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Jobs 
Fri Jan 13, 2012 at 22:30:16 PM MST
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( - promoted by KathrynCWallace)
As a small business owner (or "job creator" if you're running in a primary right now), I've always had mixed emotions about regulation. On the one hand I recognize that there are huge transaction costs to everything in life being caveat emptor. I don't want to have to analyze the balance sheet of my bank every month to make sure I can safely leave my money there. On the flip side my life is routinely made harder by regulation that doesn't seem sane, or designed to help anyone. It seems very difficult to identify where the appropriate line is for regulatory bodies.
Even more troubling are cases like this closed silver mine in Idaho. Obviously things were not going smoothly in the mine, given that two people have died. Shutting the mine down is not necessarily an inappropriate response to that kind of tragedy, but I'm not sure that the 185 laid off employees are going to see it that way. I've had plenty of experience with company towns, and I rarely see much of the hostility leveled at the companies. Very likely they feel like they've had two tragedies now instead of one.
Much like in my last post when I was discussing environmental issues, regulation seems like a landmine of an issue right now. In an environment where jobs are the #1 issue, anything that leads to layoffs is going to be viewed askance. Even worse, stories like the Idaho mine are going to reinforce the idea that Democrats are out to ruin your employment. I doubt any of those 185 laid of miners are going to feel a debt of gratitude to the Democratic party.
At the same time people are crying out at the excesses of banks and "Fat cats." It's not clear however that they see more regulation as the solution. No one seems to like bankers, but no one really seems to like regulators either. In many ways this mimics my own life. You don't see the cases where regulators make your life easier, but the ones where they make your life harder are pretty obvious.
Is trying to help people who don't want help a losing proposition in the current political landscape?
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Mon Aug 15, 2011 at 18:53:41 PM MST
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We gotta grow some jobs, and that's a fact, and we probably aren't going to be able to do it with big ol' jobs programs funded by the Federal Government, what with today's politics and all, and that means if this Administration wants to stay in the jobs game they're going to have to find some smaller and more creative ways to do it.
They are also going to have to come up with ideas that are pretty much "bulletproof", meaning that they are so hard to object to that even Allen West and Louie Gohmert will not want to be on record saying "no no no!"; alternatively, solutions that work around the legislative process entirely could represent the other form of "bulletproof-ery".
Well, I have one of those "maybe bulletproof" ideas for you today, and it has to do with how "Made in USA" the things are that our Government buys.
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Mon Aug 15, 2011 at 15:09:40 PM MST
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( - promoted by Fong)
As many of us know, Colorado House Democrats lost their majority after the 2010 election by one member. Among other goals for 2012, regaining the majority in the House is a priority. I want to do my part in helping Democrats regain the majority and one way to do that is to work with my House District to elect a Democrat. House District 29 has a Democratic challenger to a Republican incumbent: Tracy Kraft-Tharp. My intention in this post is to introduce the Democratic activist community to Tracy - an introduction that is real, not rumor. I will do so by writing about topics I discussed with Tracy earlier this week.
Tracy's message is simple: she is running so that HD29 has someone representing everybody. Her focus will be on supporting the community. She has experience crafting solutions with multiple stakeholders in a number of jobs and endeavors. She is familiar with the legislative process. Tracy is well situated to start making a positive impact early in her role as a Representative.
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Thu Mar 24, 2011 at 06:25:42 AM MST
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From launching a satellite to getting pregnant there are windows of time in every aspect of life that once missed must either be waited for again, or achieved with much more difficulty and expense. Not least among these are the economic windows. Attention to the problems of the nation's unregulated derivatives and the nature of the bond insurance markets might have prevented the kind of near economic cataclysm that we are still suffering the after affects of.
Just because we have managed to stabilize our financial markets and get our mega-companies making a big wad of cash again does not mean that the economy is stable or can't be damaged by a failure to act when needed.
One of the leading economic indicators over the last few decades has been the sale of new homes. This is a good gage of not only how people feel about the economy (you don't get involved in a 30 year mortgage if you think you are going to lose your job) and it also says a lot about the demand for all kinds of products that go with home ownership.
In February of this year, it fell to it lowest level since the statistic started being measured in 1963. The total was 19,000, for the entire nation. That would annualize out at about a quarter million new homes sold for all of 2011 if the trend continues.
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Wed Feb 09, 2011 at 07:35:45 AM MST
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It has been a fun thing to shout "Speaker Boehner where are the jobs?" on the blogs and in real life, but the question is starting to become more than rhetorical. The Republicans spent most of 2010 talking smack and outright lies about jobs. You all know the story, they claimed, loudly and constantly, that the stimulus program did not create a single job (a flat lie) while at the same time going to ribbon cutting ceremonies for projects that were going to be built with stimulus money.
They've called everything "Job Killing" from the ACA to the trying to assure the safety of deep water drilling rigs before we had even started to clean up the Gulf of Mexico. It was all about how regulation of any kind was killing jobs. It was all about how if we did not make sure that millionaires and billionaires keep their undeserved Bush era tax cuts that there could not be "certainty" in the market and jobs could not be created.
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Wed Nov 10, 2010 at 10:28:37 AM MST
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(a way to kick start his administration's job creation program - promoted by wade norris)
An interesting thing is going on in the states where Republican Governors are being sworn in to replace their Democratic predecessors.
From Meteor Blades on DKos
Governor-elect Scott Walker of Wisconsin doesn't want to build the high-speed rail line from Madison to Milwaukee that the federal government has granted his state $810 million for. Governor-elect John Kasich of Ohio doesn't want to spend the $400 million in federal grants his state is slated for a high-speed line connecting Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland. Governor-elect Rick Scott of Florida doesn't want to spend the $2.05 billion the feds have granted his state for high-speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. Add in the $3 billion in federal dollars for the Hudson River Tunnel that Gov. Chris Christie rejected and you've got a substantial pile of dough.
