It's a real populist message Jeb is selling. I hope he sticks with it. pic.twitter.com/e2FJuk7vcd
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) July 9, 2015
Demonstrating, yet again, the aristocratic Bush Crime Family disdain for us little people, as per ABC:
Today, Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who as of-late has gone relatively gaffe-free, uttered a phrase that may not go over too well with the constituency he seeks to reach. During an interview that was live-streamed on the app Periscope, Bush told New Hampshire’s The Union Leader that to grow the economy, “people should work longer hours.”…
He was answering a question about his plans for tax reform and responded:
“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.” …
In a statement, a Bush aide clarified that he was referring to the underemployed and part-time workers: “Under President Obama, we have the lowest workforce participation rate since 1977, and too many Americans are falling behind. Only Washington Democrats could be out-of-touch enough to criticize giving more Americans the ability to work, earn a paycheck, and make ends meet.”…
A 2014 Gallup poll found that already many Americans employed full-time report working, on average, 47 hours a week, while nearly 4 in 10 say they work at least 50 hours a week.
US workers work more hours than workers in any other large, industrialized country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development….
No word whether Jeb! finished, “Now watch this drive…” But I’m sure the paleoconservatives at the Union Leader found his speech highly satisfactory.
Major Major Major Major
I swear this headline has been used before :)
Fuck those guys.
Wednesday ground-training Krav was fun as usual. “So this isn’t wrestling or Muay Thai. Once you’re in this position, your options are to kick them in the face or break their arm. Choose quickly. And always remember that if the armbar fails, you can go back a move and kick them in the face anyway. OK, you’ve got partners already, let’s see it!”
Whee.
Tree With Water
I liken Jeb!’s “work will set you free” economic philosophy with Walter Mondale’s 1984 promise at the democratic convention to raise everyone’s taxes. That sound you hear is Mitt Romney licking his chops…
Major Major Major Major
@Tree With Water: It sounds better in the original German.
Arbeit macht Frei!
KS in MA
What’s German for “tone deaf”?
Major Major Major Major
@KS in MA: unmusikalisch. What you’re probably looking for is more like abgedreht.
Tree With Water
@Major Major Major Major: Even the cast iron lettering in German is more imposing than it would be if written in english… but it’s the thought that counts, right?
Brachiator
The Guardian claims this is a breaking news story:
Hope they have not done a Dewey Wins on this.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/09/confederate-flag-south-carolina-approves-removal-of-contentious-symbol
CarolDuhart2
@Brachiator: http://t.co/KKKoFBVUIk
Goblue72
This plutocratic monster gets fellated by the press while Bernie Sanders gets treated like an alien from outer space.
God, I hate this country.
Seonachan
“In a statement, a Bush aide clarified that he was referring to the underemployed and part-time workers”
Uh, okay. I’m part-time. So how does this work? Do I just start working more hours, and then check my pay stub to see if I’ve been paid for them? My employer’s gonna be miffed when they have to start paying me benefits, haha!
piratedan
what I want to know, is what Jeb! stated true? Is workforce participation at an all time low? My understanding is that the unemployment numbers have been trending in a positive fashion. Is this a case of someone cherry picking stats or is there a kernel of truth that has been turned on its head while dancing on the head of a pin?
It’s pretty apparent that sitting on corporate boards and giving speeches has possibly left Mr. Shrub out of touch with the american workforce (if he ever was) to be so patently tone deaf. Remember, this is the guy that the big money is pinning their hopes on.
Major Major Major Major
@piratedan:
No. SATSQ
mtmofo
SC House votes to remove flag. Haley’s statement:
EconWatcher
This is very much on par with his mother’s comment that the families forced to live in a stadium after Katrina were actually doing quite well, because they were poor and not used to much.
Jeb was raised this way. He doesn’t know any different.
Still, all good for us. I would say this isn’t quite as bad as Mitt’s statement about half of the country being moochers, but we’re just getting started, and Jeb hasn’t even been under pressure yet.
Brachiator
@mtmofo:
In honor of this moment, Elton John’s “Burn Down the Mission.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdEQkRq_xrw
seaboogie
Fuck that fortunate son – with a rusty combine – sideways….
Apparently we peons need to work a little harder. I really want that lame-ass lazy privelege to be fully exposed….and would happily actually pants him at an important event that doesn’t include a podium he could hide behind.
Timurid
Soooo… We need to start work earlier. The solution to the college tuition crisis is a full time job for every student. And we need to retire later. Much later. If at all. And in between we’d better be working 60-hour weeks. At least. Because Newcastle needs more coal, goddamnit!
