Tag Archives: responsibilities

Wages or Benefits

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Every month, the Labor Department’s jobs report helps shine a light on the growth of overall wages, which has been slow in recent years. But what gets far less attention are the other components of compensation—health insurance, paid leave, retirement benefits—that in recent years have generally outpaced wage growth, as shown in new Labor Department data released Friday.

And isn’t that a travesty?  Used to be, in the ’50s and early ’60s, these benefits—including the pensions that were those retirement benefits were perks an employer used to induce top performers to work for him and not someone else.  Remember when “full dental” was such a big deal?

It needs to go back to that.

I’d rather have the pay, and I’m happy to be responsible for my own outcomes.  Depending on others for my benefits leaves me…vulnerable to those others, from changing attitudes of those others to the ability of those others to continue paying the benefits.  See, for instance, all the public pension bankruptcies and impending bankruptcies and all the private company pension plans that are underfunded.

Note here, too: it’s not the 401(k) plans and other defined contribution retirement plans—plans for which the individual contributor is solely responsible—that are going broke.  If they’re underfunded, too, that’s the choice of the plan holders; it’s not inflicted on them by their employers, their unions, or their government “pension” legislator/managers.  Furthermore, the failure of an individual defined benefit plan affects only that plan’s holder; it has no effect on others.  The failure of a retirement plan managed by others for entire groups hammers everyone in those groups dragooned into participating.

Timidity

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A group of perpetually-offended atheists, agnostics and freethinkers are threatening to sue a small Wisconsin town because of two welcome signs.

Here’s an example of the signs, which have been up 50 years or more:

The churches extend the welcome, not the town’s government in the name of any church or all of them.

Of what are these folks so terrified?  There’s nothing stopping them from putting up their own welcome sign: “Atheists of Oconomowoc Welcome You.”  If the town’s government objected to that, only then might there be an actual beef.

Or: these folks are just terrified of how foolish they’ll look in an open contest of ideas, so they’re suing in the hope of using that to extort acquiescence.

I trust the town of Oconomowoc will show themselves made of sterner stuff than these snowflakes and welcome them into court—and then refuse to settle the matter.

A Party’s True Character

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A Party’s True Character

The Progressive-Democratic Party leader of the time, President Woodrow Wilson, said of segregation, “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”  The Progressive-Democratic Party also is the party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party that made national minimum wage laws for the explicit purpose of keeping blacks on the plantation—literally—instead of migrating north and competing for jobs by being willing to work for less than white union members were.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of racist and sexist affirmative action programs.

The Progressive-Democratic Party is the party of the welfare cage that keeps our poor, of any stripe, trapped in poverty and dependent on government handouts.

Jason Riley in The Wall Street Journal has some insights on the current nature of the matter.

[Now] race-consciousness is once again ascendant, not only among “alt-right” types, but more tellingly among self-styled progressives and left-wing institutions that once worked so hard to combat Jim Crow policies. The liberals who are cheering the recent removal of Confederate monuments to racial separatism also indulge the separatist rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter. Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s calls for colorblind policies seem as dated as concerns about interracial hookups.

And

College campuses offer near-daily examples of this liberal devolution on racial matters. The most prominent recent episode involves Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, who has come under fire from students and fellow faculty members for criticizing the school’s “Day of Absence” protest, which involved whites quitting campus for the day.

And

Sadly, these antics have become commonplace in recent years. Students at the University of Wisconsin have demanded free tuition and housing for blacks. At the University of Michigan, a student group that previously complained about the lack of racial “diversity” and “inclusion” at the school has since requested a safe space on campus reserved for students of color to gather. At the University of Missouri, only students of color were invited to participate in a “die-in” protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

And

Last year, at the urging of the school’s black student union, California State University, Los Angeles began offering segregated housing for black students. The University of Connecticut, the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley are among the colleges that have similar arrangements in place.

And

This year, Harvard held its first-ever commencement ceremony for black graduate students. The New York Times reported that racially segregated end-of-year ceremonies like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.

The Progressive students of the campuses and those institutions’ management are demanding exactly what that Progressive icon, Woodrow Wilson, promised them: the “protection” of segregation.  This is what the Party’s Big Government-mandated dependency has wrought.

