Tag Archives: jobs

Regulations of our Government

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Kevin O’Brien of The Plain Dealer has already addressed this particular aspect of an over-regulatory government, so I’ll just quote heavily from his editorial.  It seems our illustrious Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, is the one who’s at it for our government, this time.  Per Solis, kids aren’t to be allowed to work on the family farm, anymore.  They might catch a blister, poor dears.

It seems Solis’ answer to this problem is to

…prohibit hired workers under 16 from operating almost all power-driven equipment unless they have been “enrolled in a vocational education program in agriculture under a recognized state or local educational authority or in a substantially similar program conducted by a private school.”

So, let’s see: a VoTech program is better equipped to train a minor in operating farm equipment than is the farmer who owns and operates that equipment.  Last I looked, VoTech programs don’t have many tractors, or balers, or plows, or harrows, or….  Those are mostly down on the farm.  On what basis would we expect a school to train the use of farm equipment or tools when they don’t have any?  There’s that Federal government logical thinking.

Solis insists that kids working on the farm have a higher fatality rate than kids working elsewhere (wait—there are kids working?  Where are Solis’ child labor laws?  Certainly, they’re not working in their schools as part-time janitors…).

But as O’Brien points out,

[The kids are] a lot less vulnerable than children who have to walk through a bad neighborhood after their shift at McDonald’s….

Solis goes even further:

…prohibit young people from doing any work that would take them more than six feet above ground level or engaging in any activity that would expose them to “unpredictable animal behavior.”

But tree climbing for recreation is OK—or is government going to intrude into my backyard and ban that, too?  The neighbor’s dog doesn’t like me, either—but he’s pretty predictable.  Never mind that; as O’Brien points out, sometimes you have to work more than six feet off the ground.  Ha lofts in barns, for instance.

As Senator Ben Nelson (D, NE) points out, though, this sort of rule is inimical to the welfare of farming and of rural economies.  Solis’ rule could

…change the structure of family farms and have a negative impact on the education of the next generation of farmers.

This proposed rule is another example of Washington being out of touch with Nebraskans’ values.  The Department of Labor should kill this rule before it destroys important traditions in rural America and hurts the farm economy.

One out of every three jobs in Nebraska is tied to agriculture.  We need to increase opportunities for our family farmers and ranchers to strengthen our rural economies, not threaten them with new, unneeded regulations from Washington.

Of course, Solis could have another class of laborer in mind for these jobs.

As O’Brien describes this from his own childhood, actual learning by the young worker would be lost to such rules:

I learned a tremendous amount about animals in those years, and a fair amount about people. I chased things. I got chased by things. I learned that work — even sweaty, smelly, dusty, tiring work — could be fun.

and

Along the way, I learned to differentiate among things and activities that deserved respect, things and activities that were actually worth fearing and things and activities that were no big deal if you handled them properly.

These are lessons that aren’t available in any school or VoTech program.  These are lessons that only can be learned through doing.

As O’Brien points out, though,

…a little time on the farm would have done Hilda Solis some good. She spooks too easily….

Government and Innovation

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Government’s role is to create an environment within which men can prosper in accordance with their own efforts and the degree of those efforts.  Thus, legitimate government sets laws that prevent one from cheating another and laws that require each to honor the contracts to which they agreed.  Legitimate governments do very little more than that.  Government does not have, for instance, a legitimate role in determining what those contracts must accomplish, or how they must be structured.  Nor does government have a legitimate role in inuring any of us from the failure of our efforts: it is, in fact, from those failures that our enterprises grow stronger for the next effort.  It is in the fermentation vats of competition, unconstrained by government, that innovation occurs.

Why, then, is what used to be a uniquely American skill of innovation moving apace overseas and no longer occurring here?  Here’s an example of this failure, and it illustrates an answer.  Despite our need to become energy independent, for a range of reasons I’ll not go into here, and despite our Progressives’ push to move away from coal, oil, and gas as the primary source of our energy, nuclear power innovation is moving to the People’s Republic of China, at the behest of American innovators.  In this illustration, I’ll leave aside the question of helping the PRC obtain technological superiority over us (which is troubling in itself).

