Category Archives: Labor

TPA (Updated: 4/22/016): Republicans Cede Some More American Sovereignty

Barack Obama, Federalism, Labor, Outsourcing, Republicans, Trade

“Some” would call it treason. OK, I would call it treason. Republicans—who boast of their respect for the republican value of limited authority, and who vowed to keep Obama in his Constitutional place—banded together to give President Barack Obama yet MORE executive authority. “[T]he Senate voted 60-38 to grant final approval to the fast-track bill, reports the Washington Post.

… The trade promotion bill now heads to Obama’s desk for his signature. It gives the executive branch additional powers for six years and authorizes the president, and his successor, to present trade deals to Congress for a vote on a specified timeline without lawmakers being able to amend the terms.

What is the TPA? Also via the WaPo:

… Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA. This is also known as “fast-track” authority because it gives the president the ability to negotiate a deal that will receive only an up-or-down vote in Congress. Without fast track, Congress can amend the terms of the deal. You can remember that TPA is “fast track” because when you T.P. a house, you are on the “fast track” to juvenile delinquency. Or you can just call it fast track, which is easier.

Fast-track authority doesn’t apply to only one agreement. In the past, it has spanned presidencies, beginning in 1974 and lasting until the Clinton administration. It also existed during parts of both terms of George W. Bush’s presidency. From the president’s standpoint, fast-track authority is critical to negotiating agreements because he can negotiate in good faith — what he says to his negotiating partners he’s confident will be part of the final deal (if Congress approves it).

Broadcaster Mark Levin, who exulted in the Republicans’ mid-term victory only to find himself needing to trash these traitors daily—spoke to Sen. Ted Cruz on voting against the fast track deal.

“Enough is enough,” Cruz had written at Breitbart.com. “I cannot vote for TPA unless McConnell and Boehner both commit publicly to allow the Ex-Im Bank to expire—and stay expired. And, Congress must also pass the Cruz-Sessions amendments to TPA to ensure that no trade agreement can try to back-door changes to our immigration laws. Otherwise, I will have no choice but to vote no.”

As commendable as a Cruz vote against the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) is—Levin failed to point out the following:

No bit of legislation should ever cede US sovereignty to signatory nations—not on immigration, not on self-defense, not on sentencing, not on anything.

UPDATE (4/22/016):

UPDATED: Kill #Amtrak For It Will Kill AGAIN

Business, Economy, Government, Labor, The State

Amtrak is a government-run entity. As such, it answers not to the consumer but to politicians and union bosses. Nor does the National Railroad Passenger Corporation respond to the laws of economics. Despite running at an annual loss—is it more than half a billion dollars annually?—it never “fails” or goes belly up, for the taxpayer is forced to fund it.

Whether you use it or not; approve of it or not—government takes from you to give to the Amtrak financial and operational train wreck. In fact, the worse it does—the more people it kills—the greater its rewards: the louder the calls for Amtrak’s funding. Whereas a business that squanders lives and money would go under; a state enterprise will only grow under the same conditions. Let me put it this way: Try and withhold your fungible tax dollars, and you’ll be staring down the barrel of a gun.

In state-run entities liability is socialized and limited by the power of legislation—isn’t it great to be able to legislate yourself a Get Out of Jail Free card? Socialized liability means that the costs of any criminal or tort action will be borne by government, which is funded by YOU, its victim; the taxpayer.

These are just some of the inverted incentives that make Amtrak go off the rails, again and again.

Amtrak can no more be reformed than the Soviet Union’s communistic economy could be. It can only be liquidated, wrote Gregory Bresiger.

The latest on the “catastrophic train derailment near Philadelphia this week that killed at least eight passengers and injured more than 200 others,” via the New York Times.

UPDATE: It is true that the Dutch, for example, have tremendous pride in their infrastructure. So do the Germans. But this too will pass once European sense of nationhood is dissolved beyond repair by the supra-state, the EU.

