April 7, 2013



April 7, 2013

Jennifer Rubin gets to have the first reaction to the most recent rotten jobs report of this presidency.

The consensus prediction for job growth in March was 200,000. In fact it was 88,000. Even more troubling, about a half-million people left the job market, driving the country’s job-participation rate to the lowest point since 1979.

On CNBC this morning, former Obama administration officials Jared Bernstein and Austan Goolsbee were glum, struggling to find a rationale. The sequester! Well, no. Public-sector jobs were down only 7,000. The payroll tax hike? Could be. While the president was haggling over the top marginal rate, no one in the administration seemed to care about the significant dip in take-home pay that would hit low- and middle-income consumers and, in turn, deal a blow to retail, restaurant and other consumer-based industries. Could it be that tax hikes are bad for the economy?

The president, rightfully so, will take another pummeling for failing to focus on jobs. And the push by the president and Senate Democrats for tax hikes will appear even more ludicrous (as liberal economic gurus bemoan the impact of the payroll tax hike).

There is no substitute for a strong private sector. Right now, employers aren’t hiring. You can attribute that to nervousness over Obamacare or to the payroll tax or to the aggregate burden of taxes and regulations, but the economy remains hobbled. And worst of all, we are approaching the point, as during the Great Depression, when sustained high unemployment will have ripples for years and years to come.

Reaction to the jobs numbers has been swift and brutal. Douglas Holtz-Eakin from the American Action Forum writes, “The March jobs report was awful: jobs weak, labor force down, hours flat, and earnings flat. The jobs report is important not because of any single month, but because it is the leading indicator of a break away from the new normal: bad growth and weak opportunity.  No break to be found today. The Administration has slavishly adhered to the economic doctrines of Jimmy Carter.  They should not be surprised they are getting his results.”

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) put out a statement, which read in part: “The president’s policies continue to make it harder for Americans to find work. Hundreds of thousands fled the workforce last month and unemployment remains far above what the Obama administration promised when it enacted its ‘stimulus’ spending plan.” He urged the president to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, tax reform and a replacement bill for the sequester. Republicans plainly intend to put the spotlight back on the president who spent his time this week hawking gun control and attending a lavish fundraiser.

 

 

John Steele Gordon is next.

... What is causing this stagnant job market after so deep a recession? The answer is that the amount of uncertainty in the marketplace is not declining, indeed it is growing, and there is nothing markets hate more than uncertainty. Europe’s deteriorating financial and economic situation is surely not helping, nor is the forthcoming implementation of Obamacare, with a legion of unanswered questions about how it will affect businesses from the Fortune 500 on down. When even two-thirds of Democrats think that Obamacare will either adversely impact them personally or have no effect, there is going to be a strong tendency to wait and see what happens.

If a Republican were in the White House, the mainstream media would be howling in outrage about this continuing terrible job market and demanding action. But since it’s Obama in the White House the MSM will undoubtedly be doing its usual oh-look!-a-squirrel! routine.

 

 

Allister Heath in Telegraph, UK on the disaster created by the UK's push to send millions more to college.

Tragically, as yet more data reveal, the decision to massively increase the number of school-leavers going to university, wrongly assuming that this would transform opportunity in an era of technological revolution, ranks as one of the greatest social and industrial policy blunders of recent decades.

Britain is facing a jobs crisis made in Downing Street and signed off by the leaders of all political parties, starting with Sir John Major, during the past quarter century. The problem is not the number of new jobs – there are lots of those, confounding the sceptics, and could be even more if the labour market doesn’t become over-regulated. The issue is that an obscenely large number of young people with a university education will not be able to find a job that matches their expectations.

Research from the US government, which without doubt applies equally to Britain, suggests that just one out of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade requires a university degree.

The picture is truly dire for the army of university graduates: only five of the top 30 fastest-growing occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require an undergraduate degree (or an additional post-graduate qualification) – nursing, teachers in higher education, primary school teachers, accountants and medical doctors – and 10 of the top 30 don’t require any kind of qualification at all. ...

... Many jobs will genuinely require university degrees, especially those with quantitative and mathematical skills, and of course it is essential that children of all backgrounds who have the interest and ability to study for a degree be given the opportunity to do so. But if we really care about social mobility, and ensuring that people are able to live their dreams, we need an urgent shift in policy.

