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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (42553)	6/13/2010 12:34:04 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Obama Prevaricates about Jobs by Phyllis Schlafly June 11, 2010 The spectacular loss of American jobs is devastating to more Americans than the oil spill in the Gulf, but Barack Obama still doesn't get it. This month he bragged to an audience of truckers in Hyattsville, Maryland, that our economy is "getting stronger by the day." The U.S. Labor Department reports a very different picture. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as Americans out of work for 27 or more weeks, is at its highest level since the Labor Department began collecting such data in the 1940s. More bad news comes from the Labor Department. In May, 431,000 jobs were added, but nine-tenths of them were government jobs. Unemployment of young men is the highest in 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. The numbers for minority teenagers are tragic. Obama's $787 billion federal stimulus program was packaged in mental images of construction workers in hard hats. However, most of those hired with Stimulus dollars were government employees. More than half of stimulus jobs were in education, mostly women, which was part of his payoff to the feminists. Many states expanded staff for teaching and education administration at the same time that they had a declining enrollment of students. The rest of America may be suffering from a recession, but it's boom time for federal employees. On average, federal employees are paid $71,206 per year compared to $40,331 for private sector workers. Those figures are just the start of the comfort of being a federal employee. When you include benefits such as health care and retirement, federal employees make almost double what private sector employees receive: $119,982 versus $59,909. Stay tuned: federal employees receive raises practically every year. From December 2007 through June 2009, average federal government salaries increased 6.6 percent while private sector salaries increased 3.9 percent. Most federal workers also get periodic pay hikes, called steps, which average 1.5 percent per year. Federal employees don't spend much time worrying about being laid off, or about their jobs being transferred to China or Mexico, the worry that hangs over private sector workers. Under Obama, federal jobs keep increasing in number, not diminishing. And there's more. Nineteen percent of federal employees make more than $100,000 a year. That's before benefits, overtime pay and bonuses are counted. One of the reasons why government employees are so well paid is that they enjoy the advocacy of the richest and most powerful unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). Last year was the turning point when government employee unions were able to boast more members than private sector unions. According to an article in The Hill, the SEIU expects to spend $44 million to influence the 2010 elections, and AFSCME will spend $50 million. Most will be spent to help Democrats keep control of Congress and to implement Obama's agenda. The best way Obama could create jobs is to cut taxes on those who create jobs (corporations and investors), but that's absolutely not his game plan. He wants redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to non-taxpayers and a larger percent of our population economically and attitudinally dependent on government. The second best way to create jobs would be to stop importing foreign workers. Has Obama no regard for the 15 million unemployed Americans and the additional 10 million who have given up looking or are able to get only part-time jobs? Each year, a million and a half foreigners are brought into our country and given work permits. That's a million and a half jobs a year that do not go to Americans. At least 8 million illegal aliens also have jobs in the United States. The enforcement of E-Verify would make those jobs available to our own unemployed. Don't let the liberals get by with the lie that Americans won't do those jobs. Illegal aliens work less than half of the jobs in every one of the categories where they cluster. It's not only low-paid jobs that aliens take from Americans. The Census Bureau found that 34 percent of all software engineers are immigrants, despite the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers reporting that 48,000 U.S. software engineers are unemployed. This is the 20th year of the H-1B program, which was supposed to admit only foreigners who can work jobs that require special expertise for which no U.S. employee can be found. From the start, this program has been a racket to allow big corporations to bring in cheap workers with limited skills to work ordinary jobs. The Times Square would-be bomber, who was only a "B" student, once entered the United States on an H-1B visa. We haven't heard about any bureaucrat being fired for that mistake or even admonished. eagleforum.org

To: TimF who wrote (42553)	6/27/2010 11:23:23 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

