Let’s just do a round-up of stupid shit from Galt’s Gulch rejects.
1.) First, the low-hanging fruit (from the Hunting of the Snark by way of TBOGG):
2.) Also via TBOGG, we learn that the Galtian hunters who eat what they kill feel that they are under-appreciated in their cushy finance jobs. The poor bastards.
3.) Eric Cantor has some rock solid and hip new ideas on how to spark the economy, and Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap gave him a column to write about those fancy ideas:
That is why this fall the Republican Party will pursue a legislative agenda that boosts economic growth through reducing the regulatory and tax burden. We will make sure that Washington policies are less restrictive to businesses small and large. Our goals include repealing the “3 percent withholding rule,” which serves as an effective tax increase on those who do business with the government, and overturning the EPA’s proposed regulations that inhibit jobs in areas as varied as cement and farm dust. We plan to prevent the NLRB from inhibiting where a business chooses to create jobs. We well know that the Republican majority was not elected to raise taxes or take more money out of the pockets of hardworking families and business people. We were elected to change the way Washington does business and spends money.
Tax cuts and de-regulation. Those are fresh and innovative ideas.
4.) Over at Reason, Matt Welch misses the central point of a NY Times piece, then lies about the author, claiming he finds 1% of teachers in rubber rooms “understandable.” Here is what the author wrote: “There were 744 teachers in rubber rooms at the time. For some, that is understandable in a system of 77,000 teachers…” Here’s what Matt had to say: “NYT Education Writer: Putting 1% of Public School Teachers in Rubber Rooms Is “Understandable.” But don’t worry, Welch is swinging some heavy argumentation skills, and follows up with: “Emphasis mine, because of wow.” We’re making that a new tag, because it really works.
I need a new car, because of wow!
The Fonz wears a cool jacket, because of wow!
Give money to the Reason Foundation, because of wow!
Matt Welch should have to spend a year as a public school teacher in the worst neighborhood in the Bronx and then write about how they are overpaid BECAUSE OF WOW!
John PM
What is “farm dust” and how does it create jobs? I hear the phrase “farm dust” and I think of the “Dust Bowl” in the 1930s.
Mike in NC
Eric Cantor needs to be force-fed a daily diet of that stuff.
twiffer
to me, this reads “outsourcing will be easier”. no one said the jobs created had to be in the US, right?
lacp
Because of wow? Because of World of Warcraft? WTF?
taylormattd
FOR THE HORDE!!
Oh wait, which “wow” are we talking about?
BGinCHI
Isn’t that pretty much the definition of Libertarianism?
“Because of wow” explains how all the magical economic, social, and cultural opportunities just present themselves.
Libertarian question of the year: “Context, how does it work?”
realbtl
Somewhat related to #3: As a retiree I am required to pay my estimated taxes quarterly. I don’t mind this but writing out a personal check for $3200 (state and fed combined) certainly hurts more than having it magically disappear from a paycheck.
Given the older demographics of the Tea Partiers and Rs in general, I wonder if they somehow tap into this as ‘I’m taxed too much”.
The Dangerman
What truly amazes me about that statement is how utterly ignorant it is of history; those that promulgated the regulations didn’t gather in some secret room to develop rules to fuck over the business community. Regulations came into being because some business(es) fucked over somebody or something; if they didn’t fuck over somebody or something, they would have no worries.
ppcli
In other words – we want to make sure that if a company wants to pack up a plant and ship it to a union-busting state, just to shed its union workers, labor laws that prevent this will not be enforced.
[Aside: I will not use the infuriating expression “right to work” state for “union busting state”. To have a right to work is to be able to say “I have no job and I want one.” and be given a job. People in so-called “Right to work” states do not have that right. But as usual the right wing serves up its distorted vocabulary and the media obediently follows.]
Opie-jeanne
Matt Welch is a fan of the Angels and just last night he agreed with something I said on a baseball forum, so now I’m going to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about both baseball and the Angels.
Derf
Colonel John Galt Chicken Little Wrong Way Kristol Cole voted for Bush twice and thinks Libertarians have some good ideas…because of wow.