The Washington Post reports that a startup called TerraPower has developed a nuclear power breakthrough that involves traveling wave reactor technology and this technology’s ability to use depleted uranium to power a nuclear plant for decades without need of refueling or waste removal.  However, instead of looking to deploy this technology in the US, TerraPower, heavily backed by Bill Gates of Microsoft fame, is talking to the PRC government about selling its technology there.  How does this work?

For one thing—for the driving thing—innovators still are human, and humans still can go anywhere they like.  And humans, being humans, are going to go where it’s easiest to follow their dream, easiest to satisfy their own drives and imperatives.  With business, and especially high-tech business, those places are where the conditions conducive to development and growth are most available.

The US’ rules for permitting and environmental studies, especially for nuclear power, and the US’ litigation environment that encourages lawsuits over any perceived slight, whether environmental, social, or something else all serve to drive the costs of bringing innovation from the laboratory into the market to astronomical heights.  Although, in TerraPower’s case, this might be irrelevant: “Current U.S. rules don’t even cover the type of technology TerraPower hopes to use.”

Additionally, the US’ visa rules are outright stupid.  We educate highly talented and motivated engineers and scientists, and then, because they’re aliens, we send them back to their home countries, even if they want to stay—the quotas are too low and for the few allowed, it takes too long for the converted visas to be issued.  Then, getting talented, motivated, already educated—and experienced—foreign engineers and scientists (back) into the US also is a Herculean task, made worse by not having allowed those freshly trained to stay: the quotas are set too low, and the few authorized visas are slow to be issued.  In either case, why should we have quotas at all?  We should welcome these people with open arms, as we did with the German scientists after WWII, who built our space program.

On the other hand, the PRC has programs like “Thousand Foreign Talents” to attract the world’s best and brightest into China.  And they have an active, empirically visible interest in tech and in having an environment conducive to development—and deployment.  While the US is shrinking its satellite and exploration programs and withdrawing from manned space efforts, while hoping for small change from companies like SpaceX (which NASA is in the process of stiffing due to budgetary problems), China is accelerating its programs, including intending to put a man on the moon by 2020—a feat we’ve been too timid to think about trying for 40 years.

As the WaPo concludes

The lesson is clear: The U.S. government needs to be just as aggressive as the Chinese in creating incentives for entrepreneurs and technology start-ups to grow and mature. At a time when the U.S. is downplaying efforts to attract and retain foreign entrepreneurs and flirting with legislation that could slow the pace of digital innovation, it is strangely China that is proving to be more proactive in creating the conditions for innovators to thrive. Bill Gates is one of America’s great entrepreneurial legends. Something feels wrong about seeing him launch a new chapter in his tech career in China and not the U.S.

Hmm….

Joblessness

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Here are some data on Americans and our quests for work.

Financial Times‘ Ed Luce offers some statistics (the article may be behind a paywall):

In December 2007, the US economy employed 146 million people. Four years later, it languishes at 140 million.  At the current rate of job creation it will take another two and a half years to regain 2007 levels—taking the replacement cycle to as much as 78 months….  Even that understates the problem, since in that time the population will have risen by more than 10 million.

and

At the start of the recession, the employment-to-population rate was 62.7 per cent. The rate is now 58.5 per cent….  According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 per cent.

Notice that last.  Here are some back of the envelopment calculations: in 2007, according to the US Census, the working-age population of the US (which I’ve unilaterally defined as men and women between 20 and 64 years old) was a bit shy of 181 million Americans.  Thus, that 4% drop in the employment-to-population rate represents a loss of some 7.25 million Americans from the labor force—7.25 million who have, with the terrible economy we’ve had for the last four years, given up looking for work.  If they still were looking, that’s what would run the “unemployment rate” up to 11 %.

In the last three years, the “official” unemployment rate has run from 7% to as high as 10%, stabilized at around 9% for most of these three years, and last month fell to 8.6%, a number that disguises the foregoing.  In all, some 2 million more Americans—that are still looking—are out of work today than at the start of 2009.