PROTIP: One of the most pressing domestic crises that the next President… that the next several Presidents… will have to face is a vast and growing labor surplus. Even in the unlikely event that one of them turns out to be you, Jeb…
Mike G
“Work longer hours” — from the brother of the President who set a record for vacation days in office. And who just charged $100,000 to attend a fundraiser for veterans wounded in Iraq —
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3153963/George-W-Bush-charged-charity-100-000-guarantee-presence-fundraiser-military-veterans-wounded-Iraq-war.html
This drunken stupid tool should be doing these gratis every week for the rest of his life.
Villago Delenda Est
The Bush family are a bunch of parasites.
Deal with them appropriately.
ruemara
If you’ve never had to put ointment in your eyes, I recommend it for the level 2 blur/star filter effect it has.
Also, fuck Jeb.
Arrived in SD, having made a 4 hour flight an epic 9 hour journey, met the wonderful ballonjucitariats I am bunking with, who felt like old friends at first meeting and presented their feline overlords with appropriate offerings. Holy moly. Hopefully, the adventures of flying won’t affect my ability to get up early for tomorrow. Or to not be surly.
Steeplejack
@Seonachan:
Yeah, also worth noting that many of the “underemployed and part-time” are that way because their companies are deliberately holding down their hours for various reasons, e.g., to avoid paying benefits.
Tommy
You know just stepped out of the shower. I can show you where I had I think my small pox vaccine. In my arm. Left a little scar. I say this because as I got out of the shower I heard Kennedy on TV telling me vaccines are not good.
JustRuss
@EconWatcher: And let’s not forget brother George’s comment when he met a woman who worked three jobs to make ends meet, that it showed what an awesome land of opportunity we live in. Hard to believe there’s a country full of people willing to keep voting for this fucking family.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Fascinating that Jeb! is conflating hours worked with workforce participation, almost as though he has no fucking idea what he’s talking about.
seaboogie
Well then – here is something a bit surreal….I googled “fuck jeb bush” and landed here: https://jeb2016.com/donate?gclid=CjwKEAjwlPOsBRCWq5_e973PzTgSJACMiEp2amfeup8k_DxYMo8jM_w7-SntNOvCBIDRcKSJ27D4-xoCWNbw_wcB&lang=en
Gotta be a PAC, but I love how they need to know who you work for. Christ on a cracker – this is some alarming stuff, rih ‘cheer.
Tommy
@JustRuss: @Mnemosyne (tablet): Almost like they have not had a “good” job. I worked or many years making $150,000 plus. Then lost my job and I worked where I could get work. Minimum wage. Convenience store. It was hard work. Not something I had done since I was in college. Anybody that says working a lower wage job isn’t work should WTF.
Mike J
@seaboogie:
It’s actually an FEC requirement.
seaboogie
Follow up to my Jeb! post…here is a link to this site, and the picture is so “well, bless your heart, Jeb”: https://jeb2016.com/meet_jeb?lang=en
Pissed off dude in the booth behind is really very lovely. How did anyone miss that? Oh – I don’t know – perhaps clueless on every possible level? OMG! Just realized that the “Jeb!” logo is right above the dude’s head. I SO want a campaign button of this!
Tommy
I want to like the photos. I bet he loves his wife. Don’t doubt that a second. But he is an asshole!
NotMax
Not a fan of Yglesias, generally, but he’s spot on about this. It’s hollow campaigning by way of an underpants gnome plank in the platform.
nfh
@piratedan:
Official numbers on unemployment count only those collecting UI-benefits. Those who, for whatever reason, such as expiration of said benefits, or abandoning the labor-market, are not, are ignored.
seaboogie
@Mike J: Just curious why that is. Since Jeb! is now in the race, our employers need to be known. What about all of the dark money before he declared? No FEC exposure on that, I’m guessing….
BillinGlendaleCA
So JEB! wants American workers to work more and be more productive and increase the labor participation rate. Hey JEB!, did you know that American workers work longer hours that other industrialized country with productivity increasing over the last 30 years with workers getting jack-shit for their extra effort(real wages have been virtually flat for the 30 years). Hey JEB!, ever hear of the BabyBoom generation? You know the older ones are already over 65 and they’re retiring(leaving the work force). Hey JEB!, ever hear of age discrimination? The younger BabyBoomers have trouble getting jobs and are also leaving the workforce.
karen marie
When you were educated in 1868, you were educated. Political maps drawn by a 15-year-old girl.
raven
South Carolina House votes to remove Confederate flag from state house grounds
Columbia, South Carolina (CNN)The Confederate battle flag, a polarizing fixture in South Carolina’s state house grounds for half a century, will flap in the wind no longer.
Early Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 94-20 to remove it, giving final approval to a bill that passed the Senate earlier in the week.
Baud
FTFY
Baud
@raven:
Rachel had some of the floor speeches on last night. It was impressive.
