Tag Archives: Big Government

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Obama borrowed $10 trillion and all we got was this horrible jobs report

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They told me if I voted Republican, we'd lose jobs, and they were right!
What kind of economic growth can you get from a community organizer?

Wow, you would think that there would be some organic economic growth after Obama added $10 trillion to the national debt, but the September jobs report looks more like a forecast for recession than anything else.

The Daily Signal reports:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September jobs report showed unexpected weakness in the labor market.

The payroll survey showed that employers created only 142,000 jobs in September. The economy created only 167,000 net new jobs a month in the 3rd quarter—a substantial drop from the 231,000 jobs a month pace in the 2nd quarter.

The numbers are even worse for private-sector job growth. Large expansions in government hiring boosted the August and September figures. Private-sector job growth dropped from 220,000 net new jobs a month in the 2nd quarter to 138,000 in the 3rd quarter.

[…]The Household survey reported that the unemployment rate remained constant at 5.1 percent in September. Unfortunately, this happened only because almost 600,000 Americans left the labor force. People not looking for work do not count as unemployed, so the unemployment rate remained unchanged.

However, the labor force participation rate dropped another 0.2 percentage points to 62.4 percent—its lowest level since 1977.

[…][T]he September report follows a disappointing August report. Revisions also showed that employers created 60,000 fewer jobs in July and August than previously estimated.

CNS News says that the number of Americans not in the workforce is at 94,610,000. The Weekly Standard says we are going in reverse: ” For the last three months, average job growth comes in at 167,000. Nearly 100,000 below the average for 2014. We are going in reverse.” and “Of the 142,000 new jobs, 24,000 are in government. ”

The manufacturing sector is hardest hit, as Investors Business Daily explains:

The anemic September jobs report was bad news for anyone hoping that the economy had turned a corner. But it was even worse news for manufacturing, which is on a two-month losing streak.

Manufacturing shed 9,000 jobs last month on top of the 18,000 lost in August, completely erasing the gains made so far this year. Since January 2013, the industry has gained only 338,000.

All this flies in the face of President Obama’s repeated promise in 2012 that if reelected, he would create 1 million new manufacturing jobs by the end of his second term. Obama said that these new jobs would “put middle-class people back to work.” To make it happen, he promised to aggressively pursue corporate tax reform and unfair trade practices by China, set up new community-college/employer partnerships and create up to 20 “manufacturing innovation institutes.”

Since then, he’s done little if any of it.

The problem is big government regulations:

A study by the National Association of Manufacturers found that regulations cost the industry nearly $20,000 per worker in 2012. At smaller firms, the cost is almost $35,000 per worker.

It’s only getting worse, as new or impending regulations on CO2 emissions, smog, etc. threaten hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Investors Business Daily says:

The biggest decline in the workforce has not been among the elderly, but the young, who just aren’t jumping into starter jobs at the normal rate.

[…]The workweek shrank again — to 34.5 hours — largely due to the rise of part-time hiring. Thank you, ObamaCare.

Obamacare forces employers to make workers part-time, or else pay more to employ them if they stay full-time. It’s a real genius-level policy.

More:

Can we finally repeal the law requiring employers to provide health benefits to workers once they log 30 hours of work in a week? Workers can’t pay their bills and feed their families with 28-hour paychecks.

Wages, which made decent gains over the previous several months, actually ticked down in September. So we are working less, for less.

This is no accident; it’s policy-induced slow growth.

It’s fitting that we get a disappointing jobs report in the very week that the administration says it will move forward with a new ozone containment rule that the National Association of Manufacturers says will be one of the biggest job-killing regulations in American history.

Obama still won’t allow the Keystone Pipeline, or the exporting of oil, which would be a major job producer. He won’t cut the corporate tax, or roll back ObamaCare rules hindering employment. His grandiose plans to save the planet come before putting Americans to work.

This is serious. I know that a lot of people in the media, in academia, in Hollywood, etc. think that you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity with laws like Obamacare, but it’s not true. Massive expansions of government and massive borrowing depress economic growth and job creation. Jobs come from entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs do not like what they have seen from the government in the last 7 years under these Democrats.

News

Who pays the scientist who wants global warming skeptics prosecuted?