There’s one more interesting statistic.  This one does a better job of measuring the quality of the jobs available: the unemployed and underemployed combined rate is pushing 20 per cent.  This isn’t a number that says an American isn’t getting paid what he wants, or thinks he deserves—none of us are that—this is a number that says Americans don’t have as much work per day as we want—it includes all less than full time workers who want to be full time.

And there’s this from the Democratic National Committee Chairwoman and Congresswoman (D, FL), Debbie Wasserman Schulz in an exchange with Gretchen Carlson:

Carlson: Unemployment has gone up precipitously since [Obama] took office.

Wasserman Schulz: That is simply not true.

Among Luce, Carlson, and Wasserman Schulz, someone has lost track of the situation.

What is the President’s Jobs Agenda?

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What, exactly, is the President’s jobs agenda, now that he’s begun campaigning on one, a year ahead of the next election and three years into his administration—three years in which unemployment has been as high as 10% and has stagnated at 9% for the last two years?  Three years in which he has pushed through his Obamacare health care legislation and his Dodd-Frank Wall Street legislation.  Three years in which he has shaken his finger very firmly at America’s enemies as he has presided over our retreat from the world stage.

Let’s review the bidding.  His opening move, at the end of summer, was a $440 billion bill in which he collected parts of Stimulus I, with its spending imperative, added a push for higher taxes for his class warfare reelection campaign theme, and titled the collection “The American Jobs Act.”  What were the jobs?  There weren’t any, directly.  Much of that spending, though, was aimed at transfers of national taxpayer monies to state and local public service unions—teachers, police, and fire fighter unions—to retain their support in Obama’s campaign.

When that failed, his next move was to pull his jobs bill’s spend and tax legislation apart and push the spending piece parts—always paid for with higher taxes, rather than spending cuts elsewhere—separately.  He did this against the backdrop of his campaign for reelection.

In parallel with that, he’s been having his EPA write “clean” air rules that are Draconian in their effect on, for instance, coal-fired electricity generating power plants.  As Josiah Neely, an Analyst with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, points out, these rules threaten existing and future jobs in return for highly doubtful favorable effects on air quality.  The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, reports Neely, says that enforcing the Cross-State and related rules could result in power plant closures to the extent that 183,000 jobs could be lost every year until 2020.  Our president is unconcerned about this, however.  In 2008, Candidate Obama bragged that under his proposals “if somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can—it’s just that it will bankrupt them.”

Just last week, Obama has decided to punt on the Keystone XL pipeline, a project proposed—in 2008—to build a pipeline to carry oil from Canadian tar sands to refineries in Texas and along the Gulf coast.  He said that, after these three years of review, he wants yet more, “to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood.”  This delay will cost 20,000 construction jobs and potentially 100,000+ downstream, more permanent jobs in the US.

Finally, we have this announcement from the Stryker Corporation, a firm that makes implants and instruments for orthopedics and neurosurgery.  Stryker is reacting to Obamacare taxes that are soon to take effect, and their press release, presented 10 November, says in part [emphasis added]:

Stryker Corporation announced its intention to implement focused workforce reductions of approximately 5% of its global workforce and other restructuring activities….  The targeted reductions and other restructuring activities are being initiated to provide efficiencies and realign resources in advance of the new Medical Device Excise Tax scheduled to begin in 2013….

Obama’s Medical Excise Tax is an Obamacare tax that applies to revenues, as opposed to profits, and it is driving companies that want to do development work in this area to reduce effort in this area and to reduce associated employment.  Other companies will likely outsource jobs to overseas jurisdictions that don’t have such counterproductive employment policies.  (As an aside, it needs to be noted that Stryker’s implants now will be harder, and more expensive, for our wounded veterans to obtain.)

Finally, Obama’s do-nothing Democrat Senate is sitting on 15 jobs bills that would have a real impact on our unemployment and our unemployment rate.

What is Obama’s jobs agenda, then?  He doesn’t have one.  He’s still working on his tax and spend agenda, and pushing class warfare to get more of it imposed.