J
I don’t want or have time to read Welch at Reason or the NYT piece, so #4 makes little sense. What was the actual point of the piece, and how did that jackass misconstrue it?
Yutsano
Are you trying to up the page clicks at Reason JC?
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Isn’t WOW the name of the snack chips that cause consumers to shit themselves?
Why yes, yes it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay's_WOW_chips
Bago
You know that the notion of asymmetric info was so distasteful that exchanges and insider trading rules were invented, no?
gene108
A guy takes a job because he wants ‘x’, but gets ‘y’. He gets discouraged because he thought he could get ‘x’, but it never materialized and it doesn’t look likely to materialize. He changes jobs, contemplates new career, etc.
I don’t get the criticism of young investment bankers unhappy with their pay.
They went into investment banking to make lots and lots of money. They aren’t being hypocritical about anything. The industry isn’t able to meet their expectations.
MonkeyBoy
In other news it comes out that William Koch has bought the Buckskin Joe Olde West Town “edutaining” attraction/tourist trap .
I guess he is really into building fantasy worlds where all a real man needed was a 6-shooter.
catclub
@Opie-jeanne: William F Buckley liked Bach, too.
Get over it.
J.W. Hamner
I wonder if there is anything that can’t be called “an effective tax increase”… like: requiring cooks to wash their hands after going to the bathroom serves as an effective tax increase on the food service industry.
Bob
@Opie-jeanne:
The Angels are a decade long statistical fluke who win more games than they should by the numbers.
Also, reply is fixed! Thanks JC!
PaminBB
Count me in as mystified by “farm dust”. Crop dusting?
Opie-jeanne
@twiffer: This is becausE of the lawsuit against Boeing. They moved their new contract work to S Carolina from the state of Washington because they didn’t want to pay the wages the union had negotiated for there. It’s a huge lawsuit.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
WOW! being the former brand of olestra chips is also appropriate.
its a food additive and an industrial lubricant.
Violet
@gene108:
Excellent comment from TBogg’s:
Yeppers.
LongHairedWeirdo
See, Boeing and the Machinists union have a contract dispute. Well, it’s obvious, to a Republican, who absolutely, positively *must* be in the right. Uh, obviously the union has no cause for complaint because retaliation doesn’t exist because, uh, *shut up*, that’s why!
I do find it kind of funny. Boeing has been doing more and more outsourcing, and has run into hideous delays, but they’re going to keep doing the same thing, expecting different results. They have some of the best workers, skilled and eager, right in Washington, and their upfront costs might be higher, but what cost is there to laughably long delays in one’s new projects?
(Edited to remove somewhat tasteless “struck out” comment)
Violet
@PaminBB:
Probably crop dusting. If dusters can’t dust, that’s jobs lost — I think that’s what he’s trying to say. Plus that would make sense with it being the EPA. Regulations about poisons in the air and all.
JGabriel
Re-submitted by author, due to moderation for using the socia1ist word.
JGabriel
While we’re on the subject of glibertarian stupidity:
Obama:
Jim Hoft aka Gateway Pundit:
Yeah! Jesus would want us to commemorate the dead of 9/11 by shooting shotguns in the air, none of that wimpy charity shit!
.
catclub
The 3% witholding rule.
1. implements legislation from 2006 i.e. when GOP ran both houses and held the white house.
2. Probably was implemented so that if a contractor does not pay their taxes, they will not get back the witheld part.
(i.e. what some huge number of contractors were probably doing, so much so that the GOP house and senate passed a bill to thwart such tax cheating.)
3. Already exempts huge numbers of transactions, like any government entity that spends less than $100M per year.
lacp
“Because of wow”: the kinder, gentler version of “Because of shut up.”
Tonal Crow
Republicans need remedial reading classes, not because of wow!
And reporters need to stop using “some people” because it gives undeserved weight to ideas whose source the reporter is unwilling or unable to explicitly describe.