Cckids
@karen marie: Holy cow. It reminds me of the later “Little House on the Prairie ” books, where Laura & class demonstrated their mastery of the subjects they’ve studied. A depth & mastery of knowledge (and memorization) we no longer achieve.
raven
@Baud: Yea ,I saw that.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: The one by the female rep was really emotional.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Yeah. I don’t know if she is a Republican, but if so, she gets a rare ovation from me.
The old dude was impressive also.
BillinGlendaleCA
I do hope when the Pope is here they have him speak at the Best front of the Capitol as opposed to the Worst front.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: That was goofy.
Alex S.
A dumb statement. Yes, an increasing rate of labor participation (and/or of hours worked) will increase growth for a while, but that process comes to an end at some point, i.e. once all people are working and they are working all the time they can do it and not collapse from exhaustion. But it’s not a recipe for endless growth.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Rachel gets goofy sometimes, she went to Stanford. Ever see their band?
BillinGlendaleCA
Hmmm, no Joe today; I might last longer than 15 minutes today. Alex Wagner is on the panel, definitely longer than 15 minutes.
Central Planning
@Baud:
I’m pretty sure I saw that one. Yes, she’s a Republican.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Central Planning: Not just a Republican, a direct descendant of Jeff Davis.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: Jenny Horn.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: They’re showing her remarks on Morning Hoe.
different-church-lady
So, how much longer does Jeb! think these hours should be? 65 minutes? 70 minutes? Dammit, Jeb!, there’s no way in hell I’m going to work an 80 minute hour.
FlipYrWhig
Everyone is missing this. What he means is “too many people are on welfare.” It’s an article of faith among Republicans. It’s kind of what makes Republicans Republicans.
Gindy51
Could be like his daddy’s check out scanner moment if played right.
HeartlandLiberal
Jeb! did not mention the corollary wet dream of the fantasy. Workers work longer hours, but NO OVERTIME.
Also, we could be such a productive country again if we just restored child labor to its rightful place in the corporate oligarchy’s profit plans.
Little Jimmy and Mary working 18 hours a day in a factory. The poor kids at school scrubbing toilets for their lunch. Which was actually proposed, by the way, a few years ago, by Herr Newt Gingrich, I think it was.
Mustang Bobby
@HeartlandLiberal: Newt’s plea for kids working reminded me of a bit of poetry by Sarah N. Cleghorn from the time when child labor laws were being proposed by the Progressives in the 1910’s:
satby
It’s always the regular guy’s fault isn’t it? We’re lazy, we’re moochers, we don’t work enough, we expect too much, we actually nurse hopes of enjoying the leisure of a retirement some day instead of slaving until we drop dead.
They never suggest that possibly the rich could actually pay a fair wage, or share some of the obscene profits with the workers that generate them, or pay a fair share of taxes so that the rest of us would have a bare shred of social security. Wonder why that might be?
Gimlet
Jeb says it was out of context
“If we’re going to grow the economy people need to stop being part-time workers, they need to be having access to greater opportunities to work,” Bush said, according to The Washington Post.
“You can take it out of context all you want, but high-sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours and that by our success, they have money, disposable income for their families to decide how they want to spend it rather than getting in line and being dependent on government.”
PaulW
If the work numbers under Obama were bad, it’s because the Republicans fought every f0cking day of the week in Congress – which was 4 days a week while the remaining 3 were spent goofing off at country clubs – to stop Obama from getting a Jobs bill passed. Even jobs bills for hiring more veterans off the streets. Obama was still able to get the unemployment numbers under 6 percent and keep it there for more than two months, a percentage that Jeb’s older brother Dubya had trouble doing during his 8 years of office.
If Jeb is serious about creating that 4 percent growth, he has to get serious about forcing companies – these so-called job creators – to hire more people to fill work needs rather than get their few employees to double up on overtime at little recompense. And he ought to see about getting our wage increases back on track because they’ve been dead flat the last 20 years.
And if Jeb is serious about getting Americans to work more, what is he going to say about parents finding fewer and fewer hours to be with their kids, and making sure their kids are educated, and making sure their kids are watched over? Of all the items out there that IS a limited commodity, Time is not a luxury but something very limited and very hard to manage if one is working 14-hour work days. Just gonna send all those latchkey pre-teens into after-school programs perhaps? What after-school programs where the Republicans have cut such programs due to “ohh, it’s an expense”?
I’d love to see Jeb’s work history, how many hours he’s put in flipping burgers at McD’s or something. I doubt this lazy golf-happy SOB ever clocked in longer than 4 hours a day.
Baud
Today show is about to do a story about a company that has moved to a 32-hour work week. Great timing, Jeb!