Mr Obama, Approve this Jobs Plan Now

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Energy security is a new meme of the present administration, and creating jobs has lately gained a measure of political importance within White House walls, too.  Here’s a chance for significant progress on both, and without gov’t subsidy, without the feds spending a penny.  This single move lessens our dependence on extracontinental foreign oil, whose sources are politically unreliable and whose delivery depends on a long, vulnerable, fragile “pipeline” of oil and gas tankers plying their slow, nonmaneuverable way across the Arabian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea (these two already beset with pirates that our government is too timid to dispatch), and the world’s oceans.  This single move also will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, to cut into our 9+% unemployment rate.  Mr Obama, cut through the delays and approve the Keystone XL pipeline, proposed in 2008, now.

The Washington Post reports that several unions aver this pipeline will directly generate as many as 20,000 high-wage construction jobs for their members, your constituents.  As many as 250,000 additional jobs, according The Chamber of Commerce, also will flow from this pipeline project and other businesses that will develop along its completed length.  Even if inflated by 100%, this represents 125,000 more jobs in your economy than currently extant.  US News and World Report reports that “[T]he states along the pipeline route are anticipated to receive an additional $5.2 billion in property tax revenue and thousands of indirect jobs relating to the project.”

Environmentalists and farmers misinformed by these environmentalists, worry about oil spills from pipeline leaks.  However, the fact is that in the existing 55,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines in the US, leaks are virtually non-existent.  Our most famous pipeline, the Trans Alaska Pipeline, suffered sabotage in 1978 with a resulting spill of around 16,000 barrels.  Other incidents of gunshots and age have led to leaks of 4,200 barrels, 6,300 barrels, and “several thousand” barrels, as reported by the pipeline’s operator, Alyeska.   These are vanishingly small against the pipeline’s lifetime delivery, to date, of 16,000,000 barrels.  Interestingly, the Denali earthquake in 2002 damaged some parts of the pipeline designed to take the damage, and no leaks at all occurred.

The existing Keystone pipeline is equally sound.  Of the leaks reported from 2001-2010 for this pipeline, 50 percent were less than 3 barrels and 80 percent were less than 50 barrels.

Finally, simple business imperatives push for sound design to minimize the likelihood of leaks and for prompt seal and cleanup of those leaks that do occur.  Oil and gas pipelines turn out to be safer than the trucks that would need to carry all that oil from the Athabasca Oil Sands field to our Gulf Coast and Texas refineries—were Canada willing to sell to us under such limiting conditions.

With regard to that, either we use the Canadian oil or the Chinese will: the US News also reports that PetroChina has already signed a deal with Athabasca Oil Sands Corporation that gives PC a controlling 60% stake Athabasca’s MacKay and Dover oil sands deposits in Alberta. Further, Sinopec, a state-owned Chinese company, has bought ConocoPhillips’ 9% stake in Syncrude Canada, LTD, further demonstrating China’s drive to absorb North American oil and gas resources, even as it is doing with Iranian oil resources.

Yet this administration’s response to the need for this pipeline isn’t based on the merits (or lack) of Keystone XL, it’s based solely on Obama’s “Re-elect me” campaign stump, as this email from campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt demonstrates:

When Americans compare the president’s record promoting clean energy and America’s energy security to those of the leading Republican candidates, who don’t even believe that climate change is an issue that we need to address and would cede the clean-energy market to China, there will be no question about who will continue our progress.

Additionally, Administration officials are ducking their responsibility for making a decision in re this project—for or against—at every turn.  In an October 11 interview with the Associated Press, also reported in The Washington Post, Secretary of State Clinton said she realized “this is a very emotional decision” for some but emphasized that she had not been involved in the process yet because “originally, two and a half years ago, this had been delegated to the deputy.”  Hmm….  Even though I’m the MFWIC, I’m going to keep avoiding this for as long as I can.

Thus, the question is whether, in the face of an ongoing national crisis, we can stop the political circus and actually do something to help the economy.  Mr Obama, approve this jobs plan now.