The Keynesian Dead End Spending our way to prosperity is going out of style. JUNE 26, 2010. Today's G-20 meeting has been advertised as a showdown between the U.S. and Europe over more spending "stimulus," and so it is. But the larger story is the end of the neo-Keynesian economic moment, and perhaps the start of a healthier policy turn. For going on three years, the developed world's economic policy has been dominated by the revival of the old idea that vast amounts of public spending could prevent deflation, cure a recession, and ignite a new era of government-led prosperity. It hasn't turned out that way. Now the political and fiscal bills are coming due even as the U.S. and European economies are merely muddling along. The Europeans have had enough and want to swear off the sauce, while the Obama Administration wants to keep running a bar tab. So this would seem to be a good time to examine recent policy history and assess the results. * Like many bad ideas, the current Keynesian revival began under George W. Bush. Larry Summers, then a private economist, told Congress that a "timely, targeted and temporary" spending program of $150 billion was urgently needed to boost consumer "demand." Democrats who had retaken Congress adopted the idea—they love an excuse to spend—and the politically tapped-out Mr. Bush went along with $168 billion in spending and one-time tax rebates. The cash did produce a statistical blip in GDP growth in mid-2008, but it didn't stop the financial panic and second phase of recession. So enter Stimulus II, with Mr. Summers again leading the intellectual charge, this time as President Obama's adviser and this time suggesting upwards of $500 billion. When Congress was done two months later, in February 2009, the amount was $862 billion. A pair of White House economists famously promised that this spending would keep the unemployment rate below 8%. Seventeen months later, and despite historically easy monetary policy for that entire period, the jobless rate is still 9.7%. Yesterday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis once again reduced the GDP estimate for first quarter growth, this time to 2.7%, while economic indicators in the second quarter have been mediocre. As the nearby table shows, this is a far cry from the snappy recovery that typically follows a steep recession, most recently in 1983-84 after the Reagan tax cuts. The response at the White House and among Congressional leaders has been . . . Stimulus III. While talking about the need for "fiscal discipline" some time in the future, President Obama wants more spending today to again boost "demand." Thirty months after Mr. Summers won his first victory, we are back at the same policy stand. The difference this time is that the Keynesian political consensus is cracking up. In Europe, the bond vigilantes have pulled the credit cards of Greece, Portugal and Spain, with Britain and Italy in their sights. Policy makers are now making a 180-degree turn from their own stimulus blowouts to cut spending and raise taxes. The austerity budget offered this month by the new British government is typical of Europe's new consensus. To put it another way, Germany's Angela Merkel has won the bet she made in early 2009 by keeping her country's stimulus far more modest. We suspect Mr. Obama will find a political stonewall this weekend in Toronto when he pleads with his fellow leaders to join him again for a spending spree. Meanwhile, in Congress, even many Democrats are revolting against Stimulus III. The original White House package of jobless benefits and aid to the states had to be watered down several times, and the latest version failed again in the Senate late this week. (See below.) Mr. Obama is having his credit card pulled too—not by the bond markets, but by a voting public that sees the troubles in Europe and is telling pollsters that it doesn't want a Grecian bath. * The larger lesson here is about policy. The original sin—and it was nearly global—was to revive the Keynesian economic model that had last cracked up in the 1970s, while forgetting the lessons of the long prosperity from 1982 through 2007. The Reagan and Clinton-Gingrich booms were fostered by a policy environment for most of that era of lower taxes, spending restraint and sound money. The spending restraint began to end in the late 1990s, sound money vanished earlier this decade, and now Democrats are promising a series of enormous tax increases. Notice that we aren't saying that spending restraint alone is a miracle economic cure. The spending cuts now in fashion in Europe are essential, but cuts by themselves won't balance annual deficits reaching 10% of GDP. That requires new revenues from faster growth, and there's a danger that the tax increases now sweeping Europe will dampen growth further. President Obama's tragic mistake was to blow out the U.S. federal balance sheet on spending that has produced little bang for the buck. The fantastical Keynesian notion (the "multiplier") that $1 of spending produces $1.50 in growth was long ago demolished by Harvard's Robert Barro, among others. That $1 in spending has to come from somewhere, which means in taxes or borrowing from productive parts of the private economy. Given that so much of the U.S. stimulus went for transfer payments such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance, the "multiplier" has almost certainly been negative. With the economy in recession in 2008 and 2009, we argued that some stimulus was justified and an increase in the deficit was understandable and inevitable. However, we also argued that permanent tax cuts aimed at marginal individual and corporate tax rates would have done far more to revive animal spirits, and in our view would have led to a far more robust recovery. *** What the world has now reached instead is a Keynesian dead end. We are told to let Congress continue to spend and borrow until the precise moment when Mr. Summers and Mark Zandi and the other architects of our current policy say it is time to raise taxes to reduce the huge deficits and debt that their spending has produced. Meanwhile, individuals and businesses are supposed to be unaffected by the prospect of future tax increases, higher interest rates, and more government control over nearly every area of the economy. Even the CEOs of the Business Roundtable now see the damage this is doing. A better economic policy will have to await a new Congress, which we hope at a minimum can prevent punishing tax increases. But for now the good news is that voters and markets are telling politicians to stop doing what hasn't worked. online.wsj.com