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: Spent all my working life making other people richer. Never minded as long as I got my fair share. But they don’t like sharing.
Botsplainer
@FlipYrWhig:
And don’t forget the “lucky duckies” who don’t have to pay taxes. All we gotta do is enact the fairy tax, and get everybody’s skin in the game on screaming about gummint spending.
MomSense
I was remembering that in 1977 my mom bought a four bedroom home in a nice neighborhood for 42k. She earned about the same amount I do now for a comparable job, She was stressed out and always working but I don’t think she could cope with the stresses now given that the calculations for affording shelter, food, transportation, and health care do not work at all. JEB! Is a moderate Republican and he doesn’t get it. There is zero appetite among the rest of the party to take any steps that would benefit ordinary people by simply raising wages. Our economy is unsustainable for most of us who are already overworked and overstressed.
Princess
@HeartlandLiberal: Yup, you’ve got it. This is all about the push for paid overtime, and about raising the minimum wage.. “You want more money? Fine, work 18 hour shifts and like it.”
Matt McIrvin
@piratedan: Workforce participation is down and still dropping, even though the top-line unemployment rate (people actively seeking work) has dropped. There’s a lot of debate about precisely what that means.
People claim it’s about discouraged workers leaving the workforce, but there are other versions of the unemployment rate that count that, and they’re down too. So it’s not just that.
Part of it is boomers retiring in large numbers, some of them early when they’re still considered to be of working age, but I suspect that’s not the whole story. I think some of it is kids just out of school not being able to get a job in the first place.
One detail is that workforce participation varies a lot by gender. The male workforce participation rate has actually been dropping since the 1950s. The female rate was increasing until, I think, sometime around 2000, and has been dropping since then.
OzarkHillbilly
Josh Marshall:
“As our piece here notes, American workers already log dramatically more hours a week than they did a generation ago. They also work more hours a week than workers in any other industrialized economy. It’s sort of a judgment call whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But unless American workers are part of a different species than people everywhere else in the world there are obviously limits to how many hours people can work every week without severe adverse effects on health, basic perceptions of quality of life and the quality of the work they do. The whole point ‘growth’ in the economic sense is that it is real and something that can be built upon in compounded terms over time, providing ever expanding levels of prosperity without limit. But there are only 16 hours between 8 hours and 24. Eventually you will simply run out. Whatever other countries are doing better than we are can’t be hours worked a week since no one else works as many hours as Americans.”
Botsplainer
@satby:
If a meritorious inheritor doesn’t get to see the digits increase at a geometric rate on his investments while screaming ” suck it, poors” at all the unworthy, then what fun is it to be a meritorious inheritor?
Matt McIrvin
(If you look up information on this online, incidentally, you will pretty soon land on John Williams’ Shadow Stats site. This is a right-wing conspiracy site devoted to claiming, among other things, that the true inflation rate is double-digit and that true unemployment stats show that Obama’s recovery and only Obama’s is a fraud. The Wikipedia article on it seems to have been written by its fans.)
Sherparick
@piratedan: Yes, that statement is “true” https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=CIVPART. However, decline started during his brother’s administration and a major part of it is a structural decline due to all of us Boomers getting old. Even though the participation rate of the over 55 part of the population is rising, there are still so many of us that even if a smaller % of us are retiring, we reduce the participation rate of the population by 2-4%, and a lot of people who lost their good jobs during the recession retire early to start collecting Social Security and other benefits. Demographically, another source of the declining participation rate is the age 14-22 part of the labor force. As older workers take part time jobs (sometimes multiple part-time jobs), the demand for teenagers in the workforce has fallen. Another structural factor that economists are starting to recognize is that another cost of War on (Black and Brown people using) Drugs, a large amount of the labor force, particularly minority males, are far less employable then post felony convictions and they have dropped out of the labor force. I also think that the long term decline in the real medium wage and wages down to the minimum wage since 1999 has reduced the marginal incentives of people, particularly those with young children who would have to pay for day care to enter the work force. If about all you earn goes for day care andr commuting costs, what’s the point. Another structural factor is that what economists call hysteresis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis#In_economics), and this operates with workers, often older workers, who become unemployed during something like the Great Recession. The long term unemployed may lose their job skills or find that their job schools are obsolete in the post-recession economy or that they live in geographic area where closed factories and businesses leave the area in permanent economic decline (see Southeast Kansas or Appalachia) and they can’t find work where they live, but also don’t want to leave the place they call home and the people they call family and friends.