Berto
Regulation is the best friend of an honest businessman.
catclub
@J.W. Hamner: 3% rule
“serves as an effective tax increase on those who do business with the government…”
How is it that government cannot create jobs, and yet there exist people who want to do business with the government?
It is a mystery!
And as I noted above: making some people actually PAY their owed taxes IS an effective tax increase. Possibly, too effective.
The Dangerman
@PaminBB:
A bit of googling shows this dispute goes back to 2006, when “farm dust” was being regulated by the Bush Administration.
I have no idea what the Bush Administration was trying to accomplish (lather, rinse, repeat).
JGabriel
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
In all fairness, that’s pretty much true of any grease. Though olestra earns it place by being the first grease literally engineered to be indigestible.
.
Tonal Crow
@Berto:
Which is precisely why Republicans loathe it.
nodakfarmboy
@Violet: No, they actually mean dust. Like crop dust during harvest. Or dust kicked up from soil during planting. Particulate matter and the like.
http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/16732/
Farmers are highly concerned about the potential regulations, because a lot of what they do on a day to day basis creates dust, by necessity. There’s no way to avoid stirring up soil occasionally out on the prairies in the wind, and when you harvest, you spread chaff and crop residue dust as a part of the job. I was out on the combine helping harvest this weekend, and the countryside had a faint haze of wheat dust in the air all around. It’s just part of living in the country. The worry is that the cost to try to meet any new proposed standards will be above and beyond what farmers can meet.
That said, I think the Republicans are making a bunch of noise just to make noise. Gotta throw anything at Obama. Even potentially proposed regulations only being discussed.
jl
I humbly suggest that Cole should spend his precious time reading about, you know, facts and stuff, rather than glibertarian posturing that tends to upset him, to no good purpose.
For example, rev up the old Google scholar and lets take a look at what Alan B. Kreuger has been up to.
Job Search and Job Finding in a Period of Mass Unemployment: Evidence from High-Frequency Longitudinal Data
Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller
January 16, 2011
Extracts from conclusion below:
… the amount of time devoted to job search declines sharply over the spell of unemployment. [but data sample problems may distort findings] Assuming that the declining search profile is robust, there are three likely explanations for this phenomenon. First, workers could exhaust suitable jobs to apply to the longer they are unemployed, and wait for more jobs to become available, rather than spend time searching as their spell of unemployment progresses. Second, search efficiency could rise with time spent searching. Third, workers could become discouraged the longer they are unemployed, and this could prevent them from applying for available jobs. Distinguishing among these explanations is very important, as the latter behavior could lead to hysteresis and prolonged joblessness after the job market improves…
the average reservation wage is close to the previous wage and does not seem to respond to the exhaustion of benefits…
For older workers, however, we do find a decline in the reservation wage over the spell of unemployment. In addition, while we do not find that workers increase their search time as their benefits run out, we do find that they lower their sights as they exhaust their own personal savings. In particular, those who had more than $10,000 in liquid assets at the start of the study were more likely to lower their reservation wage over the course of their spell of unemployment, compared with those with a smaller amount of savings to start with. This finding suggests that people treat government provided social insurance differently from their own personal precautionary savings…
For offers of part-time jobs, however, workers tend to be less choosey. The reservation wage does not predict acceptance or rejection of part-time jobs. One explanation for this finding that we plan to explore in future work is that a part-time job could be a bridge to a full-time job. In addition, workers can continue searching for a full-time job even if they work part time..
We find mixed results concerning extended unemployment benefits. On the one hand, workers do not search more or lower their reservation wage in periods when their UI benefits have lapsed or been exhausted, suggesting that EUC did not provide a serious disincentive to finding a job. On the other hand, we find that average search time was lower for workers as a whole after the maximum duration of benefits was extended from 79 to 99 weeks, although this finding is sensitive to [all sorts of technical stuff and data shortcomings]…
reservation wage and job search time predict early exits from UI…
http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/562.pdf
[I summarized some stuff in brackets]
MikeBoyScout
Because of WOW, it’s their world and we just die in it.
Now shut up and eat you some farm dust.