Britain needs more, better, skilled jobs – and that means making the UK more welcoming as a base for firms in areas such as technology, science, finance and high value added business services.

The onslaught against the City, which is crippling it rather than seeking to make it more resilient, will merely reduce the availability of good jobs.

The answer is not more top-down planning of the sort that gave us our higher education crisis, with politicians choosing sectors they guess will create the “right” sort of jobs, but a broad policy to encourage global firms to base their best-paid positions in the UK, and to trade and export from our shores.

That means low tax rates and living costs, a better business climate and enhanced infrastructure and airport links; sadly, we are faring miserably in all areas. ...

 

... Apprenticeships and vocational qualifications are essential: had politicians focused on these in recent decades, rather than on boosting university admissions at any cost, the prospects for Britain’s young would be very different today.

Most important of all, however, the political establishment needs to start telling our young people the truth: it doesn’t make sense for everybody to go to university.

 

 

This was all explained in 2010 by a post from the blog The View from Alexandria. The post was titled Reynolds's Law.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

"The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them."

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental. ...

 

 

More on misplaced education priorities from FrontPage Mag. (Sarcasm alert)

We need to invest more in college education so that college graduates can get jobs that don’t require college degrees while paying off piles of student debt for an unnecessary college degree.

And that will help our colleges pay off their massive burden of debt. Welcome to the Obama Economy. (via Instapundit)

The recession left millions of college-educated Americans working in coffee shops and retail stores. Now, new research suggests their job prospects may not improve much when the economy rebounds.

Underemployment—skilled workers doing jobs that don’t require their level of education—has been one of the hallmarks of the slow recovery. By some measures, nearly half of employed college graduates are in jobs that don’t traditionally require a college degree.

Economists have generally assumed the problem was temporary: As the economy improved, companies would need more highly educated employees. But in a paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of Canadian economists argues that the U.S. faces a longer-term problem.

They found that unlike the 1990s, when companies needed hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to develop, build and install high-tech systems—everything from corporate intranets to manufacturing robots—demand for such skills has fallen in recent years, even as young people continued to flock to programs that taught them.

 

Richard Cohen was not impressed with the salary stunt.

... This president is independently rich. He is rich by dint of his own talent and industry, but rich is rich –- and you probably ain’t. Obama has made a small fortune in book royalties, and last year the president and Michelle Obama reported an adjusted gross income of $789,674. Without having to Google it, I can say that the Obamas made more than your average federal employee –- even including overtime.

So the $20,000 Obama is kicking back to the Treasury is a pittance that will not be missed. (What’s the difference between $789,674 and $769,674? Will the kids not go to camp? Is Hawaii out of the question for next summer? ) But 5 percent for someone making $100,000 is a different story. That’s five grand, and it well could be camp or a vacation. It is not chump change.

Obama was once poor –- although young and poor is not the same as old and poor –-  so I know he can appreciate what that 5 percent can mean. The president was apparently responding to the symbolism of him living like a pasha while asking others to sacrifice. I understand. But his taking a wee haircut on his salary is just a PR stunt from the White House that’s more insulting than it is empathetic.

 

 

Theodore Dalrymple on a little disability scam in England.

Earlier this month, British newspapers reported the story of Paul Marshallsea, a Welshman who, while on a two-month Australian holiday with his wife, wrestled a six-foot shark to prevent it from attacking children in the water. Marshallsea happened to be filmed while doing so, and the pictures went around the world. He was proclaimed a hero.

Unfortunately for him, the pictures also reached Wales. He and his wife were supposed to be on sick leave at the time with “work-related stress,” and his heroics didn’t impress his employers: they sacked him, on the not-unreasonable grounds that if he could travel to Australia and wrestle with a shark, he could probably have made it into work. Moreover, photographs of the couple suggested that they were having the holiday of a lifetime, rather than merely recuperating from serious illness. ...

... The story illustrates a fundamental truth about contemporary Britain: it is now a sink of corruption, moral, intellectual, and financial, all of it perfectly legal.

 

 

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: President Obama says his NCAA bracket is busted, worst picks he ever made. Then he looked at his economic advisers and said, “Ehh, maybe not.”

Leno: President Obama did not take VP Joe Biden to Israel with him. He figured the Jews had suffered enough.