Jeb! and his Austrian and Neo-classical economic gurus see the above and their response is “how to we get all these lazy good for nothing moochers back in the labor force?” Hence raising the age eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare, reducing the the already paltry sums for disability and making eligibility tougher, cutting food stamps and adding a work requirement (I guess those already working will have to do something extra for the food stamps), reducing unemployment benefits and shortening the benefit period, according to the Casey Mulligans of the econ world would get these people back to work from their “voluntary” vacations from the work place and the incentive to work longer hours for less pay. Although the subject bores are VSP political press to tears, we are talking about the implementation of the “Ryan Budget.”
Baud
@Sherparick:
Simpler just to blame Obamacare.
(Good comment BTW)
Baud
Ha. The Today show specifically mentioned Jeb’s comment.
lol
@nfh:
Not sure how misinformation like that gets started.
FlipYrWhig
@Gimlet: His statement is trying to capitalize on the notion, from the anti-Obamacare crowd, that Obama redefined full-time as fewer than 40 hours. Which was to help more people qualify for employer-based health insurance. But among Republicans it means “Obama likes the idea of Those People sitting around doing nothing and being dependent on the government.” For Republicans, the problem with America is lazy, coddled Negroes. And that’s what Bush is artlessly attempting to say.
Randy P
@Gimlet: So, Mr Bush, you’re saying that people who Walmart forces to work a part time schedule would be better off and contribute more to the economy if they were allowed to work a full schedule and get benefits. I’m sure they’d agree but what exactly do you expect them to do about it?
Or can we quote you on directly criticizing this employment policy as bad for the economy?
debbie
What’s everywhere as far as the eye can see are the Crazies. I just listened to an NPR interview with Michelle Flournoy, an “actual” Democrat, arguing that US troops need to more directly combat ISIS by participating in battles.
http://www.npr.org/2015/07/09/421359509/op-ed-co-author-criticizes-u-s-efforts-to-defeat-isis
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: Me too. I was a single mom who had to work every hour of overtime I could get because the ex was a deadbeat dad. That was often 55 or 60 hours a week, since my kids were young. And then when I was 59, and my former company decided to offshore every single job they could, I was discarded. And the Rs made sure not to extend unemployment benefits, so while unemployment was still high, I ran my benefits out at 6 months. I have found other jobs, all paying less than 1/4 what I used to make because they’ve only part time.
I worked hard, cheated my sons of their only parent so I could keep them housed and fed, and now at age 60 I live in poverty even though I work two jobs now; and this SOB is going to tell me I don’t work enough?
FUCK HIM.
MomSense
@OzarkHillbilly:
How about paying people more for their work, paid time off, paid maternity leave, lower college tuition, lower health care costs? Those are just a few things off the top of my head.
Republicans either know what works or could very easily find out what works. Republicans either know or could easily find out that our economic mobility and standard of living are dropping compared with other advanced nations.
They simply do not care about ordinary people at all. What do all the Republican candidates have in common? They all simply do not care at all about the wellbeing of the vast majority of Americans. Some of them try to hide this with Luntz focus group tested words but most of them do not care how they sound because they are counting on their base to assume the targets of their ire and class warfare are blahs and browns and rapey immigrants. I hope Trump keeps being Trump because the only good thing that may come of this embarrassment is if more people figure out that Republicans don’t give a crap about them.
Baud
@satby:
Didn’t you read AL’s title to this post? With the GOP, they are always talking about other people. Of course they don’t mean you.
(And a lot of people will fall for that.)
JPL
@Baud: Of course, they did.
@Sherparick: In other words, income inequality is a good thing.
MomSense
@satby:
Sing it, Satby! Fuck JEB!
Kay
This is great, on Cuomo:
debbie
@Kay:
He’s definitely not the man his father was.
trnc
does not square with this.
Also,
Full time jobs were redefined in order to give part time workers benefits because so many large employers cut hours to try to avoid benefits. Does Jeb have anything to say to the most profitable retailer in the world about making more of it’s positions full time again?
Gin & Tonic
@debbie: You mean Mario “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo”? That paragon of virtue?
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
I stand corrected. I didn’t move there until 1978, and I never heard about those posters. I’m not surprised to learn that they appeared in Queens (also the home of Howard Beach).
satby
@Baud: Yeah, well that may not work this time (I hope) because my FB is blowing up with former Reagan Dems and former Rs going nuts over this statement, and not in a good way. 75-80% of people hate their jobs, that statistic has been well known in HR circles for years. When you want to divide and conquer, you have yo aim for more than 25% to have a winning coalition.
rikyrah
Scott Walker Tries To Use A Back Door To Get Rid Of Wisconsin’s Living Wage Law
by Alice Ollstein Posted on July 6, 2015 at 1:05 pm
Only one hurdle stands between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his upcoming bid for the White House: passing a budget to keep his state chugging for the next two years.
After months of uproar over provisions to slash hundreds of millions of dollars from state universities and strip the values of “truth” and “service” from their mission, lawmakers in Madison missed their July 1 deadline to pass the budget.
