Tag Archives: jobs

Fairness

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Stephen Moore, of The Wall Street Journal, asks some questions….

about taxes

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country’s income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation….

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

Is it fair that nearly four out of 10 American households now pay no federal income tax at all—a number that has risen every year under Mr. Obama?

about labor

Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?

Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don’t work?

Is it fair that thousands of workers won’t have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?

Is it fair that in 27 states workers can be compelled to join a union in order to keep their jobs?

Is it fair that Boeing, a private company, was threatened by a federal agency when it sought to add jobs in a right-to-work state rather than in a forced-union state?

about individual responsibility

Is it fair that those who took out responsible mortgages and pay them each month have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize those who acted recklessly, greedily and sometimes deceitfully in taking out mortgages they now can’t afford to repay?

Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids—who never voted for Mr. Obama—will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Contradictions

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In an energy policy article in The Daily Caller, Deneen Borelli raises some interesting disconnects between President Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.  She points out the failures engendered by his contradictions:

Despite his class-war rhetoric, Obama’s command-and-control energy policy drains our budget to reward crony capitalists such as General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and his fellow presidential jobs panel member and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr.

Ironically, the Obama war on fossil fuels hurts hard-working Americans because high energy prices have a disproportional impact on middle- and lower-income households and jeopardizes U.S. manufacturing.

And although Obama has called for fairness and a level playing field, the mandates and subsidies for renewable energy he favors would stifle competition by picking winners and losers.”

Then she gets specific.

on energy

Obama’s call for more oil and gas drilling in his State of the Union address was meant to deflect attention away from his failure to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

Obama’s energy policy excludes coal. Coal now provides approximately 45 percent of our electricity, but regulations generated by the Obama EPA are imposing significant costs on utilities, costs that are forcing some power plants to close and others to spend billions of dollars in order to comply. Those compliance costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher electricity prices.

Fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — provide roughly 85 percent of America’s energy needs. Yet, despite the failure of companies such as Solyndra, Obama is doubling down on renewable energy by calling for a national renewable energy mandate, forcing the Department of Defense to buy enough renewable energy to power a quarter of a million homes

on jobs

The president’s refusal to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, at a cost of an estimated 20,000 jobs….

Some Thoughts on the January Unemployment Number

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Last week some jobs data were published for January, and the headline number was an unemployment rate of 8.3%, a 0.2 per centage point drop over December’s 8.5% rate.  This seems highly encouraging, but it’s useful to look at some of the data underlying this number: those data give a clearer picture of the true employment picture for our economy.

If we look, for instance, the BLS’ participation rate—the per centage of Americans actually looking for work—some other aspects of our jobs numbers appear.  The Dec 2011 participation rate was 64% of a civilian labor force (those aged 16-65) of some 153,887,000.  Yet the participation rate of January’s civilian labor force of 154,395,000 had dropped to 63.7%—or 138,000 fewer Americans actually were working despite a larger labor force and 243,000 net jobs “created.”

Adding those missing 138 thousand Americans back into the numbers yields an unemployment rate of 9.1%%.  The participation rate in Jan 2011 was even higher: 64.2% (notice that: under the Obama policies, the participation rate keeps falling, as more and more Americans despair of getting jobs).  The civilian labor force that year ago January was 153,250,000 compared to Jan 2012’s 154,395,000.  Projecting 2011-2012 population growth rate onto 2011’s participating population gives an expected 2012 participating population of 155,539,000, or  1,144,000 more than the BLS says was participating in Jan 2012.  Adding those missing million Americans back into the unemployment equation of unemployed/(Civilian labor force) gives an unemployment rate of 9.0%.

Indeed, if the participation rate were at the level it was at the start of President Obama’s administration, as James Pethokoukis, of The Enterprise Blog, points out, the unemployment rate today would be 11.0%.  But under Obama’s policies, the jobs really aren’t there (the 243 thousand additional jobs appearing between December and January notwithstanding, coming as they do with 5 million fewer Americans actually working today than at the start of the Obama administration), and Americans, millions of whom have been out of work this entire administration, are giving up.  Moreover, a “measure of unemployment which includes both the discouraged plus part-timers who wish they had full time work” yields an unemployment rate that’s “a sky-high 15.1 percent.”

These are just some ways of looking at the true unemployment rate.  Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge, writes of yet another way.

Using BLS data, the US civilian non-institutional population was 242,269[,000] in January, an increase of 1.7 million month over month: apply the long-term average labor force participation rate of 65.8% to this number…and you get 159.4 million: that is what the real labor force should be.  The BLS reported one?  154.4 million: a tiny 5 million difference.  Then add these people…to the 12.758 million reported unemployed by the BLS and you get 17.776 million in real unemployed workers.  What does this mean?  That using just the BLS denominator in calculating the unemployed rate of 154.4 million, the real unemployment rate actually rose in January to 11.5%.