Leno: The U.S. Senate is fighting to keep open its own Senate Barber Shop. It losses $350,000 a year. You know what that makes it? The most successful government program ever! It only loses $350,000 a year.

Leno: The island nation of Cyprus has this new 10% tax on individual savings accounts there. They will take 10% of your money right out of the bank. To which President Obama said, "You can do that?"

 

[pic]

[pic]

[pic]

 

 

 

Right Turn

The administration’s jobs debacle

by Jennifer Rubin

The consensus prediction for job growth in March was 200,000. In fact it was 88,000. Even more troubling, about a half-million people left the job market, driving the country’s job-participation rate to the lowest point since 1979.

On CNBC this morning, former Obama administration officials Jared Bernstein and Austan Goolsbee were glum, struggling to find a rationale. The sequester! Well, no. Public-sector jobs were down only 7,000. The payroll tax hike? Could be. While the president was haggling over the top marginal rate, no one in the administration seemed to care about the significant dip in take-home pay that would hit low- and middle-income consumers and, in turn, deal a blow to retail, restaurant and other consumer-based industries. Could it be that tax hikes are bad for the economy?

The president, rightfully so, will take another pummeling for failing to focus on jobs. And the push by the president and Senate Democrats for tax hikes will appear even more ludicrous (as liberal economic gurus bemoan the impact of the payroll tax hike).

There is no substitute for a strong private sector. Right now, employers aren’t hiring. You can attribute that to nervousness over Obamacare or to the payroll tax or to the aggregate burden of taxes and regulations, but the economy remains hobbled. And worst of all, we are approaching the point, as during the Great Depression, when sustained high unemployment will have ripples for years and years to come.

Reaction to the jobs numbers has been swift and brutal. Douglas Holtz-Eakin from the American Action Forum writes, “The March jobs report was awful: jobs weak, labor force down, hours flat, and earnings flat. The jobs report is important not because of any single month, but because it is the leading indicator of a break away from the new normal: bad growth and weak opportunity.  No break to be found today. The Administration has slavishly adhered to the economic doctrines of Jimmy Carter.  They should not be surprised they are getting his results.”

Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) put out a statement, which read in part: “The president’s policies continue to make it harder for Americans to find work. Hundreds of thousands fled the workforce last month and unemployment remains far above what the Obama administration promised when it enacted its ‘stimulus’ spending plan.” He urged the president to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, tax reform and a replacement bill for the sequester. Republicans plainly intend to put the spotlight back on the president who spent his time this week hawking gun control and attending a lavish fundraiser.

 

 

Contentions

The Jobs Report

by John Steele Gordon

It’s a status quo jobs report this month, with little significant change in the numbers. The good news is the unemployment rate went down by a tick to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent. The bad news is that the civilian labor force declined as well, by 493,000 people, and the participation rate, the percentage of the adult population in the labor force, declined to 63.1 percent, the lowest number in the 21st century. When President Obama took office, it was 65.7 percent. So the decline in unemployment is almost entirely due to a declining labor force, not a growing job pool. The number of new jobs in March was a mere 88,000, nowhere near enough to reduce unemployment on its own.

What is causing this stagnant job market after so deep a recession? The answer is that the amount of uncertainty in the marketplace is not declining, indeed it is growing, and there is nothing markets hate more than uncertainty. Europe’s deteriorating financial and economic situation is surely not helping, nor is the forthcoming implementation of Obamacare, with a legion of unanswered questions about how it will affect businesses from the Fortune 500 on down. When even two-thirds of Democrats think that Obamacare will either adversely impact them personally or have no effect, there is going to be a strong tendency to wait and see what happens.

If a Republican were in the White House, the mainstream media would be howling in outrage about this continuing terrible job market and demanding action. But since it’s Obama in the White House the MSM will undoubtedly be doing its usual oh-look!-a-squirrel! routine.

 

 

Telegraph, UK

Tell youngsters the truth: the UK needs you to work not go to university

There is little that is more likely to lead to ruined lives than groupthink in politics, especially when it is imposed by a well-meaning, over-enthusiastic Establishment convinced that it is doing the right thing.

by Allister Heath

Tragically, as yet more data reveal, the decision to massively increase the number of school-leavers going to university, wrongly assuming that this would transform opportunity in an era of technological revolution, ranks as one of the greatest social and industrial policy blunders of recent decades.