In the ensuing scramble, Governor Walker and his allies in the statehouse used the 4th of July holiday weekend to insert several more controversial provisions into the massive document, which local press called “a grab bag of pet projects.” Walker and Republican lawmakers have already been forced to retreat on one of them: a gutting of the state’s open records law that would have barred reporters and the public from accessing the documents that reveal how laws are written, including drafts and e-mails between state lawmakers.
But the other additions remain, including provisions that censor information about police shootings, scrap factory workers’ right to one day off per week, and completely eliminate the state’s 100-year-old definition of a “living wage,” which now says workers deserve pay that provides “minimum comfort, decency, physical and moral well-being.” This major change, which has received far less attention than the open records law rewrite, would strip the state’s Department of Workforce Development of the power to to investigate complaints that an employee is not being paid a living wage, and would replace “living wage” with “minimum wage” throughout Wisconsin’s laws.
The change to the wage law comes just as low-income workers in the state are suing Governor Walker for refusing to consider their complaint that the current state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is not a living wage.
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/07/06/3677107/scott-walker-uses-holiday-weekend-sneak-controversial-provisions-state-budget/
rikyrah
can’t stand Milbank, but a broke clock is right twice a day.
………………………………
Donald Trump is the monster the GOP created
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer July 8 at 4:52 PM
It has been amusing to watch the brands — the PGA, NBC, Macy’s, NASCAR, Univision, Serta — flee Donald Trump after his xenophobic remarks. Who even knew The Donald had a line of mattresses featuring Cool Action Dual Effects Gel Memory Foam?
But there is one entity that can’t dump Trump, no matter how hard it tries: the GOP. The Republican Party can’t dump Trump because Trump is the Republican Party.
One big Republican donor this week floated to the Associated Press the idea of having candidates boycott debates if the tycoon is onstage. Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and other candidates have lined up to say, as Rick Perry put it, that “Donald Trump does not represent the Republican Party.”
But Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about — or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate.
Anti-immigrant? Against Common Core education standards? For repealing Obamacare? Against same-sex marriage? Antiabortion? Anti-tax? Anti-China? Virulent in questioning President Obama’s legitimacy? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check and check.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-the-monster-the-gop-created/2015/07/08/5b0bb834-259b-11e5-aae2-6c4f59b050aa_story.html?hpid=z2
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: I’ve got Scott Walker’s # and it’s 666.
debbie
@rikyrah:
And yet monsters beget other monsters. Glenn Beck considers Trump to be too Progressive.
Paul in KY
@Major Major Major Major: If you don’t break somebody’s arm, you’re not trying…
a non mouse
Grrrr…….
I work part-time. Deliberately. My boss is begging me to reconsider. I don’t want to – I did the full-time crap when my kids were little. Maybe after they fly the coop, I’ll consider going back to full-time doctoring.
PT hours allow me to care for my family (teens need more loving than little ones and they specifically need Mom/Dad, IMHO). It allowed me to care for my mother in her final year. It allows me to volunteer.
Screw him. I work hard enough – in non-paying areas.
Paul in KY
@piratedan: What the Hell do you think?! Of course it’s not true. Certainly not the way he implied.
Cervantes
@trnc:
Exactly. If he wants to clarify his remarks he should actually do so.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: You could also go with ‘Southern Men’.
Cervantes
@EconWatcher:
Outside the family.
Kay
@debbie:
Chris Christie looked strong and unbeatable until he didn’t. His work caught up with him. It becomes impossible to ignore.
Rugosa
@piratedan:
With early-wave Baby Boomers retiring, labor force participation is going to keep dropping for a while. Rest assured Republicans will spin this just as W. Jr. did. Of course, mid- and late-wave Boomers will be less able to retire, so this will level out at some point. Then 20-somethings and 60-somethings will be competing for the same crappy minimum wage jobs. Or as Republicans would describe it, the new economic paradise.
Kay
Gross:
It’s a reduction from his normal speaking fee of 250k, but isn’t there something wrong with the President who put them there taking what amounts to the cost of a house (in many areas!) out of funds raised for homeless vets?
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/247287-george-w-bush-charged-100k-for-speech-at-wounded-veterans-event
weaselone
Jeb hits the trifecta. Demonstrates tone deafness, economic ignorance and bass ackwardness in one concise statement.
chopper
@weaselone:
he’s definitely a Bush.
Cervantes
@Kay:
If you can think of one Presidential or ex-Presidential act of his that was not wrong …
bemused
Ugh. From Jeb! site:
“If you really want to solve a problem, take the time to understand it first and get ready to roll up your sleeves”.