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Wed Oct 06, 2010 at 11:18:05 AM MST
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( - promoted by Fong)
From national perspective, the Midterm elections of 2010 are far more complex than the pundits may understand themselves. However, after looking at the polling numbers from the PEW Research Center for September 30th to October 3rd, victory may not be as easy as the Republicans think. For instance, in the category of less likely to vote for category, a survey of 1002 adults, 46 percent stated that they would not vote for a candidate that supported the bank bailouts.
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Wed Aug 25, 2010 at 06:02:34 AM MST
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Those who read my posts (and there are a lot more of you than I ever thought there would be) know that I am not really a fan of divisive politics. This comes from the teachings of my Mom, who spent her political career reaching out to Republicans to get things done in Washtenaw County. Her argument was always that while you might hammer your opponents in today's fight, you're probably going to need them to get tomorrows work done. It is generally good advice, but it is predicated on the premise that your opponents want to get things done and really are working for the best solution for everyone.
Sadly Mom's good advice can not be used right now. There has been too big a shift in power in the nation for us to look at the Republicans as any kind of honest partner in anything. The efforts of the folks like the ultra-wealthy Koch brothers have shifted our discourse so far to the right that things which would have had politicians thinking about spending more time with their families in the past can be said with a straight face and taken as serious.
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Mon Aug 09, 2010 at 23:53:46 PM MST
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As I pick up the pace of work again, coming into the midterms, I have to get some stories cleared off the desk in order to make room for some others, and that's what we're about today.
We'll be talking about saving more than 300,000 of this country's most important jobs, and paying for it in a way that is not only good policy, but is a real problem for Republicans who are yelling "no new taxes!" once again while pretending they care about actually paying for actual spending and actually want to cut actual unemployment.
We have a bit of work to do today, but we want to keep it somewhat short...so let's get going.
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Sat Jul 03, 2010 at 14:18:00 PM MST
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( - promoted by Fong)
Intel's co-founder, Andy Grove has written an opinion piece in Bloomberg pointing out the failure of technology firms to continue producing jobs.
He points out that Tom Freidman's A Gift for Grads: Start-Ups
The underlying problem isn't simply lower Asian costs. It's our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts." His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.
Mythical Moment
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
What Grove means here is that the major portion of the wealth created by new businesses, especially technology businesses, including machinery, aircraft, other precision devices, as well as semiconductors, photonics, medical devices, advanced materials and some kinds of software, will not grow American jobs without their production remaining in the United States.
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Mon Jun 07, 2010 at 21:48:26 PM MST
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(I don't find it hard to believe Republicans don't understand basic economics. Do you? - promoted by Fong)
Crooks and Liars says it all:
"The Democrats will try to act like Republicans by cutting the deficit, and it won't win them any additional votes. It never does. The kind of people who like Republican policies vote for Republicans."
http://crooksandliars.com/susi...
What is so hard to adhere to what FDR had to battle? The fight to restart a collapsing economy and a horrendous unemployment number?
Small businesses (and large businesses) cannot just hire more people if there is not demand for their products. Right?
It is up to government to create a 21st century Works Projects Administration that will jump start a collapsed private sector. The private sector cannot do it. Wall Street cannot do it.
Contrary to what Republicans have to say about their scary boogie man of the "deficit", most people don't give a rat's *ss about the deficit. If the choice is having a job or mythical "red ink" the job will always win.
If the economic is jump started then the tax revenues will grow too.
Hard to believe that Republicans cannot understand simple economics.
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Fri Jun 04, 2010 at 06:31:29 AM MST
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There is a meme that I am starting to hear from the Republicans and the Democrats that have become wholly owned subsidiaries of the oil industry. It is the idea that there will be massive job losses from the suspension of deep water drilling in the Gulf and elsewhere. Rule one in any Republicans play book; keep the issue isolated so you never see the big picture. This is because any time you look at Republican policies in the larger context they fall completely apart.
There are about 1.3 million jobs in oil production in the United States. Roughly 25% of them are in Louisiana. This is due in large part to the very friendly environment to oil development that exists in the state. Depending on what study you look at the Bayou State is either the 3rd or 1st most corrupt state in the nation. Its corruption is not a partisan thing; it is an equal opportunity corrupt state with the likes "Dollar" Bill Jefferson and Sen. David Vitter. Can there be any doubt that large amounts of oil industry money have been part of this corruption.
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Tue Jun 01, 2010 at 15:07:21 PM MST
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( - promoted by Fong)
Speaker Pelosi pulled a brilliant move at the end of the last weeks legislative session.
House Democrats are home for a long Memorial Day break with a gift-wrapped wedge issue delivered just in time for district campaigning. One of their final actions before adjourning late Friday was passing a measure that would strip tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas by a 215-204 vote.
talkingpointsmemo.com
The Grand Outsourcing Party. Expect Dems to run on this come election time.
More brilliance below the fold.
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Thu May 06, 2010 at 17:20:47 PM MST
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Think about this, what if this Oil spill, as tragic as it is, provides us with the wake up call about how we power our world?
My first thought when the spill happened was, what if we had not gotten rid of the electric car of the 1990's (from the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?)
and electric cars had grown in usage for the past decade? Would the drilling platform catastrophe still have happened?
No one can be sure, but what we can be sure of, is that it will keep happening until we change our cars from gas/oil powered to electric powered.
That's why this petition is so important - the Gulf Oil Spill Electric Car Credit.
This petition asks for legislation to give a substantial credit for purchasing an electric car, and it has key provisions to put a lot of people to work, immediately - in a midterm election year.
But we need to get support for this idea in the US House and Senate.
That's where you can help...
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