‘Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly’ In The Ivy League

Economy, Labor

“Economic malpractice” in the Ivy League is nothing new. In promoting minimum wage laws, hundreds of so-called top economists have defied the “law known as the first fundamental law of demand.”

The law states that the higher the price of something the less people will take of it and vice versa.

Alas, members of “the brie, tofu, and champagne circuit” regularly pretend that this natural law, “to which there are no known real-world exceptions,” is unaffected by minimum wage legislation.

Now comes news that a California city is to raise its minimum wage to $16.00. This unemployment-causing folly is a good opportunity to revisit WALTER E. WILLIAMS’ magnificent, ongoing efforts to “embarrass the economists” who lie about the costs of raising the price of unskilled labor:

… Some people suggest that if the price of something is raised, buyers will take more or the same amount. That’s silly because there’d be no limit to the price that sellers would charge. For example, if a grocer knew he would sell more — or the same amount of — milk at $8 a gallon than at $4 a gallon, why in the world would he sell it at $4? Then the question becomes: Why would he sell it at $8 if people would buy the same amount at a higher price?

There are economists, most notably Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who suggest that the law of demand applies to everything except labor prices (wages) of low-skilled workers.

Krugman says that paying fast-food workers $15 an hour wouldn’t cause big companies such as McDonald’s to cut jobs. In other words, Krugman argues that raising the minimum wage doesn’t change employer behavior.

Before we address Krugman’s fallacious argument, think about this: One of Galileo’s laws says the influence of gravity on a falling body in a vacuum is to cause it to accelerate at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. That applies to a falling rock, steel ball or feather. What would you think of the reasoning capacity of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who’d argue that because human beings are not rocks, steel balls or feathers, Galileo’s law of falling bodies doesn’t apply to them? …

MORE.

Your Get-With-The-Program, Demography-Is-Destiny Policy Paper

Education, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism

You know just how scholarly an essay is when it is studded with loaded pop-words like “conversation”: “We need to have a conversation about race (when we do nothing but subject ourselves to one-way brow-beatings about imagined slights committed against the pigmentally burdened). “We need to have a conversation about immigration (translation: Get with the program of mass immigration from the third world and its implications for your communities—reduced quality of life, poorer education, environmental degradation; less safety and security, more taxation).

Jennifer Bradley of the liberal Brookings Institute lectures Middle America on how to prepare its diverse workforce for tomorrow.

Thus, for example, it is stated that “America is on the cusp of becoming a country with no racial majority, where new minorities are poised to exert a profound impact on U.S. society, economics, and politics.” The implication is that the seismic shift is due to a mystic force, and not to willful policies in which the host population has never had a say.

A feature of the Minneapolis-St. Paul diversity explosion, as Bradley sees it, is a widening “race-based education and achievement gap” that will “become a drag on workforce growths unless something was done to reverse these trends.” In other words, the immigrant population isn’t up to scratch.

I can think of a few options to narrow the gap. One is to welcome immigrants who’ll add value, not drain resources. But Bradely is here not to explore all options, but to dictate them.

The raiment of scholarship is shed as quickly as a hooker sheds her clothes (only less admirably; working girls deserve respect). Bradely brays about the need to “reframe the conversation about race-based education and achievement gaps in Minneapolis-St. Paul — turning what had been a moral (and insufficiently effective) commitment to its underserved communities into an economic necessity. Leading figures from the worlds of government, business, and academia, and public and private groups throughout the region, are now trying to figure out how to undo the effects of decades of neglect, tackling the problem from many perspectives and with an ever greater sense of urgency.”

If a population is not achieving parity it is inferred that it has been “underserved”; that its inhabitants need more resources rather than that the fault lies with the kind of incompatible immigrant being privileged by policy makers. The essay’s premise is that America is “underserving” her immigrant population, when it is the other way round:

Averaged out, the immigrant population is underserving the American economy.

And, research is only as good as the semantics used to state the hypothesis.

MORE braying (with apologies to donkeys; they’re adorable).