Redshift
@realbtl: Oh, definitely. I’ve always said that if I were president (and since this is fantasy, I can get any legislation I want passed), I would raise taxes and raise withholding more. I’d set it up so people who care could opt out, and everyone else would get a bigger refund in April and think they’d gotten a tax cut.
Dennis SGMM
@Opie-jeanne:
Great, on top of everything else it’s going to rain aircraft.
Roger Moore
I think that’s unfair to fruit. I’m pretty sure McMegan counts as a vegetable.
JGabriel
McMegan:
I know, and you know, that there’s a joke here in referencing The 40 Year Old Virgin, but my heart’s just not in it.
Sometimes, it’s just better to point out the potential and let people make up there own punchlines.
(Click on the link if you don’t get it.)
.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@PaminBB: No. Microparticle dust from milled grains. Working in a silo storage facility without an industrial breathing mask (very restrictive, esp. when conducting manual labor–see: coal miners) creates a number of respirator ailments akin to black lung.
Crop dusting would be the wholesale aerial spraying of chemical contaminants. I’m sure Cantor would have no problem with that, either, as long as it happened far, far away from his home.
Not often one to wish harm to others, but I wish Cantor would get sucked asshole-first into the drain at the bottom of a public pool.
nodakfarmboy
@MikeBoyScout: Count me as one who’s been eating farm dust his whole life, and is seemingly none the worse for wear. Other than a bit of sneezing around barley chaff. That stuff doesn’t agree with me.
But, if that’s the price I have to pay for delicious beer…
Mark D
The depleted-uranium-levels-of-dense in Cantor’s screed is truly something to behold — and about as dangerous to our economy as a true depleted round is to a human being’s noggin.
And while he’s busy making friends in the Chamber of Commerce world, he’s making even more on the entire East Coast.
Not sure what it takes to make someone so abhorrently vacuous and absurdly callous, but Cantor took two of them.
And there really is a special place in hell for the guy, as some of my friends in Joplin can attest (some are getting fukced over thanks to his stalling on emergency funding, and one is ready to drive to DC and beat the shit out of little Eric … and knowing the guy — my friend — as I do, he just might do it).
BGinCHI
In other news, our mayor can kick your mayor’s ass:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/clout/chi-emanuel-offers-chicago-triathlon-quip-20110829,0,2042868.story
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: Shows which part of the gutter our minds have been…
dj spellchecka
over the weekend, benen flagged a piece by iain murray of the competitive enterprise institute calling for the end of the national weather service
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_08/the_wrong_way_to_respond_to_a031834.php#
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
Oh, they know the history all right; they just see it from the other side. Businesses know that they used to be able to fuck people over as they pleased until those nasty regulators came along and stopped them. They want to go back to the good old days when the only thing that stopped them from killing their employees and customers is a conscious decision that they were more profitable alive.
Redshift
Shorter GOP, in all economic conditions: “Tax cuts are the answer. What was the question?”
They’re not trying to address any actual problem, other than that their friends should have more money. Tax cuts are not a means to an end, they are an end in themselves. Articles like this are not proposing tax cuts as a solution to something, they’re declaring that the current “something” is a justification for tax cuts, just as it always is.
bonkers
Libertarianism is a Sham. Wow.
Mark D
From jl’s quoted text:
Fourth, there could be a total lack of jobs available for those looking for one because the economy is in the shitter thanks a bunch of libertarian bullshit (in this case, an unregulated market for CDOs and the like) that sounded great in theory, but has proven to be a horrific nightmare for millions of people once put into practice.
Funny how that never occurred to them …
MikeBoyScout
@44 nodakfarmboy:
I’m sure Eric would not protest if I asked you then to consume you some first rate coal dust.
Dennis SGMM
@dj spellchecka:
The NWS interferes with the creation of impoverished serfs. It has to go.
jl
My take from Krueger and Mueller’s workingp paper (which looks like it is ready to submit, so go download it now while it is still free for everyone!) is that it is mostly inconsistent with notions that social insurance, like US unemployment insurance, plays any big role in increasing unemployment or decreasing adjustment speed of economy coming out of recession.
