducing those payments [at the expense of those premiums], corporations report more taxable income and Uncle Sam magically collects more money.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who need to be fired this fall.

Europe’s Labor Problems

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Aside from the debt and profligate spending problem, Europe’s labor laws are large contributors.  The Wall Street Journal recently described Italian labor law.  And Italy is not atypical for Europe.

  • Business pays 2/3 of each employee’s social security costs (I won’t go into how cheap we Americans are compared to the Europeans when it comes to social security).
  • Businesses with more than 10 employees (quoting the WSJ)

must submit an annual self-assessment to the national authorities outlining every possible health and safety hazard to which your employees might be subject.  These include stress that is work-related or caused by age, gender and racial differences.  You must also note all precautionary and individual measures to prevent risks, procedures to carry them out, the names of employees in charge of safety, as well as the physician whose presence is required for the assessment.

  • Businesses with more than 15 employees encounter very onerous limits on the ability to fire an employee, for any reason.
  • Businesses with more than 15 employees also must explicitly hire disabled—qualified or not—and must have at least 14 disabled employees when they go above 50 employees.  The businesses must maintain that 7% ratio at all larger sizes.
  • Businesses with more than 100 employees must submit to the government a biennial report on the gender dynamics within the company.  This report must include a tabulation of the men and women employed in each production unit, their functions and level within the company, details of compensation and benefits, and dates and reasons for recruitments, promotions and transfers, as well as the estimated revenue impact.

The WSJ cites the OECD as noting that

All of these protections and assurances, along with the bureaucracies that oversee them, subtract 47.6% from the average Italian wage….  Two-thirds of that bite comes before payroll, meaning many Italian workers are unaware of their gross cost to employers.

I mean, really.  YGTBSM.