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Global warming profiteer Jagadish Shukla
Global warming profiteer Jagadish Shukla

This is quite striking. The global warming alarmist who is leading the effort to criminally prosecute those who dissent from global warming alarmism is himself a global warming profiteer, according Climate Depot.

This article from Climate Depot explains:

From 2012-2014, the Leader of RICO 20 climate scientists paid himself and his wife $1.5 million from government climate grants for part-time work.

George Mason University Professor Jagadish Shukla  ( jshukla@gmu.edu) a Lead Author with the UN IPCC, reportedly made lavish profits off the global warming industry while accusing climate skeptics of deceiving the public. Shukla is leader of 20 scientists who are demanding RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges be used against skeptics for disagreeing with their view on climate change.

Shukla reportedly moved his government grants through a ‘non-profit’. The group “pays Shukla and wife Anne $500,000 per year for part-time work,” Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. revealed.

“The $350,000-$400,000 per year paid leader of the RICO20 from his ‘non-profit’ was presumably on top of his $250,000 per year academic salary,” Pielke wrote. “That totals to $750,000 per year to the leader of the RICO20 from public money for climate work and going after skeptics. Good work if you can get it,” Pielke Jr.added.

I think this fellow needs a RICO investigation himself, don’t you? And if found guilty, he should be put in jail. I think in general this story shows why we need to cut taxes, shrink government spending, and generally reduce the influence that government has on private businesses and individual consumers. Global warming alarmists don’t generate anything of value, they just collect taxpayers’ money in exchange for lying. And then the lies are used by the government to take measures that raise our electricity bills and increase the national debt. What sense does it make for voters to vote for that?

Marco Rubio was asked about global warming alarmism in the recent CNN GOP primary debate, and he answered thus:

Exactly. I have better things to do with my money than waste it on myths.

Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri

Shukla would be the second Indian guy to be implicated in these sorts of global warming intrigues. The first was the U.N. IPCC sexual harrasser Rajendra Pachauri, (on the right, above), who predicted that the Himalayas would melt. He later admitted that his predictions were false. And then his career melted after the victims of his sexual harassment came forward to accuse him.

Climate change science, for a change

Atmospheric temperature measurements though April 2015
Atmospheric temperature measurements though April 2015

(Image source: Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama – Huntsville)

The best measurements of the Earth’s temperature are the atmosphere measurements, not the surface measurements, because those are more easily tampered with.

The Daily Caller summarizes the atmospheric measurements, which have not been changed to fit the global warming narrative.

Excerpt:

[…][N]ew satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months.

“For 222 months, since December 1996, there has been no global warming at all,” writes climate expert Lord Christopher Monckton, the third viscount Monckton of Brenchley

“This month’s [satellite] temperature – still unaffected by a slowly strengthening el Niño, which will eventually cause temporary warming – passes another six-month milestone, and establishes a new record length for the Pause: 18 years 6 months,” Monckton adds.

[…]Scientists have already pushed back against NOAA’s new study. The news site Mashable interviewed about a dozen climate scientists not involved in the study, and nearly all of them said “the study does not support the authors’ conclusion that the so-called warming pause never happened.”

“Instead, they said it simply proves that changing the start and end dates used for analyzing temperature trends has a big influence on those measurements, a fact that was already widely known,” Mashable reported.

I think this important, because global warming alarmism is being pushed by the secular left, especially onto young people in public schools. This affects government spending, which is ultimately paid for by us – the taxpayers. I don’t know about you, but as a Christian, my priorities for my money are much different than those of secular leftist bureaucrats and crooked “scientists”. People who are taken in by global warming lies will vote for bigger government to limit industry (fewer jobs are created) and to regulate personal consumption (higher costs of gas, heating and cooling, electricity). This again results in less money for me to run my life plan, which is focused on serving God. So, as a conservative and a Christian, I am all over this issue, and you should be as well. Show people the evidence, let them decide. Otherwise, the secular left will be making the rules that we have to live by.

News

New study: government run child-care increases negative outcomes for kids

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Canada Political Map
Canada Political Map

I’ve complained before about Quebec, the most liberal and secular province in Canada. Well, one of the things that makes them so crappy is their policy of encouraging women to abandon their young children to strangers in government-run daycare. The government takes a whole lot of taxpayer money, often from traditional single-earner homes, and uses it to subsidize government-run child care. Well, now we have a brand new fresh study to show how wrong this policy has been.

Canada’s radically leftist CTV News reports on the study.

Excerpt:

In a paper released Monday, a group of university researchers say that children exposed to the province’s child-care system were more likely to have higher crime rates, worse health and lower levels of life satisfaction as they have aged than their counterparts in other provinces who didn’t have access to the same type of system.

[…]In their paper made public Monday through the National Bureau of Economic Research, Kevin Milligan from the University of British Columbia, Michael Baker from the University of Toronto, and Jonathan Gruber from MIT in Cambridge, Mass., update work from 2008 to see if children in the Quebec care system kicked their troubling behaviours over time.

To do that, they analyzed four different data sets from Statistics Canada that touched on child outcomes, health and crime rates and scores from standardized tests that are connected to the national Council of Ministers of Education.

What the trio found instead was “striking evidence” that exposure to the program was associated with higher crime rates, with the effects most acutely seen in boys. Boys were more likely to have higher levels of hyperactivity and aggression, the researchers wrote, while girls showed declines in prosocial behaviour, which captures many altruistic activities like donating and volunteering. All of those behaviours fall under the heading of “non-cognitive” abilities, such as impulsiveness and emotional stability.

Exposure to the program was also associated with “worsened health and life satisfaction,” the study says.

There was no such lasting effects on math, science and reading abilities, the researchers write.

By the way, in case you are wondering – yes, that is the same Jonathan Gruber of MIT who was the architect of Obamacare. Surprising that he would be co-author on a study that dings big government.

Are these results unique to Canada? Let’s take a look at a recent study from the UK.

From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Academics at Oxford University discovered that exposure to some forms of early education contributed to bad behaviour and could be linked to emotional problems.

[…]In the Oxford study, researchers recruited 991 families with children aged three months. Mothers had an average age of 30.

Researchers assessed children at the age of four through questionnaires about their behaviour and emotions completed by teachers and parents. They also observed care provided by mothers and observed non-parental care for at least 90 minutes for those children placed in formal childcare settings.

The report, published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development, said that “children who spent more time in group care, mainly nursery care, were more likely to have behavioural problems, particularly hyperactivity”.

The study, led by Prof Alan Stein, of Oxford’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that “spending more time in day care centres, over the total period was a predictor of total problem scores”.

“Children who spent more time in day care centres were more likely to be hyperactive,” it said. “Children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems.”

The authors added: “The findings in relation to childminding suggest that it might be out of home care rather than group care that raises the risk of behavioural difficulties.”

Well, that’s only Canada and the UK. Maybe things are better in Sweden?

Here’s a second article from the National Post (one of Canada’s national newspapers) about Sweden’s government-run universal day care system.

Excerpt:

True, parental leave in Sweden is a generous 16 months. There are no babies in daycare. But when parental leave ends, practically the reverse is true: A full 92% of all children aged 18 months to five years are in daycare. Parents pay only a symbolic amount for this; tax subsidies for daycare are $20,000 per child, annually. Swedish taxes are among the highest in the world, and the tax system was designed to make both parents seek employment in the work force.

[…]Then there are the questions about the social toll Sweden’s childcare system is taking. Sweden has offered a comprehensive daycare system since 1975; since the early ‘90s, negative outcomes for children and adolescents are on the rise in areas of health and behaviour. While direct causation has been difficult to prove, many Swedish health-care professionals point to the lack of parent involvement beyond the first 16 months as a primary contributing factor. Psychosomatic disorders and mild psychological problems are escalating among Swedish youth at a faster rate than in any of 11 comparable European countries. Such disorders have tripled among girls over the last 25 years. Education outcomes in Swedish schools have fallen from the top position 30 years ago, to merely average amongst OECD nations today. Behaviour problems in Swedish classrooms are among the worst in Europe.

Now this idea of government taking children away from families is very popular on the left, because they want children to be “equal”, and that means getting them away from their parents so that the government can raise them “equally”. You can even see Hillary Clinton pushing for it when she talks about “universal pre-K”. Well, maybe it’s time that someone showed her the studies. Not that she strikes me as someone who cares a lot about children, given her support for born-alive abortions and organ harvesting.