Tag Archives: Unemployment

News

Why Canada’s response to the recession saved more jobs

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Here’s an amazing post from Ed Morrisey of Hot Air. (H/T Muddling)

Excerpt:

Barack Obama likes to tell people that we should thank him for his interventionist economic policies, and that without them, unemployment would be much worse in the US than it is now.  For instance, he told Racine that without his economic stimulus, we’d be at 12, 13, even 15% — even though Racine itself is at 14.2% unemployment.  D’oh! Otherwise, this looks like a classic Churchill conundrum.  Had the UK elected Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1936 and he fought Hitler early, forcing him from power, would Churchill have gotten credit for saving Western civilization?  Or would he have been seen as a war monger, without the context of tens of millions of dead people in World War II?

Actually, we can test the hypothesis in this case, at least to some extent.  The financial collapse also battered our northern neighbor, Canada, although not quite to the same extent it did us.  (Canada has more conservative banking and lending policies, which shielded them from the worst of the problems.)  Instead of using a blizzard of government spending to correct a downturn in unemployment, Canada tightened its belt and rode it out.

So how do the two compare?

Here’s Canada’s employment chart from their Statistics Canada web site – it shows how many thousands of people are employed.

Source: Statistics Canada
Source: Statistics Canada

Where’s the recession? There is no recession in Canada.

And they say:

Employment rose by 93,000 in June, pushing the unemployment rate down 0.2 percentage points to 7.9%. This is the first time the rate has been below the 8% mark since January 2009.

Employment has been on an upward trend since July 2009, increasing by 403,000 (+2.4%). These gains offset nearly all the employment losses observed during the labour market downturn which began in the fall of 2008. The June unemployment rate, however, remained well above the October 2008 rate of 6.2%, due to a large increase in the number of people in the labour force over this period.

Yeah – they actually delivered the sub-8% unemployment rate that Obama promised and failed to deliver. And Ed hazards a guess as to why that may be.

He writes:

For those who have trouble recognizing it, that’s what a recovery looks like.  Canada’s job creation really has gone in the right direction, not simply plateaued at the nadir of the curve.  Maybe Canada’s private sector has been hiring because it doesn’t have to worry about the price signals of the massive government interventions created by the Obama administration that the US private sector has to deal with.

We talked before about how businesses fear “bold experimentation” in economic policy from an interventionist government. That’s the kind of thing that causes depressions, by the way.

Canada’s unemployment rate started off HIGHER than ours, and it is not LOWER than ours. How can that be? Their economy is dependent on us! Well, they didn’t act to “stimulate” the economy with massive government spending, and they’ve been signing free trade deals with everybody and their mother in order to diversify their trading so that we don’t take them down with us. And it’s working. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an F.A. Hayek conservative, not a J.M. Keynes liberal. He doesn’t believe in deficit spending.

Ah, the benefits of electing an economist to run your country, instead of a demagogue community organizer who sues banks and wants to “spread the wealth”.

Commentary

How much do lawsuits against businesses cost consumers?

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Consider this article from the Pacific Research Institute.

Excerpt:

When deciding where to start a business, expand operations, or relocate, entrepreneurs prefer states with balanced tort systems that discourage abusive lawsuits. In 2006, job growth was 57% greater in the 10 states with the best tort climates than in the 10 worst states. Business leaders are leery of Michigan because of its sky-high tort costs and skewed courtrooms.

Fear of lawsuits also causes companies to withdraw or withhold beneficial products. Volkswagen planned to sell a 46 m.p.g. three-wheel vehicle. This “green machine” would have cost only $17,000, but VW decided not to market it in the United States because of lawsuit fears.

Total direct tort costs were $255 billion in 2008. Abusive lawsuits cost every American a hidden “tort tax” of about $2,000 a year in higher prices and insurance premiums, fewer jobs and new products, lower wages and benefits for working people, reduced access to health care, and higher taxes to pay for court costs. And the current system is very inefficient at its intended purpose – less than 15 cents of every tort-cost dollar goes to compensate plaintiffs.

Here’s a video about the Tort Liability Index, which tracks which states have the best environment for business based on tort costs.

This is one reason why states like North Dakota have low unemployment while anti-business states like New York have high unemployment. And North Dakota has massive budget surpluses whereas New York is running massive deficits.

Commentary

How discrimination against men in schools increases male unemployment

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(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics via Red State via Michelle Malkin)

First, the unemployment rate for men is higher than for women.

Story here in the ultra-left-wing UK Guardian.

Excerpt:

Complacency and “general hopelessness” have been blamed for the failure of young British men as research reveals that underperformance in school and university is now creeping into their working lives. A report published today by the Higher Education Policy Institute thinktank says male graduates are far more likely to be unemployed than their female counterparts.

Figures show that the economic downturn caused an increase in graduate unemployment from 11.1% at the end of 2008 to 14% by the end of last year. But when the figures are broken down by sex a stark picture emerges of 17.2% of young male graduates failing to find jobs compared to 11.2% of women.

[…]Bahram Bekhradnia, the HEPI’s director, spoke of the “general hopelessness of young men”. “The increase in unemployment that occurred between 2008 and 2009 is striking. For those graduates who have not found work it is a personal tragedy – a really bad start to their working lives,” he said.

He pointed to forecasts that suggest women will dominate the professions within 15 years. “That has all sorts of implications for things such as family creation, child-rearing and so on. The situation in some countries is even more extreme. An American woman told a conference I attended of the fury of black American women who found it impossible to form relationships with men of the same race with similar educational attainment because black American males weren’t going to university.

[…]Around half of the difference can be put down to subject choice, but the rest is unaccounted for and could indicate discriminatory forces.

[…]…the underachievement of men in school, university and adulthood is now an international phenomenon and it is one that is being increasingly studied in psychology.

Why are men struggling to find jobs? Well they are not doing very well in school.

Consider this article from Pajamas Media.

Excerpt:

  • In 2006, the high school dropout rate, which was 1.5 points higher for girls in 1970, was 2 points, or almost 20% higher, for boys (10.3% vs. 8.3%).
  • A 2007 study led by James Heckman of the University of Chicago asserted that “the pattern of the decline of high school graduation rates by gender helps to explain the recent increase in male-female college attendance gaps.”
  • The gender gap in college attendance for at least the past several years has returned. In late April, Uncle Sam’s Department of Labor told us that after three years of almost equal gender enrollment by high school graduates (2006, 2007, 2008), 202,000 more women than men from the class of 2009 went on to college. Women make up almost 55% of the current year’s freshman class.

The problem is that there are almost no male teachers and also that boys don’t learn well in co-ed classrooms – they get distracted by girls. The curriculum is not suitable for boys, who learn better with different materials that focus more on things that boys like, like wars, guns and adventures. Boys learn better with male teachers and all-male classrooms because they need male role models in order to succeed.

Consider this article on male/female teachers.

Excerpt:

The organization MenTeach, a Minnesota organization dedicated to increasing the number of males working with young children, posted a survey on its Web site showing that males constitute less than 20 percent of America’s 2.9 million elementary and middle school teachers. The 2008 survey, based on source data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed even more drastic differences among different grade levels:

  • 44 percent of America’s 1.2 million secondary school teachers.
  • 18.8 percent of America’s 2.9 million elementary and middle school teachers.
  • 2.4 percent of America’s 685,000 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers.

Most women want men to be strong husbands and fathers, so they’ll need to make sure that men have jobs. In order for men to have jobs, they’ll want to oppose feminists who discriminate against men in the education system.