Britain is facing a jobs crisis made in Downing Street and signed off by the leaders of all political parties, starting with Sir John Major, during the past quarter century. The problem is not the number of new jobs – there are lots of those, confounding the sceptics, and could be even more if the labour market doesn’t become over-regulated. The issue is that an obscenely large number of young people with a university education will not be able to find a job that matches their expectations.

Research from the US government, which without doubt applies equally to Britain, suggests that just one out of the top nine occupations expected to create the most jobs this decade requires a university degree.

The picture is truly dire for the army of university graduates: only five of the top 30 fastest-growing occupations expected to create the most jobs by 2020 require an undergraduate degree (or an additional post-graduate qualification) – nursing, teachers in higher education, primary school teachers, accountants and medical doctors – and 10 of the top 30 don’t require any kind of qualification at all.

Among the top 10 fastest-growing professions are retail sales staff; food preparation (including fast-food restaurant jobs); customer service reps; labourers and freight, stock, and material movers; lorry and van drivers; and various healthcare aides, related to the ageing population. This is the semi-secret, and devastating, story that far too few people in government want to talk about.

The horrible truth is that central planning never works: just as the authorities cannot possibly know how many widgets an economy ought to produce, or what the “right” price for goods will turn out to be, they cannot possibly know many decades in advance what skills will be required, or what percentage of school-leavers should go to university. It is hard to fathom what Tony Blair was thinking when he promised that half of 18-year-olds would go to university. The result has been betrayal, broken dreams, graduates working in coffee shops, a business community that still cannot find the right people with the right soft and hard skills, and a generation of young people crumbling under ever larger student debts. It’s a social catastrophe for which nobody has yet paid the price; even worse, it remains politically unacceptable for those in a position of power to point any of this out.

The figures predicting where new jobs are going to come from were uncovered by Mark J Perry, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, who analysed the US Bureau of Labour Statistics’ official employment projections in a short note published recently by the American Enterprise Institute. Most Western economies face a similar problem. They confirm what many in Britain already knew: many young graduates are in jobs where a degree is not necessary, a situation which is getting worse. The oversupply of graduates, especially from those institutions in the lower reaches of the league tables, and those with degrees in areas not directly relevant to firms, has substantially distorted the market.

To many employers, university education has become little more than a signalling device, a means to filter out potential staff. To others, it is seen as a remedial device, there to fill in the gaps left by state education. The result has been an inflation of entry requirements, with positions once open to plucky 16-year-olds now requiring at least a bachelor’s degree, if not a master’s, even though the actual work hasn’t changed one jot.

There are, of course, caveats. There will still be plenty of qualified jobs, but regrettably their supply is not growing as quickly. Many of the more specialist, skilled jobs, such as those in IT, are divided into numerous categories, such as programmers, developers, network administrators, security analysts and so on – and are therefore ranked further down the list. Grouping them together would rebalance the picture a little.

Many jobs will genuinely require university degrees, especially those with quantitative and mathematical skills, and of course it is essential that children of all backgrounds who have the interest and ability to study for a degree be given the opportunity to do so. But if we really care about social mobility, and ensuring that people are able to live their dreams, we need an urgent shift in policy.

Britain needs more, better, skilled jobs – and that means making the UK more welcoming as a base for firms in areas such as technology, science, finance and high value added business services.

The onslaught against the City, which is crippling it rather than seeking to make it more resilient, will merely reduce the availability of good jobs.

The answer is not more top-down planning of the sort that gave us our higher education crisis, with politicians choosing sectors they guess will create the “right” sort of jobs, but a broad policy to encourage global firms to base their best-paid positions in the UK, and to trade and export from our shores.

That means low tax rates and living costs, a better business climate and enhanced infrastructure and airport links; sadly, we are faring miserably in all areas.

Britain also needs to do more to promote entrepreneurship, including welcoming job-creators from overseas.

We need to raise productivity levels, enabling workers to be paid more; mechanisation and technology kill jobs in the short term, but eventually boost output per worker and hence average wages, and are thus a good thing. The Government needs to continue reforming the welfare state to ensure that nobody is locked into a situation where it doesn’t pay to take a job.