People look for work, they maintain their “reservation wage” (in this context, the level of compensation required for them to take another full time job). Like banks and corporations, the unemployed are loathe to write down their assets, and working history is a really big asset for most people. Actually, they have more reason to keep up their reservation wage, since spending time at a new job at alower wage may significantly downgrade their work history asset.
Note that Krueger and Mueller find that exhaustion of unemployment benefits do not seem to be connected to reservation wage, at least in the available sample. That makes since.
The author’s explain the fact that older workers reduce their reservation wages more rapidly because they view their social insurance ‘assets’ (the capitalized value of their expected future social insurance benefits) differently some how than their private assets.
I think there is another explanation, that ties up the different results better. My hunch is that for older worker, the decision to take a lower wage job now has a smaller effect on their future income (that is, such a decision does less damage to expected future income) than for younger workers. So they can afford to be more flexible. That is, the effect of their current decision to accept lower compensation has less effect on the ‘good will’ or ‘signal of quality worker’ reflected in their lifetime employment history that they built up while they were employed.
Tonybrown74
@Derf:
OMG, for real??
Did you want to suck John’s dick and he rejected you or something?? Seriously!
“John voted for Bush twice, wah wah wah!! Why won’t he love me!?!?!?”
You’re worse than Maureen Dowd!
Chad N Freude
I’ve read somewhere that after some factory fire in New York, business was heavily burdened by regulation and a whole new union. Outrageous!
trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
Oh no he caint.
http://www.kevinjohnson.com/
jl
@Mark D:
The Krueger/Mueller paper was about job search, not the cause of the slump.
The authors’ made some comments on their results that do, in my opinion, reflect an over eagerness to blame the unemployed (see my comment on the sticky reservation wages they found above, the authors just kind of say, well, the unemployed keep it too high for some reason. Why would they do that? I offered another reason above that gives the unemployed more credit for trying to do the best they can over their lifetime.
I think it is OK to criticize the paper in the context of what it is trying to explain.
What you said is like the book critic who is complaining because the authors did not write a different book on another subject.
And there is absolutely nothing I can see in the paper that is inconsistent with an aggregate demand shortage as being the cause of the unemployment. But the cause of the mass unemployment is simply not what the paper is about.
Derf
@Tonybrown74: How pathetic is it being a Chicken Little Cole apologist? Surely you can find more noble pursuits. A professional fluffer perhaps?
different church-lady
@Derf: I see you’ve taken the “point at blue sky and insist it’s raining just to drive people insane” track.
And sadly, it seems to be working.
nodakfarmboy
@MikeBoyScout: I’m going to guess that the black lung that could cause would be a tad more dangerous to my health than a simple case of hay fever from taking in a bit too much plant dust and pollen. Individual results might vary, I’d suppose. In any case, harvest creates dust. Threshing dry plants in the open field (and they have to be dry, in order to facilitate safe and stable storage) leads to dust as you spread the remaining plant matter back on the field to return to soil. Question is, should such dust be regulated the same way that coal dust or other industrial pollutants are?
Therein lies the rub.
fasteddie9318
@Derf:
To paraphrase a Great American:
jl
@trollhattan: Oh yeah. I want a Kevin Johnson vs Rhahminator cage match, now. The Kevinator will win. Go Sacto!
fasteddie9318
@nodakfarmboy:
Duh, it’s like, a tricky queschun, cuz teh gummint SHOONT REGULAYT NOTHIN! DEY TOOK R JERBS!
Derf
@different church-lady: You still don’t get the fact Cole is libertarian curious and could be persuaded to vote for the likes of Perry under the right conditions. So your opinion means less than zero really. Stick around awhile and maybe you will see the light (doubtful)
Tonybrown74
@Derf:
It’s not about being an apologist. Shit, can you put a criticism of the topic/post, as opposed to the individual?
Jesus Christ, if you have that much of a problem with John Cole, why the fuck are you on his blog? Why read it at all?
You come across as a rejected suitor … “you WILL love me!1 eleventyone !!”
