Tag: Unemployment

Need to Know 8/8/18

Investigative research by the Daily Caller has revealed that the Chinese spy working for Diane Feinstein was not just her driver.  Comparing dates and time periods, the Daily Caller identified Feinstein’s spy staffer as Russell Lowe, a Chinese-American, who’s actual title was “Office Director”.   He worked with Feinstein in this sensitive role for 20 years while providing information to the Chinese government.  Feinstein forced him into retirement when the FBI informed her of his espionage.  He now works for the Education for Social Justice organization.  Little else about him or his background is known at this point.

Feinstein’s Chinese spy “driver” was actually her “Office Director”

A leaked memo from the desk of Democrat Senator Mark Warner is making waves.  Warner called for intense regulation of internet platforms to promote his idea of “fairness”.  Among the proposals, common tools like Google Maps would become publicly regulated and subject to government anti-discrimination rules.  The plan would also make internet platforms liable if they don’t introduce greater censorship of users.  Anonymity of political writers online would become a thing of the past under this plan.  The combination of outing anonymous political writers online and subjecting them to potential lawsuits of the government disagrees with the information they share is a very dangerous step towards the destruction of free speech on the internet.

Leaked Democrat memo calls for curbs on internet free speech

Another win for the economy as 2.8 million have dropped off of food stamps since Trump became President.  This combined with unemployment below 4% and GDP growth above 4% make it more and more difficult for anyone to argue that the Trump economy has not been amazing so far.

2.8 million fewer on foodstamps

Need to Know 8/3/18

Job growth disappointed in July….Ok, not really.  That’s just the headline.  Actually, the news is pretty much all good in the jobs department.  The economy added 157,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate dropped back below 4%.  We continue to be at full employment.  The underemployment rate also dropped from 7.8% to 7.5% which is the lowest it’s been since before the 2008 financial crisis.  So what’s the bad news?  Economists were expecting 193,000 jobs, so that’s a 41,000 miss.  Keep reading.

June’s jobs report was revised upward from the 213,000 originally reported to 248,000.  That’s a 35,000 increase over what was originally reported.  May was also revised up to 268,000.  Originally they had reported 244,000 jobs in May.  That’s another 24,000.  So we missed July by 41,000, but revised May and June up 59,000.  I’m feelin’ alright.

“US Economy added fewer jobs than expected in July” but more than previously thought in May and June

Speaking of unemployment, the unemployment rate for adult women is at 3.7%, for blacks 6.6% and for Hispanics a record low 4.5%.  The black unemployment rate had been at 7.9% at the beginning of the Trump economy and as high as 16.3% during the Obama administration.  And yet Democrats want to go back to the way it was before Trump.  They want to raise taxes back to where they were and bring back all the regulation that hurt the economy.  I think black Democrat voters need to ask themselves if they want to go back.

Unemployment for minorities drops again

“…relics from the past, frumpy and outdated”.  This was the description of the terms “feminism” and “empowerment” by none other than young Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  You may not know this, but Ocasio-Cortez used to be an anti-tax capitalist and economics student.  This was of course before her publishing company went under in 2016, she tried to vote for the first time and found out she had been purged from the voter rolls for inactivity, she went full blown socialist, and joined up with Bernie Sanders.  Turns out in 2009 she had a right leaning blog too and described herself as an Adam Smith capitalist.  She also had the harsh words for feminism back then.  I’m sure she’d hate if anyone brought that up today, as she runs as the icon of the Democratic Socialist movement.

In 2009, Ocasio-Cortez trashed feminism, supported capitalism, and cooled on the fight for equality

Need to Know 7/27/18

It’s all about the GDP.  Markets are anxiously awaiting this morning’s GDP report, hoping for 4.2% quarterly growth.  If it happens, it’ll be a good indicator that the economy continues to rise at a rapid rate, even after the rapid growth from last year. It would also make the argument against Trump’s tax reform even weaker.

Wall Street awaits GDP report

Speaking of tax reform, Elizabeth Warren bumbled through an interview when she was asked what tax rate is too high.  The poor CNBC journalist tried to help her out.  “Do you feel…that it’s wrong for more than half of somebody’s marginal income to be taken?” “Is 50 percent obviously too high?” Finally, as Warren continued to indicate that 50 percent may actually be too low, John Harwood went for the moon. “…obviously ‘no, 90 percent, that’s ridiculous'”.  Warren finally capitulated.

Warren has the blessing of many Democrats to be the top 2020 DNC Presidential contender.  But they will have to figure out how to deal with her ignorance about what taxes do to families and how the economy works.  When Ocasio-Cortez ignorantly claimed that unemployment was low because people were working two jobs, Warren doubled down on the erroneous claim by saying it was actually because people were working as many as four jobs.  Hopefully she can get some help on the economic front.  When it comes to the economy, Trump is definitely winning.

Warren suggests hypothetical 50% tax rate is too low

On the legal side for Trump, it’s a mixed bag.  While rumors from unnamed sources about the Mueller investigation have turned out to be mostly blowing smoke, there’s a new one out today saying Mueller is going to be looking at Trump’s tweets to see if he obstructed justice.  That would be a stretch.  As Guiliani pointed out, people don’t generally obstruct justice in public for millions to see.  This appears to be grasping for straws.  They would have to prove that Trump was somehow giving instructions to witnesses or intimidating people through Twitter.  That would also mean Mueller would have to take Trump’s 3am Twitter persona more seriously than Peter Strzok’s texts to his mistress.