Crucially, the UK must focus on improving the knowledge and skills of school-leavers, currently all too often heart-breakingly inadequate, eventually reducing the need for as many to go to university. The reforms being pursued by Michael Gove are an excellent first step, but it is a tragedy that he isn’t being allowed to go faster and further.

Apprenticeships and vocational qualifications are essential: had politicians focused on these in recent decades, rather than on boosting university admissions at any cost, the prospects for Britain’s young would be very different today.

Most important of all, however, the political establishment needs to start telling our young people the truth: it doesn’t make sense for everybody to go to university.

 

 

The View from Alexandria

Reynolds’ Law

September 25, 2010 by philo

I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:

"The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them."

I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.

This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental.

Since the time of Woodrow Wilson, Democrats—but not only Democrats—have fretted that the middle class is shrinking due to the power of large corporations, and that only government action to “level the playing field” can save the middle class. The “middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity.” Obama? Hillary? No, that’s Woodrow Wilson in 1913 (The New Freedom). It’s striking to realize that progressives have been playing the same tune for a century, no matter what’s actually taking place in the economy—indeed, in the midst of the greatest expansion of affluence in the history of the world—with the same set of proffered solutions: greater government power, regulations, higher taxes, and subsidies for the markers of affluence.

Reynolds’ Law thus strikes at the heart of progressivism as a political ideology. Progressivism can’t deliver on its central promise. In fact, it’s guaranteed to make things worse in exactly that respect. It’s not that it sacrifices some degree of one good (liberty or prosperity, say) to achieve a greater degree of another (equality). That suggests that the choice between conservatism and progressivism is a matter of tradeoffs, balances, and maybe even taste. Reynolds’ Law implies that progressivism sacrifices some (actually considerable) degrees of liberty and prosperity to move us away from equality by undermining the characters and thus behavior patterns of those they promise to help.

Not coincidentally, progressives accumulate power for themselves, not only by seizing it as a necessary means to their goals but by aggravating the very social problems they promise to address, thus creating an ever more powerful argument that something has to be done.

 

 

Frontpage Mag

Let’s Invest More in College so its Graduates Can be Stuck in Jobs that Don’t Require College Degrees

by Daniel Greenfield

We need to invest more in college education so that college graduates can get jobs that don’t require college degrees while paying off piles of student debt for an unnecessary college degree.

And that will help our colleges pay off their massive burden of debt. Welcome to the Obama Economy. (via Instapundit)

The recession left millions of college-educated Americans working in coffee shops and retail stores. Now, new research suggests their job prospects may not improve much when the economy rebounds.

Underemployment—skilled workers doing jobs that don’t require their level of education—has been one of the hallmarks of the slow recovery. By some measures, nearly half of employed college graduates are in jobs that don’t traditionally require a college degree.

Economists have generally assumed the problem was temporary: As the economy improved, companies would need more highly educated employees. But in a paper released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of Canadian economists argues that the U.S. faces a longer-term problem.

They found that unlike the 1990s, when companies needed hundreds of thousands of skilled workers to develop, build and install high-tech systems—everything from corporate intranets to manufacturing robots—demand for such skills has fallen in recent years, even as young people continued to flock to programs that taught them.

The problem isn’t just high tech skills. America does need more technical grads in some professions, unfortunately those professions are also glutted by low quality Third World students.

Meanwhile American students are wasting piles of money on unemployable non-technical degrees.

Brian Hackett, who graduated with honors from the College of New Jersey in 2010 with a political-science degree, is among those who haven’t found full-time work. Instead, the 25 year old works part-time doing clerical work and conducting phone interviews—and he is hardly the only one at his company with advanced credentials.

“There are people with master’s degrees and bachelor’s degrees and even people with law degrees applying to work for $10 an hour,” Mr. Hackett said.

Well yes. Not exactly all that surprising. There’s a lawyer surplus and political science is a chancy specialty.

Better-educated workers still face far better job prospects than their less-educated counterparts. The unemployment rate for Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree was 3.8% in February, compared with 7.9% for those with just a high school diploma.

This slops together all degree holders. The actual unemployment stats are 4.5 for BA holders and 3.5 for MA holders. High school grad unemployment does top 8 percent, but student loan debt more than makes up for the difference in incomes.

And some degrees have whopping unemployment rates that are worse than those of High School dropouts.