Give it a fucking rest, already!
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: Cage match!
Roger Moore
@jl:
Or maybe it’s just that the remainder of their working life is relatively short, so any reduction in their remaining work time is proportionately larger. If I’m 30 years old, I probably expect to work for another 35+ years before retirement. If taking a lower paying job now will reduce my expected future earnings proportionately, I will be willing to take a relatively long time looking for a job in order to avoid taking a pay cut. After all, a 1 year job search will only cut about 3% of my remaining work life, so from a lifetime earnings position it’s not worth taking a pay cut bigger than 3% to make the search go faster.
OTOH, if I’m 60 and expect to work for only 5 more years, even a short layoff will consume a relatively large fraction of my remaining working life. A six month job search will reduce my remaining work life by 10%, so I may be willing to take a 10% pay cut to get a job quickly. Of course older workers may also have well grounded fears that businesses are reluctant to hire them, which would make them more eager to grab any job offer, even if it comes with a pay cut.
Mino
@LongHairedWeirdo: Where in the hell are they going to find pattern makers and master machinists in Alabama?
cathyx
@Roger Moore: And on the the other, other hand, the longer you sit unemployed, the more you are deemed unemployable by employers.
trollhattan
@jl:
@BGinCHI:
I’m in! Did Rahm every say anything naughty about Michelle Rhee? Can we start a rumor? Let’s get the ball rolling.
trollhattan
@Mino:
Steal ’em from the Mercedes plant?
Derf
@Tonybrown74: I know, it’s all about ME. Your reaction is typical of all my obssessed groupies. I totally understand Tony. But mellow out dude otherwise I’ll have to get a restraining order.
Take it out on your fleshlight or something.
jibeaux
@Derf:
Well, thank goodness you’re here, then. To be the firebagwall and all.
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: Pretty sure he said her ed policies were fucking retarded, but I can’t reveal my source on that.
Rahm won’t need a reason to cage match. You just show him the cage and he goes apeshit.
Roger Moore
@Mino:
Shut down their plant in Washington and tell the workers there they can move to Alabama if they want a job doing what they’re experts at? I’m pretty sure that’s the long-term goal.
nodakfarmboy
@fasteddie9318: Well, for what it’s worth, I’m not overly concerned about the proposed regulations. Call me crazy, but I’m going to take the administration at their word for now- they claim that the proposals being made by the EPA should have minimal impact on farmers harvest activity.
http://lubbockonline.com/agriculture/2011-03-20/agriculture-chief-aims-ease-fear-dust-rules#.Tlvsn13Ayso
Note that the one group making noise about the proposals (as listed in the linked story) is the Farm Bureau, which is a GOP leaning organization. The EPA has passed on implementing stricter regs in the past, and says they have no plans to clamp down on farmers this time, either. But, the Republicans won’t let that get in the way of them demagoging the issue a bit to take some shots at the administration.
MikeBoyScout
@63 nodakfarmboy:
I was all snarky, and you proceed with debate. :-)
I don’t know that farm dust is regulated, but assuming it is I’d like to read the regulations you might want me to comment upon.
In general, my right as a producer ends at the tip of your nose and vice versa. Under that blog commentary standard your farm dust need not be regulated if it stays on your farm and never leaves.
trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
Has anybody seen Rahm and the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger in the same place, ever?
(One angle on Johnson could involve the ’93 finals, nomsayn?)
Mino
@trollhattan: They just oil the robots. You don’t think a German engineer would let an Alabaman anywhere near a milling machine, do you?
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: Not that I know of, or who lived to tell the tale.
Mark D
Sorry, jl, but my comment was not directed at you, but the paper itself.
And the first part of my comment did, in fact, address the point of the paper — and points out one factor they seem to fail to appropriately address: the fact there simply aren’t any jobs.
They do a lot of neat analysis on how people look for jobs, what makes them take one job over another, how age is a determining factor, etc.
But one simply cannot, in good faith or in an attempt to do good analysis, ignore the gifreakinggantic reason most folks are still looking for a job 6, 9, even 18 months after losing one: there are no jobs. There just aren’t.
