Tag Archives: Labor

News

Manufacturing sector suffered sharpest drop in June for the past 12 months

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Story here from Yahoo News. (H/T Hot Air)

Excerpt:

New evidence of a slowing economic rebound emerged Thursday in reports that manufacturing activity is slowing after helping drive the early stages of the recovery.

Factory output fell in June, according to a government report on industrial production. It was the sharpest monthly drop in a year. And two regional manufacturing indexes sank this month. …

Separately, the Labor Department said wholesale prices fell for a third straight month. Prices were pulled down by a drop in energy costs and the biggest plunge in food costs in eight years. But excluding those two volatile commodities, inflation was nearly flat. …

Adding to concerns in the manufacturing sector were steep drops reported Thursday in the Empire State and Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing indexes.

CNN Money explains what went wrong for the Obammunists.

Excerpt:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce slammed President Obama’s economic policies Wednesday, saying administration officials “took their eyes off the ball” and “neglected” to focus on job creation.

A letter posted to the business group’s site and a summit with 500 business leaders were the latest moves in an ongoing battle between big business and the Obama administration.

The two are at odds over the best way to keep the recovery from slipping into a double-dip recession. The Chamber believes tax cuts are key to job creation. The Obama administration, however, has focused on stimulus and spending to create jobs.

The Chamber said in its letter that the administration “vilified industries while embarking on an ill-advised course of government expansion, major tax increases, massive deficits and job-destroying regulations.”

Democrat voters think that a left-wing president who opposes free trade deals with Panama, Colombia, etc., and who implements socialist policies will help the working man to keep his job. But they could not be more mistaken. Attacking businesses causes businesses not to hire anyone. And workers won’t spend money when they are afraid of their job disappearing. Which business hires people when there is no demand for products and services? Government’s job is to encourage businesses to hire by cutting regulations and taxes – that’s what creates sustainable consumer demand.

Just wait until he legalizes 20 million illegal immigrants. Then his union buddies will really get a little lesson in supply and demand.

News

Feminist wants UK government to provide free IVF

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From the UK Telegraph, an editorial by Theodore Dalrymple. (H/T RuthBlog)

Excerpt:

[The chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Suzi Leather] …has suggested that, henceforth, the clause requiring doctors to take account of the need of a child for a father, when offering in vitro fertilisation to infertile women, should be removed from the law. The idea that fathers are necessary or even desirable in the lives of children is, in the opinion of Ms Leather, too old-fashioned to be entertained any longer.

[…]In Ms Leather’s brave new world, women are to have children merely because they want them, as is their government-given right, irrespective of their ability to bring them up, or who has to pay for them, or the consequences to the children themselves. Men are to be permanently infantilised, their income being in essence pocket money for them to spend on their enjoyments, having no serious responsibilities at all (beyond paying tax). Henceforth, the state will be father to the child, and the father will be child of the state.

This paper from the Heritage Foundation cites a very interesting study.

A seminal British study confirms that a child is safest when his biological parents are married and least safe when his mother is cohabiting with a man other than her husband. Specifically, the family Court Reporter Survey for England and Wales presents concrete evidence that children are 20 to 33 times safer living with their biological married parents than in other family configurations.

I think that if you take taxpayer money from working fathers and pay for unmarried women to have fatherless children, you will get fewer fathers and more fatherless children.

News

If government is paying the piper, then government is calling the tune

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Veronique de Rugy

Check out this post from GMU economist Veronica de Rugy on Big Government. (H/T ECM)

First, she puts up this chart.

Veronique writes:

On this chart we can see the changes over time in the composition of personal income in the United States since 1929. The most notable trend is the increase in the portion of personal income coming from government transfers (mainly social Security payments, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and personal and business tax credits.)  And the increase isn’t minor: the proportion of total personal income constituted by government money has grown from 0.9% to 17.2%.

Complementary decreases of wage earnings as percentages of total personal income (from 59.5% to 52.3%) are also going on.

The problem with government giving people money is that it creates a culture of dependency, as with Greece. Politicians take money from job-creating business-owners, or from productive individual workers, and they redistribute it to whiny unproductive, immature victim groups like unions, in order to buy their votes. Eventually, the government goes too far making promises and the productive people just stop or slow their working or they move away, since they keep less and less of their own money for the same amount of work and risk-taking.

And that’s when welfare checks of the losers dry up, and they have no choice but to riot and kill people. Why do they riot? Well, if they were earning their own money by working, then they would know that they are responsible for themselves, not government. They would understand that something might go wrong, and they would know that they had to cut their spending and save for a rainy day. So when things do go bad, they would have known how to live cheaply off of their savings while they find another job.

But people who take welfare don’t save – they think the money will always be there. What do they do when the taxpayers slow or stop production? They have no skills, and they have no savings. They can’t just find a new government because a new government isn’t going to find any more money from somewhere – there isn’t any left. So the only way to get their welfare back is to revolt – which is exactly what the socialists in Greece are doing right now. They’ve been spoiled rotten and they want their welfare back, like little babies crying for their mommies.

It’s sick. And this is what Obama and the Democrats idolize, because that’s how they grew up – begging their rich parents for money and bailouts for their own irresponsible behaviors. Their policies aren’t thought through – it’s just reliving their silver spoon childhoods of never having to work for anything.

Would you like to know what Republicans are like? Consider Michele Bachmann.

At 13, Bachmann was forced to become almost financially independent after her parents divorced. She used her babysitting money to buy her own clothes and lunches at school and saved up enough to purchase her first pair of contact lenses. Between college semesters at Winona State University, she took her hardworking streak to Alaska where on one memorable day she cleaned 280 salmon.

She also quit her job as a tax litigation attorney to homeschool her five kids, because she didn’t like the job the public schools were doing. Her business runs a small business, and she helped him to start it. That’s what Republicans do. We work. And we give.

We need to stop increasing the size of government so they can “take care” of all our needs. We need to take care of all our needs, and to take care of our neighbor’s needs, too. That’s capitalism. Having something to share from what you can make from your own industry and labor.