Even if Trump did try to obstruct justice on Twitter, the Bill Clinton precedent on obstruction would make it very hard to successfully argue for consequences.  Clinton secretly intimidated witnesses, instructed them to lie, matched up stories, then committed perjury himself.  The Senate failed to reach a two thirds majority and ended up acquitting him.

Mueller looking at Trump’s tweets?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Hall of Fame

The latest gaff by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kind of makes me wonder if she is a GOP operative secretly working to stop Bernie Sanders style socialism.  Ocasio-Cortez was recently in Kansas campaigning for Brent Welder, promising to “flip this seat red”.

This follows Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that the only reason unemployment is so low is because everyone has two jobs.  Unemployment is actually measured by surveying the percentage of people who are currently seeking employment.  It has nothing to do with how many jobs each person has.

Ocasio-Cortez got famous for beating Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th district.  The district is so blue that if Crowley and Ocasio-Cortez both ran and split the liberal vote, one of them would still win.  But Ocasio-Cortez didn’t seem to take that into account when she attacked Crowley for trying to run a third party campaign because he had originally registered for multiple parties, and New York won’t allow him to remove his name from the ballot.  Crowley endorsed her and promised to support her, but Ocasio-Cortez lashed out in paranoia when she found out his name would still be on the ballot.

Perhaps what made her infamous though was her admission that she has no clue what she’s talking about when it comes to Israel.  Ocasio-Cortez fumbled through an interview where she tried to insinuate that Israel was blocking Palestinians from accessing their homes and actively occupying Palestine.  Eventually she gave up.  In a later interview, she promised that she would “get with activists” so she could learn more about the Israel/Palestine issue.

Not all Democrats are on the Ocasio-Cortez Socialist train.  Ocasio-Cortez herself supported lower taxes when she was a business owner, but her business failed shortly before she switched to Socialism and tried to get involved in politics for the first time.  At age 26, Ocasio-Cortez went to vote for the first time and discovered she had been purged from the New York voter rolls for 8 years of inactivity.  That was 2016.  She then joined the Bernie Sanders campaign and rose from non-voting millennial failed business owner to rising star of the DNC.  But not all Democrats are happy with her.

Florida representative Alcee Hastings has already shut down any prospects of her taking over the DNC.  “Meteors fizz out,” Hastings said. “what she will learn in this institution is that it’s glacial to begin with, and therefore no matter how far you rise, that’s just how far you will ultimately get your comeuppance.”

Perhaps her paranoia was justified.  One time relevant Democrat Joe Lieberman is telling Democrats to vote for Joe Crowley.  The party split between moderates and socialists is more defined than ever.  Who knows, maybe she’ll succeed in turning more districts “red”.

 

UBI and the Matrix

I’ve been asked in the past about my views on UBI, or universal basic income. This article does a pretty good job of summing up how UBI creates two classes of humanity. I would go further to say UBI takes a large portion of humanity out of the evolutionary process.

When you lose your job to a machine, you are forced to reinvent yourself and find a new way of providing for yourself in a world of limited resources. That’s why businesses are started in garages, why new things are invented, and why people go back and educate themselves in fields that matter to the progress of humanity.

I see it as the Matrix. For younger readers, the Matrix was a movie about a future age where robots have taken over the world and hooked every human into a computer that feeds off of their biomass energy while keeping them satiated with a false virtual reality.

In the Matrix you live in a fake reality, have everything you need, and meanwhile your body slowly is eaten up and decays. Outside of the Matrix life is difficult. You are fighting the very automation that has enslaved the rest of humanity. For a time the food isn’t as good. The living conditions aren’t as good. But you are free, innovative by necessity, and progressing humanity.

We’ve had UBI before. Instead of having a job, we had large populations who lived in provided homes, ate provided food, and performed tasks required by the free class of society. That was slavery. In my mind, UBI equates to slavery because it’s only a matter of time before the working class requires the UBI class to contribute for their government provided paycheck. That will usually come right about the time the Socialists get the difficult reminder that resources are not unlimited.

When the resources to provide UBI run out, the question usually comes down to whether people should be forced into labor camps or systematically starved. Just ask anyone anywhere socialism has actually been tried. When robots figure out how to solve the question of limited resources, then let’s give UBI a shot.

What Makes Up 4.6% Unemployment

The last time the unemployment rate was 4.6% was August, 2007.    Bush was President and Democrats had been in control of Congress for only 8 months.  By October, 2009 unemployment had hit 10%.

However, that number has been steadily dropping since then, falling below 5% for the first time of Obama’s Presidency in January, 2016.  Today, after adding only 178,000 jobs, the rate fell to 4.6% again.  In fact, monthly job growth has been anemic for 8 years while the unemployment rate has steadily fallen.

The reason economists have been cautious is that the drop in the unemployment rate has less to do with job growth and more to do with how many have given up looking for a job. The U-6 unemployment rate is only a measure of the percentage of workers in the market who are employed.  It doesn’t count anyone who is not working and not actively seeking work.

Since January, 2009 the number of employed workers in the United States has increased 11 million.  That is an increase of 8% over 8 years.  On the other hand, about 15 million have dropped out of the workforce since January, 2009.  That’s nearly a 19% increase in the permanently unemployed over 8 years.  4 million more have dropped out of the workforce over the last 8 years than have been hired.

But we are still growing, so that’s good, right?  New hires rose 178,000 in November. On average, they’ve grown about 135,000 a month under Obama. The economy needs a minimum of 145,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. On the other hand, an average of about 155,000 have dropped out of the labor force each month. No credible economist is cheering 4.6% unemployment this time because it only represents long term economic failure.