The Wall Street Journal put it this way:

After such a long trough, the economy’s natural recuperative powers are taking hold.

Washington has also stilled some of its damaging impulses, at least temporarily, thanks to the gridlock that arrived a year ago with the Republican House.

Unions and Economic Well-Being

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As Indiana moves toward becoming the 23rd Right to Work state—that is, a state in which its citizens no longer have to join a union, or pay union dues or part of union dues as a condition of finding work—the unions are weighing in on this risk to their awesome political and fiscal power.  Indeed, the unions are so opposed to this fundamental freedom of citizens to seek their own Happiness that they’re preparing to do everything they can to disrupt the National Football League’s Super Bowl, which this year is to be played in Indianapolis.  Jeff Combs, organizing director for Teamsters Local 135 in Indianapolis, assures us

You can tell them we’ll take the Super Bowl and shove it.

Brad Holloway, of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 481, warned that electricians may engage in work slowdowns.

And teamsters gathered at Indiana’s statehouse last week to protest while wearing T-shirts with 46—symbolizing the 46th Super Bowl—crossed out on the back.  The unions are looking for a national stage for their protest, and they’re sure to find one with this tactic.  But is it a stage they want?  And in a state whose unemployment rate is 9%, a half-point worse than the terrible national average?  Investors.com offers some statistics from the National Institute for Labor Relations Research concerning the relative economic well-being of Right to Work states vs. union states.

It seems that Right to Work states had a better than 28% growth in real personal income vs. a shade under 14% growth in union states between 2000 and 2009.  Per capita income in the last year of the period, adjusted for states’ costs of living (so that income in California, for instance, could be compared directly with income in North Dakota), was $35,500 in Right to Work states vs. $33,400 in union states.  Right to Work states experienced a nearly 21% growth in real manufacturing GDP vs. just 6.5% in union states between 2000 and 2008.

And there’s this: Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicate that Right to Work states added 1.5 million private sector jobs in their states, a 3.7% increase, while union states lost 1.8 million jobs, a 2.3% decline, between 1999 and 2009.

Go for it, guys.

Keystone XL: Too Many Jobs

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Take some of them out.  President Obama has chosen to kill the Keystone XL pipeline project, which aside from contributing to reducing our dependence on overseas (literally—and so especially vulnerable) oil, would have generated some 20,000 jobs in the near term and a few hundred thousand long term jobs from work in follow-on and associated enterprises.

Naturally, it’s those evil Republicans, who imposed an arbitrary deadline on his “environmental” assessment process, that are to blame, he says.  Of course, he ignores the fact that the environmental assessment—which had already taken three years—was complete, and that’s why it was in the State Department’s hands in the first place last fall, when he first tried to duck the question.  What’s arbitrary is his decision to cancel the project, a decision that he thought needed to be delayed for more than a year that has now been made fully a month ahead of a deadline set solely to stop his stalling.

It’ll be interesting to see the justification Obama is required by law to provide Congress to explain his decision (which explanation he would have been required to provide had he approved the pipeline, also).

In the meantime, we have these Alinsky-esque obfuscations to keep us distracted.

When President Obama took office, the United States imported 11 million barrels of oil a day. The President has put forward a plan to cut that by one-third by 2025 by…transitioning to a wide range of clean energy technologies [among other means].

and

[T]he Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Guarantee Program has already supported more than 40 clean energy projects….

Clean energy projects like Solyndra, Beacon, Evergreen Solar, AES Eastern Energy LP.

The White House goes on:

[T]wo of the Administration’s programs – the DOE Loan Guarantee Program and the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards – will create more than 10 times the amount of jobs generated by the Keystone XL pipeline, which will only generate a few thousand temporary jobs.

The DoE’s Loan Guaranty Program’s effectiveness can be seen above.  The EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards already are costing jobs as coal-fired electricity generating plants are shut down, eliminating jobs permanently in those closed plants.  The EPA’s program also is costing jobs at the small businesses that depended on those plants for their power.  These jobs are lost, at best, for the intermediate term, until the businesses can restart when new plants come on line in a few years—for those businesses that can restart.  Yes, the EPA’s Standards will provide jobs for the conversion and compliance tasks mandated—but it’s these jobs that are the temporary ones.

Obama has opened another front in his class warfare election campaign: this time between his overzealous “green” backers and (erstwhile) working Americans.