Tag Archives: jobs

Keystone and Vetoes

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All the pundits are looking to the Senate for an override of President Barack Obama’s pending veto of the pending Keystone XL Pipeline legislation. The Senate, it seems, has 63 votes for passage (which implies a cloture vote won’t be a problem), but the focus is on the Senate’s lack of four more votes to produce a “veto-proof” bill.

All the pundits are skipping over two key factors.

One is that a Senate passage with 67 Senators voting “aye” is not at all veto proof. That’s just for passage. The veto override is an entirely separate vote that comes after the President has, in fact, said “No” to his Senators and to the legislation. To override in the Senate, all 13 Senators voting for passage would then have to vote against their president to override. Every single one of them.

Also lost in the “veto-proof” blather, though, is a larger hurdle. Obama’s “No” would have to be overridden in the House, too: 290 Representatives would have to vote to override. That means that 44 of Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) Democrats would have to vote to override their President.

Good luck with that. Good luck with either of those.

Pass the bill, anyway, with a roll call vote in each House. Then do roll call votes in each House to override. Use Obama’s veto and those Democrats’ votes to shape the ’16 elections.

The Congress and the President

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President Barack Obama is ready, willing—even eager—to work with the 114th Congress, instead of routinely bypassing it, The Wall Street Journal quoted “senior administration officials” as saying at the start of this new year.

Both Houses of this new Congress have introduced bipartisanly supported bills that would authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. And Obama has said he’ll veto that legislation, never minding that 70% of Americans—Obama’s employers, as well as the employers of the new Congress—want the pipeline built.

I’m driven to the conclusion that Obama’s claimed willingness to work with Republicans is just more Obamatalk, and that “cooperate with” still means “be reasonable: do it my way.”

At Last, Shovel Ready Jobs

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And President Barack Obama only had to break the law (and the Constitution) to find them.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency is looking to hire 1,000 new employees to process applications pertaining to President Barack Obama’s new executive action on immigration, the New York Times is reporting.

Never mind that existing immigration law makes his Executive “Action” mandating protection from deportation of illegal entrants into the US illegal. Never mind that his Constitutional mandate, and his oath of office to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, make his Executive “Action” illegal.

Because, jobs. And best of all,

The new positions have salaries that range up to $157,000 a year.

That’s better than road building—and they’re indoors, too. Can’t beat that with a…stick.

Good Medicine for Bad Bankers

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That’s the title of an Alan Blinder op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. It’s subtitled One way to keep bankers from behaving badly is to hit them in their pocketbooks with penalties that affect bonuses.

Blinder cited remarks by New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley:

Mr Dudley highlighted the “ongoing occurrences of serious professional misbehavior, ethical lapses and compliance failures” at giant financial institutions. And he warned the audience, which included a number of the world’s leading bankers, that unless the epidemic of bad behavior stops, “the inevitable conclusion will be reached that your firms are too big and complex to manage,” in which case “your firms need to be dramatically downsized and simplified.”

You bet. However, Blinder wants more government interference, even after government’s proven failure to manage economies of any sort. He wants a points system for bank(er)s’ misbehavior, with a sufficient accumulation of points leading to an offending bank’s loss of its banking license. And he wants government to dictate where in a bank its losses should be allocated. Because businessmen and their accountants can’t be trusted with this judgment. But government can be.

No, the best way to achieve “hitting them in their pocketbooks” is to have the bankers’ jobs at risk through free market sanctions on their banks’ continued viability—let those banks fail and enter bankruptcy. And the best way to achieve that would be to eliminate the too-big-too-fail sewage of Dodd-Frank.

Sorry I’m late with this today.  Ate up with dumb and with lazy.

Technology, Oil, and Government

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Falling oil prices are a good thing. Except when they’re not. Or….

The irony in the falling prices is that the success of US producers using hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies is partly responsible, along with slowing demand by struggling Asian and European markets. Now that success could come back to bite the so-called fracking industry and other drillers in America.

[Wyoming Governor Matt, R] Mead acknowledged that in the short term, lower gas prices will benefit businesses and residents in his sparsely populated state, where distances between towns are often calculated in hours instead of minutes.

But, he pointed out, “If we see low prices continue for some time, we’ll see rigs start to lay down. And it’s not just the direct revenue. It’s the hotels, restaurants and all that goes with that.”

Not to mention jobs.

This is normal in a free market economy, though. New technologies, or old technologies like fracking whose time has come, are always disruptive. Recall the stereotypical, but no less accurate for that, impact on horse-drawn buggy and whip manufacturers with the advent of the horseless carriage and then the assembly line for making those automobiles cheap.

So it is with fracking. Not only does it make hard-to-get oil and natural gas (much) easier and (much) cheaper to get, it drastically increases the supply of these commodities, each of which individually drastically lowers the price of these, and together they synergistically do.

But when supply overshoots demand, and the price obtainable for oil and gas cannot cover even the lowered cost of extraction, many of the suppliers, extractors, stop producing, stop extracting. This has negative effects on both fracking jobs and the ancillary jobs Mead mentioned.

However, in a free market, supply and demand quickly match each other, and prices—and jobs—stabilize. With the technological advances associated with this commodity, too, as with any technological advance, the new pricing equilibrium will be lower than the prior equilibrium. It’s uncertain whether oil and gas pricing in particular will stabilize at their current levels, continue a little lower, or go a little higher. But it’s virtually certain we’re done with $100 oil for the foreseeable future, which is to the good of utilities, manufacturers, consumers, and anyone and anything that uses energy.

And those jobs? They’ll recover with the stability and predictability of the new normal in oil and gas extraction. The widespread use of fracking and related technologies also will lead to a net increase in employment when all is said and done, just like in those early automobile days.

The kicker here is identified by Kathleen Sgamma, Western Energy Alliance Vice President of Government and Public Affairs [emphasis added]:

There is a point at which the lower commodity price combined with the increased regulatory cost will put new wells out of business—they just won’t be drilled[.]

And [emphasis added]

whether a well is on private, state, or federal land, “because the regulatory environment is such that it makes it more expensive to develop on those federal or tribal lands.”

Government’s intrusive regulation wasn’t a factor in Henry Ford’s disruption.