Obstruction of Justice

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Ex-FBI Director James Comey testified earlier this week before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he was the one who orchestrated the leak of his MFR purportedly describing a one-on-one meeting with President Donald Trump.  Comey said he asked a friend (Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, and a man who should have known better himself) to leak the document and the friend subsequently read it over the phone to a New York Times writer.

Even larger than the fact that Comey leaked the thing or caused its leak are two other matters: the MFR was, and is, government property since he wrote it as a government employee; it is not, and never has been, his personal property.  Thus, the leak, having been done without government permission, was illegal.  There’s also this bit, that illustrates Comey’s dishonesty, if not directly the illegality of his leak [emphasis added]:

Two days after Comey was fired, The New York Times reported on a January conversation—allegedly sourced from those Comey told about the encounter [now known to be Richman]—in which Comey claimed Trump asked him for his loyalty. Trump has vociferously denied he made such a request and tweeted the following day: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Comey, in his Thursday testimony, said it was that tweet that prompted him to enlist Richman to help him leak memos….

More than that, though, is Comey’s stated motive for his leak: to trigger the appointment of a special counsel to conduct the investigation into Trump’s campaign staff’s alleged involvement with Russian intrusions into our election process and other involvements between those personnel and Russian persons.

That strikes me as obstruction of justice.  There already were investigations in progress, by the FBI and by four Congressional committees, into precisely those matters.  Comey didn’t like the way those investigations were going, and so he wanted to trigger another—which existence could only interfere with the existing investigations.

Some Thoughts on the Paris Climate Accord

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Some information provided by Matthew Dalton in The Wall Street Journal is illuminating, if not in the way he—or the WSJ—might have intended.

The US’s willingness under the Obama administration to propose major emissions reductions and put money on the table helped solidify global consensus behind the deal. It also helped persuade politicians world-wide of the need to seek more ambitious cuts and channel more money into the fight against global warming, officials and experts say.

Our willingness to put money on the table “helped persuade politicians world-wide [to] channel more money into the fight against global warming” contains a couple of disingenuousities.  One is that the greater amount of money to be channeled is American taxpayers’ money, since the other nearly 200 nations party to the thing aren’t putting up much money at all—in fact, large polluters like India pledged themselves to do nothing under the accord until some trillions of dollars in “foreign aid” had been transferred to them.  Pakistan, unmentioned by Dalton, pledged to “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible.”  But that only defines the word “peak;” it commits to nothing—other than to be one of the receivers of (American taxpayers’) OPM.

The other disingenuousity is the cynically presented strawman of “the fight against global warming.”  The folks objecting to our leaving the accord will have to play with their dolly without me.  There’s no fight against global warming.  There is an effort to mitigate human activity’s impact on climate change, even though that impact has not had its significance established, or even suggested in any credible way.  Even the direction of climate change is not established: it was just a short time ago that the same Climate Federal Funding Industry was trying to raise funding by frightening us into worrying about the coming Ice Age.  (This is also the same collection of rent-seekers who tried to raise money with fear mongering about catastrophic global overpopulation.)

There’s also this from Dalton:

Despite the strong reaction of world leaders, the US’s financial contributions have been relatively small so far and its decision to withdraw doesn’t necessarily halt America’s progress on the emissions front.

Indeed.  The uproar is over the fact that the others won’t have such easy access to OPM—us American taxpayers’ money.  Never mind that in their bleating, these “world leaders” ignore the simple fact that we’re the leaders in cutting both pollution and CO2 emissions—we’re already at 1990s levels of CO2 emissions, and it hasn’t even been established that this plant food even is a pollutant.

And this:

When they signed the accord, governments acknowledged that the most difficult work was left unfinished. The pledges to slash emissions made by more than 190 nations fell far short of the reductions scientists say are needed to avoid the most damaging effects of climate change.

That bit of dishonesty speaks for itself.

Looks like President Trump isn’t as dumb or irresponsible as these worthies claim.  The Paris Climate Accord was, and is, nothing but cynical virtue signaling by the intended recipients of OPM and by the developed nation leaders’ who promised pennies of their own and dollars of ours.