Ken Nelson

What if Congress had incentives?

Lets travel back in time to Feb 2009. A new President, rich in hope and promise, moved to deal with economic crisis.

He sent a bill with two pages to the Congress. The first page was blank. The second had just one paragraph:

Put your plan on the first page. If it reduces the unemployment rate to 6% in the 1st year, and is deficit neutral over its entire life, each member of Congress will receive $1,000,000.

Might have 2009 been different?

Don’t like bribing Congress to do the right thing?  You could flip it and punish them with 100% taxation on their reelection funds and income.

We need to do something to get that rat bastard crew in Washington to look out for all of us, not just themselves or their SEIU donors.

If you don’t like this idea, I’m all ears for your great scheme, as long as it doesn’t involve saying crapola like “our current system is working” or “you are free to vote out your Congressman”.

Government has worked for the political class for much too long.

Chris Christie
Governor, NJ

Entire speech here.

Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.

Glenn Reynolds aka “Instapundit”

I’d prefer it be Toyota employees. Car dealers,  most of whom have built businesses preying on the stupid and impulsive, have plenty to answer for and deserve no “pulpit”.

If they knew then, what they know now…???

Ravenswood, West Virginia, lives on life support after the Kaiser aluminum plant that powered the towns economic rise slowly dies.   Should the other major plant in town close, it could become a modern day ghost town.

Why would the plant close down? Well, it is old and refurbishing it costs. Demand is down in the recession. And the plant is unionized and has high labor costs relative to foreign and some domestic operations.

Kaiser’s Ravenswood plant created a middle class where there was none. When the United Steelworkers Union was voted in after the plant opened in 1957, the hourly wage jumped from $1.78 to $3.25.

This isn’t the first time Ravenwood workers have been out of work for a long time – twenty years ago they were locked out for nineteen months in a union labor dispute with the company.

That should have been a clue that the company, and the market, viewed their plant as “optional”.   That should have been their clue to scale back their demands on the company.  To work like the dickens to make it a better, more efficient plant. And to broaden their career options

Dave Guthrie, 51, says he’s glad he was laid off because now he has the time, money and motivation to go to college. He wants to be a traveling nurse, working short-term contracts around the country, far from what he calls the plant’s "us-vs.-them" labor-management dynamic.

Will 19 years of “good times” makes up for being jobless now? Will it make up for not leaving a strong town to their kids?

It seems a bad trade to me. I’d be mad at the “leaders” that egged it on.

Should be NOWHERE near a bank much less regulating them

An article at American.com explains why Canada hasn’t been hit by the housing / bank crunch as much as America has. In short… they lent to worthy borrowers and borrowers were less likely to speculate because they paid even if foreclosed.

Taken together, the features and regulations of banks in Canada outlined above create a healthy and sound “pro-lender” environment absent of political motivations for outcomes like greater homeownership, compared to the often politically motivated “pro-borrower” and “pro-homeowner” policies of the United States. While Canada’s banking system has promoted responsible borrowing and prudent lending and underwriting practices with little politically motivated interference, the U.S. banking system seems to have encouraged excessive lending to risky borrowers because of the political obsession with homeownership.

Showing that government really is bad at most things, in SPITE of political obsession over home ownership, the home ownership percent in Canada is actually HIGHER than in the U.S.

The main difference, although not highlighted very much in the article, is that there is no Fannie Mae in Canada. With nobody to buy crazy loans from them, the banks were stuck with what they sold, and they sold with diligence.

The problems we have right now stem ALMOST ENTIRELY from ill conceived government action. We would be MUCH better off if the politicians were significantly  less involved in our economy.

If he worked for me, I’d have to pay 40% more for insurance for him because he smokes and drinks too much (according to his free Navy doctor)

Eric Raymond has two friends in hard times:

What these guys have in common is that they’re only marginally employable. What borderline mental illness has done to one, mediocre skills and the unintended consequences of anti-discrimination laws have done to the other. As long as I’ve known both (and that would actually be most of my years, for both of them), they’ve worked dead-end jobs and put their passion into science fiction and wargaming. They’re decent, honest, unambitious men who have never wanted anything but steady work, a normal life, and a hobby or two. They’re not stupid and they have respectable work habits; in fact they’re probably more conscientious and safe than average. Now they don’t quite fit; too old, too geeky, too male, too quiet. The job market has discarded one and the other is hanging by a thread.

Eric wonders what is different now that would cause them to be let go:

No. What I think is: These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

That’s right Eric. And it isn’t just regulation costs.  My #1 cost is salary, #2 health insurance for labor, #3 payroll taxes for labor, #4 taxes in general.

The non-salary costs of hiring have grown much too high. Anybody truly wanting to solve the current “jobs” problem would focus on that.

He is PERSONALLY going to make sure you get to work

The AP, always eager to give The One a break, claims it was the snow, implying that we couldn’t build houses or do other outside type things:

Bad weather can cause job losses in construction and other industries sensitive to weather.

