Trust the public broadcaster to report the facts in detail and accompany them with transcripts. High marks for that PBS service. However, the service comes with a high price: full-on Keynesian propaganda. PBS’s jobs report begins in the Volunteer State (Tennessee), with an employer who understands that the cost of doing business is increased with every little regulatory tweak issued in DC. Says Bobby Joslin of “Joslin and Son Signs”:
“Well, two years ago, three years ago, we had to have all our tow motor people certified to operate a tow motor. … A forklift. And that cost the company $3,600. Now we’re having to dispose of all our lightbulbs. We’re in the sign business. We create a lot of volume of fluorescent tubes. So we just got through spending $8,500 on a lightbulb crusher.
Then there’s “Obamacare. When we bring on a new employee, we don’t know what that employee truly is going to cost us in 2014. And we’re not in the practice of hiring people and then laying them off.”
But our intrepid PBS reporter can recognize a Republican ruse when he hears one. PAUL SOLMAN thinks the small businessman he just interviewed is one dim bulb. Solman editorializes as follows: “Uncertainty of taxes and regulation crippling job creation; it’s become a Republican talking point.”
According to such Keynesians, who have always struggled with the chicken or the egg problem, business is struggling because, well, because it is struggling:
“Joslin told us business is down 35 percent over the past three years. So of demand is the other reason you’re not hiring, right? … lack of demand is the other reason you’re not hiring, right? But if sales drive everything, how important can policy uncertainty be?”
There is always an expert on hand to expatiate about the mysterious cycle of poverty that starts with reduced demand, and has absolutely nothing to do with the Brownian motion of the DC wealth-consuming machine:
And every businessman I know says exactly that. Non-financial companies are sitting on over $3 trillion of cash, the latest IRS data shows. Companies are not investing that money because there’s no demand. It’s not because they’re concerned that tax rates may go up or regulations may change. They need to have people and businesses with money to spend in order to invest.
I wonder about those who claim our math and science students are first rank, and blame the high-tech sector and its greed for the “importation” of South and East Asian talent. Sure, there is an abundance of greed (not necessarily harmful in one of the freer sectors of the economy). There is also a requirement to display diversity, even if imported, so as to comport with the diabolic diversity policies peddled by all companies as zealously as do the state and CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. But neither are there any shortages of unskilled Americans in the sciences. Have the reductionists, who refuse to recognize this dumbing down, ever spoken to senior and serious high-tech talent; people who are employed and always overworked, because there are so few of them?
“Although the number of college graduates increased about 29% between 2001 and 2009,” reports the WSJ, “the number graduating with engineering degrees only increased 19%, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Dept. of Education. The number with computer and information-sciences degrees decreased 14%. Since students typically set their majors during their sophomore year, the first class that chose their major in the midst of the recession graduated this year.
Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract. Some students, like Ms. Zhou, say their high schools didn’t prepare them for the level of rigor in the introductory courses. [She’s more honest than the professors. “My ability level was just not there,” says Ms. Zhou of her decision” to drop out from electrical and computer engineering.]
Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.”
Science classes may also require more time—something U.S. college students may not be willing to commit. In a recent study, sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that the average U.S. student in their sample spent only about 12 to 13 hours a week studying, about half the time spent by students in 1960. They found that math and science—though not engineering—students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.
Under Barack Obama, the misery index has risen dramatically.
“Food stamp rolls have risen 8.1% in the past year,” reports the WSJ. “[I]n August, the number of recipients hit 45.8 million.” That’s an astounding figure.
Whatever BHO claims to the contrary, the debt is only increasing: $203 Billion in the month of October. The national debt is approaching 15 trillion dollars.
Officially, close to 14 million Americans are unemployed. However, the liars at Labor (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) ought to use the U-6, which includes the unemployed and people who would like to work, but who have not looked for a job recently, as well as those involuntarily working part-time. The latter is closer to 25 million. It’s all very sad.
For his part, BHO has gone tripping in Europe. Evidently, “we have the standing to lecture them.” Or perhaps the president has traveled to the Continent, ostensibly to convince Europeans to continue on the road to ruin Obama has set the US upon? Who knows? Except that his contribution to a debate about debt will be … zero, his magic number.