And for those lucky enough to find one for which they qualify, they best hope they already have a job since employers are exclusively excluding the unemployed.
Again, please don’t get me wrong here, as I’m not criticizing you at all. And I’m sure the paper has some good and interesting findings.
But if they ignore or brush aside two incredibly large factors in why we have so many long-term unemployed (lack of jobs, lack of employers willing to hire the unemployed) then it’s just another example of hackery masquerading as analysis.
trollhattan
@Mino:
Not on any planet where I’ve lived.
I grew up in a Boeing family and the HQ move to Chicago was where it all started to go sideways. The 787 is their outsourcing Waterloo; one they won’t be repeating anytime soon.
Mino
@Roger Moore: Uh, huh. Trade Pacific coast weather (cool and rainy) for Alabama weather (hot and rainy). Good luck with that.
Trade the social safety net of the Pacific Northwest for the unspeakable situation in the deep South. Good luck with that.
jl
@Mark D: You make some good points, and I agree with most of what you say. But the paper is already over 50 pages. If they were writing a book, then I would say, yeah, they should find some space to talk about the how the reason for the difficulty in finding jobs might interact with how the unemployed look for a new job.
And, the authors’ do pop off with what seems to me some implicit ‘unemployed bashing’ when they suggest the high reservation wage is too damn high. As I asked above, why?
That is where I think the macro micro interaction should start. If they reason for the mass unemployment is lack of aggregate demand, and worker productivity is the same as before (which I think is reasonable: there is no reason to suppose that all these people are goofs with no employable skills, and suggestions that they are useless are in my opinion desperation moves by the classical macro people).
Anyway, in that case, why should the reservation wage drop, on average? Wouldn’t it be better to increase aggregate demand so that the unemployed could find new jobs that could compensate them adequately for their potential economic productivity?
So the authors’ suggestion that the job seekers’ reservation wages were just too damn high irked me.
I wrote the comment and linked to the paper for two reasons. First, to illustrate how reality departs from glibertarian and GOP dogma. Second, to provide helpful suggestions to Cole (whom I love like a son, even though it would be a son who is a Test from God) to find better uses for his time.
MikeBoyScout
The transference of commercial aircraft production from union labor to low paid non-union labor in the south east will not be a reason why non US commercial airframe makers will put ours out of business.
Mnemosyne
@realbtl:
I’ve actually had idiots online tell me that the taxes withheld from my paycheck aren’t “real” income taxes because I didn’t have to sit down at my desk and hand-write a check to the IRS even when I paid more in income tax than said idiot making the comment.
And for idiots (not you) who haven’t had a paystub in a while, no, I am not confusing my Social Security or Medicare withholdings with income tax. Those are a separate line item. I’m talking about the line that says “Income Tax Withheld,” which shows what was withheld for income tax, not for SS or Medicare.
Mino
@MikeBoyScout: I have read that the construction of an modern aircraft is as much a Rorschach of a society as the ability of a Medieval society to build a cathedral.
And I don’t think it is the wages, per se, totally. There is no pool of talent in existence or being formed by education.
trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
Wha?! I could get that withholding isn’t exactly taxes paid because some folks overwithold and some folks underwithold, thus the refund check or the check sent to the IRS at 11:59 p.m. on April 15. Do they not think it’s “real” unless you’re paying in gold or fatted calves? I could envision a Paulite believing this.
MikeBoyScout
@90 Mino:
Not to argue, but the pool of US talent is being kept alive in the US, just not keeping up to the pace needed.
Decisions by our last remaining airframe manufacturer to eat the seed corn and piss off organized labor at the expense of a vital industry mean that if you love our trade imbalance with China now, you’re going to love it when they own that segment.
fyi… you do know that the LATE 787 is later exponentially than any model they have ever produced in the jet age and the 787 is not expected to become profitable until after the 1,000th (yes, that’s right!) delivery. Good thing the company is focusing on taking more design and production away from those who do it faster and more profitably!