BUT  it turns out that this was actually measuring people unemployed before the storms and not measured because the bureaucrats took snow days:

In addition, many state agencies in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions that process the claims were closed due to the storms and are now clearing out backlogs, a Labor Department analyst said.

SEIU is also exempt from anti-trust rules. How about changing that?

The House voted to remove antitrust exemptions that health insurance companies have.

I’m not sure, exactly, how the exemption helps companies that are largely state based. The industry claims removing it won’t matter a whole lot.

I’ve got two problems with this. The first is that I don’t like Congress aiming at a particular industry, especially when they largely have political aims not the merit of the actual proposal as their goal.

The second problem is that the anti-trust exemptions unions have causes far more havoc in the economy.  Why not just get rid of anti-trust exemptions – period???

Well, we know that the Democrats don’t do anything for the country as a whole, they operate for their constituencies – unions, unproductive, bought off minorities, and terrorists.  And we know that the Republicans are too stupid, or timid, or both, to fight for the country.

What a bunch of maroons we have “leading us”. We probably deserve the thumping the next decade is going to give us. 

 
20 weeks per child at my expense

In Europe they are making employers pay women employees who get pregnant for 20 weeks at FULL pay.

I’m all in favor of kids, but I’d prefer to pay for the results of work not pleasure.

This would have been more direct, but possibly less effective

Jeffrey Friedman says our banks failed because laws put in place by our social-democracy aren’t any smarter than a central planner might have been:

What I am calling social democracy is, in its form, very different from socialism. Under social democracy, laws and regulations are issued piecemeal, as flexible responses to the side effects of progress — social and economic problems — as they arise, one by one. (Thus the official name: progressivism.) The case-by-case approach is supposed to be the height of pragmatism. But in substance, there is a striking similarity between social democracy and the most utopian socialism. Whether through piecemeal regulation or central planning, both systems share the conceit that modern societies are so legible that the causes of their problems yield easily to inspection. Social democracy rests on the premise that when something goes wrong, somebody — whether the voter, the legislator, or the specialist regulator — will know what to do about it. This is less ambitious than the premise that central planners will know what to do about everything all at once, but it is no different in principle.

Read the whole thing and you will understand that we face the same problems, only magnified, after the recent years bout of regulation and “fixes”.

About $10 bucks at Wal-Mart

Everything Obama touches turns to crap. Even the simple process of weatherstripping a home.

ABC News reports that the General Accountability Office will declare today that the Energy Department has fallen woefully behind — about 98.5% behind — the 593,000 homes it initially predicted would be weatherized in the Recovery Act’s very first, very chilly year.

But no matter how little gets done the government bureacracy has to be paid, so they’ve spent $522 million dollars to do just 9,100 homes – at a amazing value price of just $57,362 per home.

BTW: The reason it goes to crap when Obama touches it is that he touches it with GOVERNMENT.

Overall Rep Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” plan isn’t bad compared, for instance, to where our road heads now. There are BIG problem with it though. It isn’t constitutional and  he doesn’t focus enough on spending cuts. Or at all really. No surprise there. He’s a politician. The thought of not spending other people’s money probably didn’t cross his mind.

The plan website is at http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/

He intends to stops entitlement spending growth by locking in benefits for people over age 55. For the rest of us, the economy better perk up… as we will be relying on private savings plans.  He plans to perk up the economy with a lower taxes and a VAT on business. Like those won’t grow.

Overall, something will have to happen. But I’m concerned about two kinds of taxes – over time they will both raise.  I’d rather see a change like this only in concert of a balanced budget amendment forcing lower spending. In other words, when hell freezes over.

I don’t like the plan very much because it is still largely unconstitutional and it is VERY vulnerable to progressive meddling by those who want to “help” constituents with other people’s money.

Frankly, we might be better off with our current government crashing and replaced by multi-state countries (Utah, AZ, NM, TX) that are run properly than with this sort of zombie progressive state.

Ryan would have you believe that over time liberty would reign, but he is naive – if the instrument of taking remains in place it will be used.  Of this we have ample historic evidence.

A proper plan would remove the power of the government to take unevenly from the people. If everybody feels the pain, the takings will only be for the common good which is the Constitutional intent.

Seeking Alpha says never mind Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland… we’ve got 7 states here that are larger and in bigger trouble…

My seven states of energy debt represent a full 35% of the total US population. As with other US states, they face looming policy clashes between protected state and city workers on one hand, and the growing ranks of the private economy’s underemployed on the other. The recent circus at the LA City Council meeting was a nice foreshadowing that the days of unlimited borrowing by governments–against future growth based on cheap energy–is coming to an end. Washington can print up dollars and fund these states for years, if it so chooses. But just as with the 70 million people in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, the 108 million people in these seven large states are probably facing even higher levels of unemployment as austerity measures finally slam into their cashless coffers, and reduce their ability to borrow.

Government and its employees are our public enemy #1.

Somebody might want to tell the Danes that, as millions of Americans have learned in recent years, leverage WORKS BOTH WAYS…

Via InfectiousGreed