Tag Archives: Jobs

News

The stimulus bill funded a study to get monkeys high on cocaine

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From ABC News. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The Obama administration has credited its $862 billion stimulus program with pulling the economy out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. But a new report by two Republican senators argues the stimulus is riddled with wasteful projects that do not create jobs.

The report, released by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and John McCain, R-Ariz., highlights 100 stimulus projects that they say have “questionable goals,” are “being mismanaged or were poorly planned” and are even “costing jobs and hurting small businesses.”

The Coburn-McCain report takes issue with stimulus spending on projects like one that entailed research on how cocaine affects monkeys. The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was awarded $71,623 to study what the report calls, “Monkeys Getting High for Science.”

Bonnie Davis, a spokeswoman for The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said the “small grant has helped protect very important research that will have significant impact on public health in regards to cocaine addiction and the issue of relapse.”

Go a little further down the list and you’ll find even bigger spending. The California Academy of Sciences is receiving nearly $1 million in stimulus funds to send researchers to the Southwest Indian Ocean Islands and East Africa to capture, photograph and analyze thousands of exotic ants.

There’s also funding for yoga and hot flashes. Researchers at Wake Forest University have received nearly $300,000 to study whether integral yoga “can be an effective method to reduce the frequency and/or severity of hot flashes” in breast cancer survivors.

This is what happens when you take money away from investors and businesses and give it to government bureaucrats to spend. Unemployment doubles compared to what it was under George W. Bush. Because money was taken from the people who create jobs and spend by people who have no experience in the private sector and no knowledge of economics.

Here’s a complete run-down on the Obama Presidency from a financial viewpoint.

Commentary

Generation Y is learning the perils of socialism

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From the horribly left-wing MSNBC. (H/T Alisha from Far Above Rubies)

Excerpt:

They are perhaps the best-educated generation ever, but they can’t find jobs. Many face staggering college loans and have moved back in with their parents. Even worse, their difficulty in getting careers launched could set them back financially for years.

The Millennials, broadly defined as those born in the 1980s and ’90s, are the first generation of American workers since World War II who have cloudier prospects than the generations that preceded them.

Certainly the recession has hurt young workers badly. While the overall unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in June, it was 15.3 percent for those aged 20 to 24, compared with 7.8 percent for ages 35-44, 7.5 percent for ages 45-54 and 6.9 percent for those 55 and older.

Among 18-to 29-year-olds, unemployment is the highest it’s been in more than three decades, according to a recent report from Pew Research Center. The report also found that Millennials, also known as Generation Y, are less likely to be employed than Gen Xers or baby boomers were at the same age.

[…]The high unemployment rate among young Millennials can affect them financially and psychologically throughout their careers, according to a report by the Joint Economic Committee.

“The ‘scarring effects’ of prolonged unemployment can be devastating over a worker’s career,” according to the report. “Productivity, earnings and well-being can all suffer. In addition, unemployment can lead to a deterioration of skills and make securing future employment more difficult.”

Many Millennials have sought refuge back at school from the worst job market since at least the early 1980s. Yet that strategy, too, can backfire as students incur staggering amounts of debt to pay for advanced degrees that might not help them out much in the job market.

Eventually they are going to realize that everything they’ve been taught in the schools was opposed to their success. From socialism to feminism to moral relativism. They are destroying their own lives because they believed lies. They vote for higher taxes and more regulations and are shocked to see jobs dry up. They vote for anti-male laws and same-sex marriage and they are shocked to find themselves growing up in sub-optimal homes, missing one or both biological parents.

Commentary

Private sector jobs are lost when government creates public sector jobs

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Here’s a story in National Review. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

In this paper, published in Economic Policy Journal, economists Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andre Zylberberg looked at the impact of public employment on overall labor-market performance. The authors use data for a sample of OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, and they find that, on average, the creation of 100 public jobs eliminated about 150 private-sector jobs, decreased overall labor-market participation slightly, and increased by about 33 the number of unemployed workers.

Their explanation is that public employment crowds out private employment and increases overall unemployment by offering comparatively attractive working conditions. Basically, public jobs that offer higher wages, require low effort, and offer attractive fringe benefits attract many workers and crowd out private jobs. This is especially true when the public jobs exist in the private sector (transportation and education, for instance). The impact is bigger when these new employees are paid with new taxes.

The bottom line is that it is possible that, by increasing public employment, the stimulus money is further hurting private jobs.

And that’s why the unemployment rate is so high after a government spending-spree. The money for non-productive public sector jobs come from the productive private sector.