Tweets on My Political and Economic Views

These tweets summarize my political and economic views:

Ever wonder whether the other side might be right? Worth considering.

The large conversion of full-time benefited jobs to gigs occurs largely because government mandates have made it cost-prohibitive to hire an American.

Can there ever be enough jobs for America's 250 million, 1/2 with IQ of under 100? That’s unlikely in an information-based, global economy.

Half the U.S. isn't working or working at a lower-level than they could. And millions more dislike their job. I see revolution possible.

Ironic that we derive our views on how to improve the world mainly from two groups that have opted out of the real world: professors and journalists.

Ever more news commentators are not experts but entertainers.

It is dangerous to read only current thought. It's too reflective of today’s zeitgeist, e.g redistribution vs merit.

It’s remarkable that with so many lenses through which to view the world, colleges and the media so focus on just the Marxist three: race, class, and gender

Social scientists tend to be more activist than scientist. Wrapping ideology in statistics doesn't make social "science" science.

Why is democracy the sacred cow when the majority in the U.S. read below 8th grade level, don't know government’s three branches, and believe in angels?

Government can't claim to care about the poor when it creates lotteries and casinos that prey mainly on the poor, who can least afford loss.

It’s jingoistic that politicians sing "Buy American!" The foreign worker who “takes" a U.S. job improves his life more than the American loses.

Seeing an individual’s pain causes irrational policy decisions as well as personal ones.

I've just had yet another client who won't look for work until all the unemployment checks run out. Is that what our tax dollars should be for?

An article in TIME: “Debt is growing at four times the rate reported by government. We are already bankrupt."

Laws, policies, and practices that further equality over merit are short-term feel-goods and long-term stabs into society.

I fear we’ll keep trying to make everything equal until everyone has nothing.

We continue to ignore the devastating drop in boys' achievement and well-being, an unfair double-standard.

If girls are “underrepresented” in STEM—massive redress. But men die 5 years younger and there’s much more money for women’s health. Huge double-standard.

The double standard: If a statement favors redistribution, it gets praised. If favoring meritocracy, it's usually censored and/or censured.

We are in a censorious era: Say or write something politically incorrect and you're censured or fired, McCarthyism from the Left, and far more pervasive. Not all wisdom lives left of center.

I read synopses of the 50 top-rated movies for adults & kids. Nearly all push redistribution to Have-Nots. In reality, most Haves earned it.

Our resources have been so heavily reallocated to the intractable: inequality and climate change. The unbiased science indicates that the money and effort could be more wisely spent.

Every medic knows that limited resources do the most good when spent not on the sickest but on those with the greatest potential to profit.

Not withstanding Temp Trump, whom I don’t believe will finish his term, we're becoming an autocratically intolerant Leftist idiocracy.

We are in a leftward era. So to avoid more wasted effort, conservatives and libertarians today should  reallocate time to activities that will encounter weaker headwinds.

Society's having replaced merit with redistributive priorities has led me to spend most discretionary time on classical music, growing flowers, etc.

HERE is a YouTube of me reading these aloud.

Why Double-Digit Unemployment will be Permanent

This week's Time magazine cover story asserts that double-digit employment is here to stay but, true to its ever more liberal bias, the article avoids the most potent reasons why:

• Government, advocacy groups, and the media pressure employers to hire candidates based not purely on merit but also on race, ethnicity, gender, and age. For example, courts are increasingly using the "disparate impact" standard to judge racial discrimination. If, for example, a smaller percentage of African-Americans pass an employee-selection test, even if no test items were evaluated to be biased against African-Americans, the test's disparate impact on African-Americans would be legally admissible evidence that the employer was discriminatory. Being pressured to hire on non-merit-based criteria, of course, reduces employers' desire to hire at all.

Government has vastly increased the dollar and human costs of hiring people. Of course, there are the employer-paid payroll taxes: unemployment tax, Medicare, Medicaid and half of Social Security plus all the associated paperwork. But mandates such as the Family Leave Act, which allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of leave every year(!) with guaranteeed rights of return, imposes onerous demands on employers. And President Obama has proposed making that leave paid! And for the coup de gras, health care cost, already a huge employer expenditure will grow far larger under ObamaCare, under which employer taxes will be used to subsidize the poor's health care.

Living-wage laws, for example, those in San Francisco, require employers to pay all workers $11.54 an hour (usually plus benefits). Employers who could use an employee that would add any less value than $11.54 an hour plus benefits won't hire anyone at all--few employers want to take a loss in hiring an employee.

• The hassle factor. Many American employees, especially in liberal cities, and especially young employees, feel a sense of entitlement and litigiousness. They view employers as necessary evils. Many employers find the hassles of dealing with such employees outweigh the profit they would generate.

• Increased government worker protections create yet more disincentives to hire. For example, California law requires that even if a non-exempt worker works only four days a week, if an employer wants an employee to work a 9th hour on even one day, the worker must be paid 50% more for that one hour. Another example: sexual harassment laws have been so liberalized that, for example, if a person merely perceives a coworker to be making unwanted advances or is offended by a photo of a sexily-dressed person in an employee's cubicle, s/he could have grounds to build a case against the employer for condoning a "hostile environment," even if the employer was unaware of the photo!

• It is very difficult to fire an unsatisfactory employee, especially if the employee is in a "protected class:" woman, minority, person over 40, person with a disability (everything from cancer to depression.) Many such employees file wrongful termination actions and the rate is growing. Those suits are not only costly and can take many years, they take a great psychological toll on employees being accused of or deposed about alleged racism, sexism, ageism, or a hostile environment.
• The overall cost of regulation is enormous. A study by California State University economists reported today by Governor Schwarzennegar finds that the regulations cost the average small business and $134,000 every year, a total cost of $493 billion and 3.8 million jobs. And, of course, President Obama is calling for yet more regulation.
  

Those are potent reasons why employers are ever more likely to not hire U.S. employees but rather to offshore or automate jobs, or simply to calculate that there's too little profit to justify the disadvantages of hiring. And to the extent hiring is necessary, employers are ever more often hiring workers on short-term contracts to reduce payroll costs and the risks of lawsuits.

Time magazine proposes the typical liberal solutions that have already been tried and failed: funding colleges more and job retraining. We already have the highest percentage of college graduates in American history and as discussed earlier, employers are yawning at them because all we've done is taken weak high school students, lowered standards in college, but radicalized them to demand the moon from employers. So employers offshore, automate, or temp as many positions as possible. Regarding job retraining, it's been tried and tried, and those federal training programs fail: cost a fortune per trainee and most trainees don't land a job in their new career or don't last.

In my view, two changes would have the biggest long-term impact on decreasing the unemployment rate:

Training more entrepreneurs, starting in elementary school. That would yield more successfully self-employed people, more new ideas for products and services, which would create the need for more employees.

Freeing business from most government regulation.

Fat chance.