From AEIdeas comes one indication:
AEIdeas summarized the circled section:
In 18 of the last 19 months starting in December 2015, the energy share of consumer spending has been below 4% marking a historic period of the most affordable energy in US history (annual data on energy spending back to 1929 confirms this).
That’s evil oil and gas for you—making our lives easier and making that ease cheaper.
There are 12 days left after their 5 September return from vacation, driven by the Obamacare requirement for health plan providers to commit by 17 September to selling their health plans for the next year or withdrawing, for Congress to pass a potful of legislation.
Two proposals regarding Obamacare are in the offing. One would shore up the funds transfer of Federal dollars to those providers who are losing money in ObamaMart, and the other instead would send that money as grants to the States to help them generate their own health coverage plan programs. This one also would eliminate the Individual Mandate.
Also looming is the debt funding deadline that necessitates raising the debt ceiling to pay currently committed-to bills.
Also: an immigration bill that rationalizes our immigration policy is in conference. It severely restricts green card issuance (which is foolish IMNSHO), but it has the beneficial effect of that rationalization.
Also: an infrastructure restoral bill is under construction.
Also: bills to withdraw counterproductive, if not outright mendacious, Federal rules and rulings in the EPA, DoEd, Labor, etc that were intended to destroy whole industries (can you say, “coal,” boys and girls?), cancel rule of law on campuses, much too excessively favor unions over management (NLRB), and on and on.
Twelve days of Christmas? Or is the Grinch coming? [/snark] Not all of those necessaries have that 12-day deadline, but all of them need to be done quickly, since Congressmen—of both parties and in both houses of Congress—are too (how to put this delicately) chicken to do anything substantive in an election year. Even were they around in DC doing their jobs instead of hiding out on their various campaign trails.
Here’s an example, People’s Republic of China style. Including the fact that gender discrimination in the workplace is illegal in the PRC, while its governments at all levels blithely ignore those laws.
[A]bout 22% of women have experienced severe or very severe discrimination when seeking employment, according to Zhaopin Ltd, an online recruiter. … That percentage rose to about 43% for women with graduate degrees.
And
A trawl through job listings on Boss Zhipin, the recruitment site, showed some tech companies state explicitly that positions are just for men.
An e-commerce marketing job at NetEase Inc, one of the largest internet companies in China, recently stated that only male candidates need to apply because “the job is tough and stressful.
It begins early on in their society.
Parents often tell their daughters they won’t be good at math or physics or coding.
Welcome to paradise.
From a Wall Street Journal op-ed, come a couple of very telling statistics regarding the opioid addiction epidemic.
…overdose deaths per million residents rose twice as fast in the 29 Medicaid expansion states—those that increased eligibility to 138% from 100% of the poverty line—than in the 21 non-expansion states between 2013 and 2015.
And
There were also marked disparities between neighboring states based on whether they opted into ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion. Deaths increased twice as much in New Hampshire (108%) and Maryland (44%)—expansion states—than in Maine (55%) and Virginia (22%). Drug fatalities shot up by 41% in Ohio while climbing 3% in non-expansion Wisconsin.
This also reflects…interestingly…on those Republican Representatives and Senators who chose to vote against rolling back the Medicaid expansion part of Obamacare.
German businesses better add women to their governances. Or else Germany’s Großer Bruder will do it for them. Regardless of qualification.
Big German companies need to put more women on their executive boards, said Germany’s Women’s Affairs Minister Katarina Barley. The official threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year.
Bad idea.
Quotas just stigmatize those who got in via quota, whether they were truly qualified for the position or not. And those who are not, and so fail, only strengthen the stigma. Quotas are especially damaging to black women. My GP was contemptuously treated as a twofer in med school because she allegedly filled two squares: she’s a woman, and she’s black. It stinks.
The way to get more favored group into organization is to train those folks up for those positions in the first place so they can compete effectively. That means the educational system needs to do a better job of training women to lead businesses (to take the present example) and to convince them they want to compete for those positions—which the German educational system already does, it seems, for boys and men.
That, though, would take time—years, a generation or two or three—and politicians (Germany’s are not unique here) don’t care about tomorrow, only about today. And today’s virtue signaling.