I wanted to break something but I think I get what he is saying. The only problems he is interested in understanding and “fixing” are those that don’t line up with GOP ideology and goals.
debbie
@Kay:
Last night, Sean Hannity was ranting about the speaking fees Clinton had received; but not a peep about Bush or (of course) Reagan. Gotta love the consistency!
Gindy51
@satby: Someone needs to make a political ad with a ton of stories like this and hammer this asshole into the fucking ground.
Redshift
@bemused: Doesn’t exactly track with the economic ignorance on display in this statement, though. Maybe a more appropriate translation is “take the time to figure out how to redefine the problem so the solution is something you wanted to do anyway, regardless of whether it actually addresses the problem.”
Cervantes
@satby:
Don’t do that to yourself.
Not easy, I know, but give yourself at least that one break.
I’m pretty sure your kids do, or will.
shell
Forget Anger Translator. Jeb needs a Explain How Im Not Really Saying !Screw You! translator
Gene108
@trnc:
Insurance companies, as far back as I can remember (I have handled benefits for my employer for 17 years now) have defined full time eligibility for benefits to be 30 hours per week.
This a private sector definition of full time, not the governments.
Ruckus
I’ve worked all of my life to have that American dream, but all I got is this nightmare of a worn out body and not enough money to retire. I’ve been told by a relative that I have to work till I drop. This relative works in banking and had the east coast private school upbringing. My last words to him were “Go Fuck Yourself.” I will now include in that statement all the financial wizards that blew up the economy, every republican in the land, and especially the bush family. Don’t know if they are the most despicable family group on the planet but they sure fall in the top 10.
bemused
@Redshift:
Yes. You can’t ever forget who Republicans are really talking to. Their policies are what is good for them. Period. Actually believing or pretending to believe that those policies would be terrific for most Americans is the snake oil sales pitch and far too many base Republican voters are still buying it.
Botsplainer
Feel the asshurt. The critique appeared on Clownhall and was the topic of a new thread on Free Republic.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3309657/posts
bemused
@Ruckus:
Nice relative. I can fully understand why to told him to GFY.
Cervantes
@Gene108:
But re health insurance benefits specifically, the ACA altered the IRS’s Internal Revenue Code at §4980H such that a “full-time employee” is now officially defined as one who works at least 30 hours per week on average.
raven
She’s got backbones and turnip greens
Ham hocks and butter beans
You, me and New Orleans
An’ that’s what I like about the South
gorram
This is particularly funny to me because I’m leaving my current job (where I easily work 40 hours a week and regularly get within range of 50) for a part-time one capped at 30 hours. Part of the issue is that the 40-50 hours a week is basically shuffling paper around, making sure the right people know the right thing, and is otherwise really unproductive. I work for a towing / locksmith service company, and a good chunk of my time is spent arguing with people over prices. Where I’m headed to is actually going to be productive. It’s basic as hell (cleaning up in a restaurant), but it seems like productive work in a meaningful way that my current job really isn’t.
The other weird thing about this is that I’ve had to explain to people why this 30-hour job is actually going to be better for me. It’s a cut of roughly ten hours a week, not the hugest loss, and I was quite easily making ends meet and then some at my current job, so it’s not that big of a loss. I can tell my current job is in a uncertain place because we’re in constant competition with the bigger companies (cough, AAA) and every mom-and-pop mechanic shop (which can offer most of our services in a package with other services people often need at the same time). My new job won’t be the most stable, but it’s certainly better than that. It’ll also get my foot in the door for food service work, which as a field tends to be a bit more insistent on experience. And I don’t want to be either answering the phones at a tow yard or washing dishes with a BA for all that long in any case, but which job is going to give me the time to volunteer, intern, and otherwise build my resume? Not the one with 40-50 weeks, no matter how much more I might make with those extra hours.
I’m sorry for the lengthy rant here, but it just seems like the entire GOP consensus on growth is detached from reality. They aren’t invested in productive industries, in encouraging productive skills, or otherwise building an economy. They’re interested in “growing” it – cheap parlor tricks like Reagan’s fire-then-rehire which boost numbers and fix their spreadsheets. Actual economic productivity and growth is so far removed from what they want, they actually would devalue it, because it’s getting in the way of their end goals.
MaxUtil
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Or that he thinks that anyone working more hours increases “productivity” which is a measure of the amount of economic activity achieved per hour worked. The only way working more hours increases productivity is if salaried employees work more hours for the same salary. So basically he is saying that effective wage cuts for mid-level managers and up will spur massive economic growth. Good plan!
