Tag Archives: Card Check

How Democrat policies cause corporations to outsource jobs overseas

David Farr is the CEO of Emerson Electric, a $1.7-billion-dollar company heavily involved in manufacturing. What does he think about the job that the Democrats are doing in Washington?

In this Bloomberg article, he explains:

Emerson Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer David Farr said the U.S. government is hurting manufacturers with regulation and taxes and his company will continue to focus on growth overseas.

“Washington is doing everything in their manpower, capability, to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” Farr said today in Chicago at a Baird Industrial Outlook conference. “Cap and trade, medical reform, labor rules.”

Emerson, the maker of electrical equipment and InSinkErator garbage disposals with $20.9 billion in sales for the year ended September, will keep expanding in emerging markets, which represented 32 percent of revenue in 2009. About 36 percent of manufacturing is now in “best-cost countries” up from 21 percent in 2003, according to slides accompanying his speech.

Companies will create jobs in India and China, “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something,” Farr said.

The unemployment rate in the U.S. jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest level since 1983. Emerson, which Farr said employs about 125,000 people worldwide, has eliminated more than 20,000 jobs since the end of 2008 to lower expenses.

“What do you think I am going to do?” Farr asked. “I’m not going to hire anybody in the United States. I’m moving. They are doing everything possible to destroy jobs.”

[…]Mature markets such as the U.S., Western Europe and Japan continue to decline in importance and the company will keep investing in emerging markets, Farr said during the presentation.

“We as a company today are putting our best people, our best technology and our best investment in these marketplaces to grow,” he said. “My job is to grow that top line, grow my earnings, grow my cash flow and grow my returns to the shareholders. My job is not to shrink and roll over for the U.S. government.”

[…]In renewable and alternative-energy markets, Emerson had 2009 sales of $50 million and plans to increase that to more than $800 million in five years.

“But you are not going to see Emerson going out there with fancy commercials or sitting at the right hand of some president, talking about this,” Farr said. “We do it.”

When it comes to manufacturing jobs, the only person whose opinion counts is the CEO of the manufacturing company, because he makes the hiring decisions.

Why Obamanomics will not improve the economy

I noticed the Bloomberg article because it was linked to this American Thinker article, which was linked at Marshall Art’s blog.

The American Thinker article analyzes why Obamanomics will not improve the economy.

Excerpt:

The reason that Obamanomics will not and cannot work is because an economy cannot be managed from the top. Economics is a bottom-up process that depends upon individual incentives. Critical incentives have been diminished or destroyed by recent economic policies. Fear, uncertainty, threats, tax increases, penalties, and violations of the rule of law are but some of the conditions anathema to entrepreneurs, small business, and large business. Businesses will not hire, invest, or expand in a climate of disincentives. No commands from on high can force economic activity. That was a lesson that should have been learned from Eastern Europe and the former USSR.

If these disincentives are left in place, our economy will continue to shrink and our standard of living will continue to diminish. Capital has no nationality, and it will start to flee our shores. Talent will follow. We will not recover from this economic downturn until businesses and individuals have a more favorable incentive structure.

You can’t argue with the 10.2% unemployment rate, and it’s only going to get worse. Everything that Obama has done has been bad for business, and has contributed to raising unemployment. Democrats, (and the people who voted Democrat), know less about economics than my keyboard.

Barack Obama’s claim to save or create 150000 jobs falsified by FactCheck.org

Obama claim that his socialist policies that attack “greedy corporations” and “the rich” are actually increasing employment rates. Now, that seems to be impossible for rational people to believe, and FactCheck.org confirms that intuition. It is not possible for socialist policies such as card check, higher taxes, increased spending, more regulation, etc. to create more jobs than are lost from the changes.

Obama’s claim was:

At President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.”

That’s what he learned to believe at Harvard in his marxist rap sessions with the radical students and professors.

But how does the world really work?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost more than 1.3 million jobs in the two months after he took office, and it has probably lost at least another half-million in April. The day after Obama spoke, the Department of Labor announced that another 631,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) had filed new claims for unemployment insurance the previous week.

So what 150,000 jobs was Obama talking about?

It turns out the president’s claim is really an estimate of what his economic advisers think the stimulus bill is doing, and not based on any evidence of its actual effects.

But how does the White House respond to the falsification of their propaganda by reality?

We asked the White House for substantiation of Obama’s claim, and a spokesman responded that the figure comes from a recent estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Because the baseline for employment is obviously still strongly downward,” the spokesman told us, “the estimate does not mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 higher than it otherwise would have been.” He said the figure is an estimate of people hired to work directly on ARRA-funded projects, plus “jobs created by the tax cuts, aid to the states, and other parts of the ARRA.”

So when the president said his stimulus bill “already saved or created” those jobs, he was just giving an estimate produced by his own economic advisers at the White House. Furthermore, the jobs figure is based on projections done at the time ARRA was passed. Recipients of ARRA spending aren’t required to report until later what they’re doing with the money and how well it’s working, so there’s very little hard data on where the money is being spent, let alone how many jobs may have resulted from the legislation. The CEA incorporated some actual spending reports into its estimate, but that information is not complete.

This is the result of voting by people who know more about the lives of celebrities than they know about economics. Imagine how surprised these Democrat voters are to find out that the 1 hour spent voting was not enough time to have thought anything through. Some of them thought that Obama was better on pro-life issues and government spending than McCain for example.

Remember, Democrats caused this recession and Republicans tried to stop it.

Fedex threatens to cancel jet order if card check bill passes

Spotted this Wall Street Journal article over on Ask Dr. Helen.

Excerpt:

FedEx Corp. is threatening to cancel the purchase of billions of dollars worth of new Boeing Co. cargo planes if Congress passes a law that would make it easier for unions to organize at the package-delivery company.

A company spokesman said Tuesday that FedEx may cancel plans to buy as many as 30 new Boeing planes should Congress pass a bill that would remove truck drivers, couriers and other employees at FedEx’s Express unit from the jurisdiction of the federal Railway Labor Act of 1926, the law which today also governs labor organizing at U.S. airlines.

I blogged about Obama’s card check bill and its effects here.