For real, clear economics, it’s hard to beat financier Peter Schiff. Here is some of the text of his testimony to the gathering of crooks known as Congress. Pearls before swine, if you ask me:
“We stimulated our way into this problem [“the housing bubble and the financial crisis of 2008”]. We are not going to stimulate our way out. In fact the stimulus is actually a sedative. The stimulus is preventing the free market from unraveling the problems of years of bad monetary and fiscal policy have created. We don’t need more spending. We need the opposite of spending. We need under consumption, what the economy lacks is savings, investment, production and if we try to preserve the jobs of the bubble economy with more reckless money printing and borrowing and government spending all we are going to succeed in doing is preventing the restructuring that we need and preventing more productive jobs from coming into existence.”
“And I wanna talk specifically about jobs, I’m an employer, I employ about 150 people. I would probably employ a 1000 more if it were not for government regulations that inhibited my ability to hire and grow my business and forced me to move portions of my business overseas in order to escape the regulatory burden here. But the question is why do I hire people where are these jobs coming from, you know, jobs in a free market, ah, they come from two things, they come from profits, or the profit motive or they come from capital. You need both to create jobs. And in a free market there’s gonna be jobs and if they’re aren’t enough jobs, Congress has to ask: ‘What are we doing to inhibit this process? How are we preventing jobs that would normally be here from coming into existence?'”
“Now, in order for me to hire somebody, I have to be able to make a profit. That means that the person I hire has to deliver to me more value than the cost of the employing them. And the cost of employing them is not just the wages I’m paying them but it’s all the mandatory benefits, the taxes, and more importantly the legal liability that I incur when I hire somebody. Source: LYBIO.net In fact, one of the riskiest things you can do in America is to hire somebody. And because of that reason, because of all the liability from Government, from lawsuits, that you have put on employers, most small businesses their main concern is how not to hire people. How can I grow my business and hire as few people as possible. That is not something that happens in the market. That is something that happens as a consequence of Government…”
“…Demand doesn’t come form government spending; inflation comes from government spending. Demand comes from supply. You can’t consume something that isn’t produced. You have to make things first. …”
“There are millions of employed Americans. How do you increase the demand for labor? You decrease the cost of labor. Regulations substantially increase the costs of employing people and as a result fewer people are employed.”
Schiff recommended that no more regulations be added and that congress begins to repeal existing regulations. Minimum-wage laws for example.
“You can’t lose your rights because you hire somebody; you can’t give workers some kind of special privily and then call it a worker’s right. Everybody has individual rights and you shouldn’t lose them because you hire somebody.”
“Bad regulation did not start under Obama. The problem with well meaning regulation is that the consequences are the exact opposite of the intent. Infrastructure spending doesn’t stimulate the economy; it drains the economy of resources. Infrastructure only helps in the long run if it raises the productivity of the nation. China can afford to put in roads. We are broke. We need to start making stuff before we can consider how to make our roads prettier.”
“99% of a [small/medium-size business’ income] is taxed at the marginal rate, so that the marginal rate is my rate. Feds take 35% of my income, another 3% for Medicare, local tax in the state of Connecticut (7%), and this is before I pay any property or sales taxes. I am already moving business to Singapore, the Caribbean. We are a high tax country, not a low tax country.”
“You can only borrow if someone is saving. There is a lender. The has to be something in it for the lender has to have something in it. Currently the banks are getting money from the government and buying treasuries, monetary policy that is stifling the savings that we need to grow the economy. You can always see the jobs that government creates, you can never see the jobs it destroys. All government can do is re-arrange the resources; it cannot create resources.”
“A sales tax should replace income tax. It would be much more conducive to tax people when they spend their wealth, not when they accumulate it.”
“Deficit spending is more damaging than taxation….”
“Interest rates [as we know] are being kept low. When they rise to approximate market rate, what effect till this have on business? banks which are kept afloat by the cheap money from the Fed will go insolvent. Their portfolios are loaded with low-yielding, long-term government bonds … keeping interest low creates inflation…”
“Henry Ford paid his workers $5 a day. Highest in the world at the time; an ounce and a quarter of gold. $2500 a week. They were paying no federal incomes taxes and no payroll taxes; there were no minimum wages and no unions. We paid the highest wages in the world but produces the best least expensive products. that was possible b/c we had the smallest government. Minimal regulations and no taxes. …”
[SNIP]
Notice how silent Dr. Heather Boushey, to Schiff’s right, has fallen—she is a popular panelist on the panel parade that infests cable, PBS, and the other networks.
Another thought: Ron Paul, who does not argue nearly as crisply and clearly as Schiff does, will need to make common cause with Mr. Schiff. Peter Schiff: United States Secretary of the Treasury in a future Paul cabinet.