• 1. Clinical psychology 19.5%

• 2. Miscellaneous fine arts 16.2%

• 3. United States history 15.1%

• 4. Library science 15.0%

Even pre-law has an unemployment rate almost as bad as High School grads.

 

 Post Partisan  -  WaPo

Obama’s insulting salary stunt

by Richard Cohen

I once had a boss who was independently rich, and when I asked him for a raise, he turned me down, adding that he, too, had forsaken a raise that year. A surge of anger, resentment and sheer hatred welled up in me, and were it not that I needed the job, I would have gone for his throat. His unthinking and unthinkable attempt to make common cause with me brought to mind Anatole France’s observation that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Now it brings to mind Barack Obama.

The president yesterday announced that he would return 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury Department. This is an effort to make common cause with federal employees who may have to take a similar paycut. This is the way this tone-deaf White House put it:

The president has decided that to share in the sacrifice being made by public servants across the federal government that are affected by the sequester, he will contribute a portion of his salary back to the Treasury.

The president makes $400,000 a year. In addition, he is provided living quarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, several limos, a very nice (Rose) garden, an (Oval) office and some very nice bedrooms, one named for a former occupant, the late President Lincoln. The president also gets a $50,000 expense account and an additional $100,000 for travel. The average government worker, I dare say, does not get quite that much for travel and might have to live in his or her own home, invariably not on Pennsylvania Avenue, necessitating a tiring and expensive commute.

But wait: This president is independently rich. He is rich by dint of his own talent and industry, but rich is rich –- and you probably ain’t. Obama has made a small fortune in book royalties, and last year the president and Michelle Obama reported an adjusted gross income of $789,674. Without having to Google it, I can say that the Obamas made more than your average federal employee –- even including overtime.

So the $20,000 Obama is kicking back to the Treasury is a pittance that will not be missed. (What’s the difference between $789,674 and $769,674? Will the kids not go to camp? Is Hawaii out of the question for next summer? ) But 5 percent for someone making $100,000 is a different story. That’s five grand, and it well could be camp or a vacation. It is not chump change.

Obama was once poor –- although young and poor is not the same as old and poor –-  so I know he can appreciate what that 5 percent can mean. The president was apparently responding to the symbolism of him living like a pasha while asking others to sacrifice. I understand. But his taking a wee haircut on his salary is just a PR stunt from the White House that’s more insulting than it is empathetic.

 

 

Sharks in the Water and Out

On the abuses of “work-related stress”

by Theodore Dalrymple

Earlier this month, British newspapers reported the story of Paul Marshallsea, a Welshman who, while on a two-month Australian holiday with his wife, wrestled a six-foot shark to prevent it from attacking children in the water. Marshallsea happened to be filmed while doing so, and the pictures went around the world. He was proclaimed a hero.

Unfortunately for him, the pictures also reached Wales. He and his wife were supposed to be on sick leave at the time with “work-related stress,” and his heroics didn’t impress his employers: they sacked him, on the not-unreasonable grounds that if he could travel to Australia and wrestle with a shark, he could probably have made it into work. Moreover, photographs of the couple suggested that they were having the holiday of a lifetime, rather than merely recuperating from serious illness.

Under the best circumstances, “work-related stress” is a slippery concept, almost an invitation to fraud. And here the context is important. Marshallsea lives in Merthyr Tydfil, long known as the sick-note capital of Britain. Up to a fifth of its people of working age receive a certificate of sickness from doctors sympathetic to the plight of the unemployed. (The sick get higher state benefits than the merely unemployed.) There is thus almost a presumption of sickness in Merthyr, once a prosperous industrial town. Unemployment is virtually a hereditary condition, having been passed down to the third generation. Were it not for the public sector, unemployment in Merthyr would be nearly 100 percent.

The work that caused the Marshallseas so much stress was with a so-called charity—the Pant and Dowlais Boys & Girls Club, for whom they had worked for ten years. The object of the club is to help Merthyr Tydfil’s boys and girls develop their physical, mental, and spiritual capacities through leisure activities. This included providing them with a disco.

The largest single donor to the “charity” last year was the Welsh government (more than 20 percent); the year before, it was the Merthyr Tydfil Council (more than 40 percent). In Britain, the distinction between charity and government has been blurred to the point of eradication by the fact that government, local or national, is often the largest contributor to charities—sometimes, indeed, almost the only one. And he who pays the piper calls the tune.

The principal beneficiaries of charities often seem to be their employees. Staff costs of the Pant and Dowlais Boys & Girls Club last year amounted to 63 percent of the club’s income. It is likely that the Marshallseas were well-paid; Australia is one of the most expensive countries in the world, and two-month holidays there, even when staying with friends, as were the Marshallseas, don’t come cheap. Sick leave is fully paid, so the charity funded the couple’s holiday.

The story illustrates a fundamental truth about contemporary Britain: it is now a sink of corruption, moral, intellectual, and financial, all of it perfectly legal.

 

 

 



Late Night Humor

by Andrew Malcolm

Leno: President Obama did not take VP Joe Biden to Israel with him. He figured the Jews had suffered enough.

Leno: The U.S. Senate is fighting to keep open its own Senate Barber Shop. It losses $350,000 a year. You know what that makes it? The most successful government program ever! It only loses $350,000 a year.

Leno: The island nation of Cyprus has this new 10% tax on individual savings accounts there. They will take 10% of your money right out of the bank. To which President Obama said, "You can do that?"

Conan: Tonight begins the eight-day Jewish Passover holiday when God freed the Jews from slavery in Egypt. In other words, history’s first Spring Break.

Leno: Spring break is underway all across the country. According to a new survey, 74% of female college students say they use drinking as an excuse for wild sexual behavior. And 100% of college men say this is a perfectly acceptable excuse.

Conan: Passover’s the time every year I’m forced to spend eight days and eight nights writing all my own jokes.

Conan: Joe Biden was in Paris and ran up a hotel bill of $585,000 in one single night! Apparently Biden tried to order “Wreck it Ralph” 1,000 times.

Fallon: March Madness is well underway. When Joe Biden was asked about his Sweet 16, he said, “It was great — I had a petting zoo and a clown."

Conan: Some people paid $6,000 to watch the Supreme Court's gay marriage deliberations. Which explains the court launching a 41-city “Monsters of Gay Marriage Deliberation Tour.”

Conan: President Obama celebrated Passover with a White House Seder. There was an awkward moment when Sasha asked, “Hey, I thought we were Muslim?”

Conan: A 17-year-old boy sold an app to Yahoo for $30 million. He says he'll use the money to fund his new website, "Who's A Nerd Now, Jenny?.com."

Letterman: Tax-wise, the average American works six months a year for the government. I'm telling you, government employees don't even work six months a year for the government.

Letterman: But I will say of all the popes, I think the best one was Sean Connery.

Leno: Pope Francis and ex-Pope Benedict met last weekend. They were trying to figure out exactly what marshmallow peeps have to do with Easter.

Letterman: Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice, turned 83 this week. In a 5-4 decision the court wished her Happy Birthday.

Letterman: Coney Island is open again after all the Hurricane Sandy repairs. I can't wait to ride a roller coaster built in 1911. But Obama has OKd $2 billion in emergency cotton candy.

Conan: Another Seal Team 6 member says Bin Laden was unarmed when he was shot dead. I think I speak for everyone when I say, “And?”

Conan: A man won $8,000 from Disney for being stuck on the “It’s a Small World” ride for 30 minutes. He'll use the money to remove the part of his brain that won’t stop playing that song.

Fallon: Today is the 15th anniversary of Viagra. Yep, the company celebrated by throwing a party that shouldn't last more than four hours.

Fallon: Homeland Security Secy. Janet Napolitano says she doesn’t email, text or tweet. So if you see something, say something because there's literally no other way she’ll hear about it.

Fallon: President Obama says his NCAA bracket is busted, worst picks he ever made. Then he looked at his economic advisers and said, “Ehh, maybe not.”

Conan: Great to be here. My TBS bosses in Atlanta said I could do a week of shows anywhere in the world,. So I said “Paris, France.” And they said, “Atlanta it is.”

Conan: Learning a lot about Atlanta. Atlanta’s No. 1 employer is Delta Airlines. In honor of that, tomorrow night’s show will be delayed by two hours.

Conan: I’m only in Atlanta for four shows, but I promise you this, ladies and gentlemen. I will not leave this city until I get into a fistfight at a Waffle House.

 

Six Bolts in One Strike over Lake Michigan

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

 

[pic]

 

 

 

[pic]

 

 

[pic]

 

 

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download