Mino
@MikeBoyScout: I was speaking of the trade in the deep South. Maybe some NASCar engineers qualify, but who else?
trollhattan
@MikeBoyScout:
Securing foreign orders, especially with national carriers, often involves quid pro quo overseas manufacturing, and it’s worth paying attention to who builds what. Mitsubishi builds 787 “center wing boxes” and IIUC wings are the most difficult components to build and represent a large fraction of a plane’s technology.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Japan get into the fullsize commercial jet market before the Chinese.
Mark D
jl–
LOL! Yeah, they did have some space constraints. And I do thank you — a ton — for posting the paper.
Ya know, glibertarian policies are like the spread offense being used in the NFL: sure, it sounds good on paper, and some might even think they have the personnel to run it effectively.
But once they try it, it fails horrifically — often with excruciating results.
Opie-jeanne
@catclub: It was a joke. Is your humor detector broken, or did I need to add a smiley face? ;-)
Opie-jeanne
@Bob: Sez you. ;-)
MikeBoyScout
@94 trollhattan:
If you believe that “securing foreign order” BS I’d like to sell you some Boeing stock at $80/share. Deal?
Sourcing has everything to do with the hating of working people by those who don’t work and pull down millions per year while actually doing nothing. Did any of Boeing senior execs step up and accept responsibility for their terrible errors, or did they just blame the people they contracted the work to and laugh all the way to the bank?
Oli called it plausible deniability.
MikeBoyScout
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Japan get into the fullsize commercial jet market before the Chinese.
I would be surprised. The C919, a 156-seat, single-aisle passenger plane is already in design with a target delivery date of 2016 and COMAC is in negotiations right now with Ryan Air.
Of course, if the Japanese Heavys develop a time machine, all bets are off. ;-)
trollhattan
@MikeBoyScout:
I knew someone high up in the finance side during the 757, 767 and 777 era and stand by what I wrote. I’m not using it as justification for union-busting, FWIW.
Ken
the Galtian hunters who eat what they kill feel that they are under-appreciated in their cushy finance jobs.
The complaint is actually that the finance industry as a whole isn’t making as much money as it used to, so jobs are being eliminated and pay and bonuses are smaller. To which I respond: The financial industry makes money by taking a cut of what the rest of the economy makes; does that suggest anything to your highly-trained financial mind?
(An alternative version suggested by “eat what they kill”: A predator only does well when its prey does well. Or if you prefer, parasites need hosts.)
AA+ Bonds
Also worth noting is that Eric Cantor is blaming unemployment on private-sector unions in that quote. On unions! It seems that the fewer of them there are, the greater power they have to wreak havoc on poor old American billionaires, like some sort of science fiction beast that absorbs the might of its fallen comrades.
I swear, unions will be outlawed in this country and they’ll still be blamed for unemployment.
AA+ Bonds
Government employees: bad.
Government contractors: awesome, beyond reproach, pour money down their throats.
This philosophy is what’s guided privatization since well before Clinton took office. To his credit, at least his administration accompanied it with some needed and long-overdue worker-friendly reforms to evaluation and other systems for federal administration, which would have almost certainly continued under Gore (point man on those efforts) and instead got wrecked under Bush.
(Also, it’s nice to read some accessible discussion of Boeing and China and selling the wing that isn’t from a Michael Crichton book where unions try to murder engineers.)
wetcasements
I called out McMegan for her continued idiocy/hypocrisy on Twitter. The poor dear, she actually responded to me with a complete and utter non-response.
She really is this stupid.
wetcasements
So now she’s telling me she only took the free sandbags because she couldn’t find a place to buy some in the DC area.
Google is not her friend:
http://twitter.com/#!/jfparr3/status/108335960797876224
honus
@nodakfarmboy: sorta the way I used to be as a cabinet maker until I found out that most hardwood dust (walnut, cherry, maple, oak) was highly carcinogenic
MarkJ
Lets make him do something equally union-tastic that won’t ruin other peoples’ lives. I mean, seriously, with a teacher that incompetent the students really wouldn’t stand a chance.