Cervantes
@gorram:
Thank you for that comment.
cmorenc
@HeartlandLiberal:
Actually, the modern business analogues to the labor niches that used to be filled by child labor is undocumented immigrant labor – the dirty secret the chamber-of-commerce wing of the GOP has been struggling to keep from their fiercely anti-immigrant wing is that the real reason no serious attempt was made when the GOP had the Presidency and both houses of Congress to undertake the sorts of draconian measures the hard-core wingnuts want to take is because use of undocumented immigrant labor has become such a convenient, sometimes essential part of the business plan of many businesses. And many of the wingnuts doubtless hire landscaping maintenance companies who use a platoon of undocumented workers to mow wingnuts’ lawns and trim their shrubs.
boatboy_srq
@piratedan: “Workforce participation” refers to the number of adults employed or seeking employment. It’s a measure of how many people are working or looking for work, and it includes the entire adult population, including retirees and disabled. It is NOT a meaningful measure of unemployment (or underemployment), and it’s skewed badly by the increasing retired population as workers leave the workforce and retirees live longer.
ACA has skewed the workforce participation rate somewhat, by allowing people who kept jobs just for the healthcare to afford health insurance on their own and leave onerous employment they otherwise wouldn’t have held. THIS is part of why JEB’s statement is so offensive: he’s hinting broadly that those people should return to the workforce (along with suggesting that retirement is a luxury the US can no longer afford, and that workers are just being lazy and not doing their jobs). He’s doing an excellent job playing the clueless 1%er, the amoral slavedriving corporatist, or both.
gene108
@Cervantes:
Was not aware of the IRS rules, but this just codifies an insurance company practice. The government did not make up the 30 hour rule out of whole cloth. It had been an industry standard for a long time.
Cervantes
@gene108:
Yes, but not quite a standard. The threshold ranged from 30-40 hours, some numbers enforced by insurers and other enforced directly by employers.
Now with the ACA, for health insurance benefits, there is a standard.
Cervantes
@cmorenc:
I agree except I don’t think it’s really a secret to anyone above the age of eight or so.
Archon
People keep on telling me that the Republican party isn’t basically a fascist organization. The problem is people in their party keep saying “fascist” things.
I guess I should just keep my mouth shut and pretend this is all normal like the press does, pretend that the only problem is Republicans are just “gaffe-prone”, and don’t really mean what they say or are misunderstood.
Another Holocene Human
@ruemara: Hope you have an awesome time! Don’t get too much SD sun, it’s deadly … but what am I saying? You’ll be inside the convention center getting your con on!
Another Holocene Human
@Kay: Why did this fucking “charity” bill him to speak? A normal motivational speaker would be like $10,000.
Couldn’t raise money any other way?
Charity or grift?
brantl
Does this dick look as though he’s even, ever, thought about working hard? That big jowly face and bid fat ass convince me otherwise. And he’s with the Libertarian dick golfer, who bitched about having to pay at all to play a park golf course, though he’s rich.
gian
I recall his brother W at a campaign event having a woman ask for help as she was working more than 1 job and falling behind.
He told her she was living the dream.
brantl
@Another Holocene Human: You’re kidding, right? The charity paid him!
J R in WV
@Tommy:
I think the relatives of that woman who died of measles the other day should sue this Kennedy bastard! And Jenny whatsername too! What monsters, killing people with lying propaganda!
The ratio between lives saved with vaccines and bad outcomes from vaccine is probably a hundred thousand to one, if not more. Untold millions of people have been saved by the use of vaccines, probably including most of us whose ancestors would have died without it.
Matt McIrvin
About the labor force participation rate, here’s a breakdown by age, sex and race:
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_303.htm
The recent drop in labor force participation (up to 2012, at least) isn’t actually from retirees at all: people are delaying retirement, in fact, and the labor force participation rate for retirement-age people is up, not down.
The drop is all young people, the younger the worse. It looks to me as if young people who have never had a steady job yet are delaying entry into the workforce, probably because they figure the situation is hopeless.
Matt McIrvin
…Though I notice the biggest drops in labor-force participation are actually among high-school-age teenagers, which may not be the most tragic situation.
Kyle
@gian:
“You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn’t it?” — George W. Bush, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005.
“I took a year and a half off (533 days) in eight years of Presidentin’, not counting reading children’s books during national emergencies or going out mountain biking during security threats,” he should have added.
These fucking people.
J R in WV
@Kay:
Talk about morality and ethics!! The whole Bush family is an ethics-free immorality zone!
Most people would donate their speaker’s fee back to their hosts for such a group. Evidently since he doesn’t ever plan to run for elective office again, Mr. Bush feels no moral or ethical pressure to not take money from wounded veterans.
What a low class person. But we knew that from his low life administration, more lies per sentence than ever before in the history of America. And that’s saying something, we’ve had crooked politicians before, but they don’t compare to W. Bush.
Cervantes
@J R in WV:
Kevin Phillips — yes, that one — wrote a book about it: American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush.