When America gave up its position as the producer-in-chief and became the consumer-in-chief, “essential skilled workers” became dirty words in our lexicon. The cultural shift is fast producing an “industrial tsunami” that threatens our economy and way of life. Ironically enough, we’re facing a crisis shortage of skilled workers at a time of dramatically high unemployment. We must re-connect this disconnect or face the consequences. America works when Americans are working. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 25 percent of the working population will reach retirement age by 2012, resulting in a potential shortage of nearly 10 million skilled workers. This heightens the price our nation is paying for dismantling so many in-school vocational training programs during the past few decades. The current shortage already sharply reduces the growth of U.S. gross domestic product, contributing to our overall economic problem. America’s infrastructure is falling apart before our eyes. Municipal water and sewer systems are failing, and more bridges are unsafe to cross. Yet the nationwide shortfall of more than 500,000 welders is causing already-funded repair projects to be canceled or delayed. Essential skilled workers are heroes.
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Never before have so many governorships been up for grabs â
With the setting of the sun this Wednesday night, Jews across the world will begin the observance of the Yomim Noraim (Days of Awe), a ten day period book-ended by the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This year’s High Holiday period comes at an interesting time for America as the first night of Rosh Hashanah comes a mere fifty-four days before the United States goes to the polls to between two radically different directions, one which emphasizes personal responsibility, the other emphasizes a reliance on government. Only one of those directions is compatible with the true meaning of the High Holidays. The popular view is the two holidays are observed by going to Synagogue saying a few prayers and begging God for forgiveness. Nothing can be further from the truth. The High Holiday period is all about personal responsibility. All the prayers and readings are just tools to help us look inward and formulate a personal accounting of our deeds over the past year, good and bad, and to understand what we have learned, or need to learn to correct our deeds. As for forgiveness, we are taught that our maker is not like a big massive government who will fix everything. For earthly-type mistakes, we must approach the people we may have harmed for forgiveness and if necessary make restitution to them, then we must discover what within ourselves led us to err and correct them. Only then can we approach God for absolution. It’s not that God couldn’t fix everything, but his direct involvement would destroy the delicate balance he set up during creation. The creation narrative in Genesis explains that man is created in God’s image. The Torah is not teaching us that we are all dead ringers for the “big guy upstairs.” If that was the case everyone’s driver’s license would have the same picture, the Sport’s Illustrated Swimsuit Issue would seem a bit creepy, and no one would be able to solve crimes as eye witness testimony would be useless and everyone would have the same DNA
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When Congress created Labor Day in the late 1800s , it was to placate an increasingly hostile labor movement. At a time when American workers needed protection from heavy-handed industrial bosses, labor unions made sense. But with the growing effort by Big Labor to unionize public employees, it’s left its mission of worker protection from dangerous conditions and now has increasingly become a leech on the taxpayers. Public employees hardly need protection from their employer, the government. If there’s any segment of society that needs protection from the government it’s taxpayers, not their employees. Big Labor’s legacy today is that of creating pension systems that are continuing to plunge deeper into the red. Some reports indicate the collective debt, just of school employee pensions, is around $1 trillion. Public employee unions have also created scenarios where the health benefits of their members now cost school districts nearly $24,000 in places like Milwaukee . And they’ve instituted schemes where teachers receive raises for not dying over the summer. With negotiated “step raises,” increases are based on years of service, not value added to the “company.” Big Labor is bankrupting government – and we should continue honoring that? Perhaps even worse, today’s labor leaders are downright hostile to America’s exceptionalism and worse yet, embrace socialist ideals. AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka is calling for a global financial tax – driving us down the path of one world government
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If my experience with one U.S. Department of Justice agency is indicative of how the federal government operates in this new era of transparency, then I must conclude that transparency causes “blindness.” Several times during the past 18 months, I’ve contacted people at the National Institute of Justice — the research, development and evaluation arm of the DoJ in Washington, D.C. — with seemingly-innocuous questions about a grant the agency awarded to a state mental health agency in Oklahoma almost five years ago. NIJ’s answers would better equip me to explain to my readers how NIJ works. Unfortunately, it seems NIJ officials prefer I remain “blind” to what’s going on inside the agency. Some background: Curious to learn details about NIJ’s criteria for granting non-competitive awards, I forwarded several questions to Jolene Hernon July 28. After pointing out to my contact in the NIJ Office of Communications that less than one percent of the total amount of NIJ’s annual awards in 2009 was non-competitive, according to the Guidelines Regarding Non-Competitive Awards published on the NIJ web site, I asked several questions as follows: I asked Hernon to explain whether or not the guidelines used in granting non-competitive awards have changed since Jan. 1, 2005, and, if they have changed, asked her to explain those changes; Prefacing my request with “If the guidelines have not changed,” I asked her to explain the basis upon which a particular non-competitive award was granted; and Finally, I asked for a copy of the NIJ director’s “determination in writing,” as called for in the current guidelines, that the award in question was worthy of non-competitive status. I asked the final question above after reading on the NIJ web site that the agency’s policy is to make non-competitive awards only under the following circumstances: Only one reasonable source — instances where only one responsible applicant can perform the work of the proposed award. Circumstances under which this may occur include when the NIJ Director has determined in writing that: ~ The applicant has proprietary information or proposes a project involving a unique idea, method, or approach toward advancing criminal justice, policy, and practice in the United States.
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Saturday, August 28, 2010, my husband, two daughters, and I attended the Restoring Honor rally in Washington D.C. It was a wonderful experience for us all. The crowd was huge (500,000 + people), very peaceful, and individuals were kind and patient. You might think that the important part of the weekend was the three and a half hours (or more) that we spent together during the rally. When I was sitting under the bright, hot sun with my friends from Texas, I thought so too. But I was wrong… During the first leg of our trip from D.C. to Chicago, our two daughters, ages 22 and 16, sat next to an African-American gentleman wearing an Obama inauguration t-shirt. After take-off, he mentioned to them that he had travelled to D.C. to attend Al Sharpton’s Reclaim the Dream rally. Our older daughter told him that they were in D.C
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We are in the midst of a national debate over the size and scope of government and I am hopeful. Conservative Republican Joe Miller’s remarkable victory in the Alaska Republican Senate Primary should have Americans feeling optimistic about the prospects of real change coming to Washington in 2011. Miller’s victory over incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski is just the latest jolt to an establishment that has paved the way for an unsustainable $13.3 trillion national debt and record budget deficits. My PAC, Citizens United Political Victory Fund ( www.cupvf.org ) has a goal for the 2009-2010 election cycle to recapture the majorities in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives by helping to elect candidates who will fight for conservative principles and challenge the agenda of the Obama Administration. To date, CUPVF has made more than $300,000 in direct contributions to 53 federal candidates who are campaigning to put an end to this fiscal insanity. If Miller is elected to the Senate in November, along with fellow fiscal conservatives Pat Toomey (PA), Marco Rubio (FL), Sharron Angle (NV), Ken Buck (CO), and Rand Paul (KY), business as usual in Washington will be over. And good riddance! After all, one U.S. Senator has the power to bring the legislative and appropriations process to a halt. Imagine what this group of potential newcomers, with a clear mandate to stop the spending, could do to get America’s fiscal house in order! Establishment incumbents from both parties should beware that the taxpayer funded party is about to end. Voters are giving the order: enough is enough. Who would have believed 18 months ago that President Obama’s big government agenda and ultra-socialist ideology would actually be the catalyst for bringing real change to Washington? I think it’s fair to say that if Obama had governed moderately as promised, the level of fiscal change that is rapidly approaching would not have been possible. Obama and the socialists completely misread their mandate and this is the result. Americans voted for pragmatic governance in 2008 – not a continuation of the LBJ welfare state on steroids. The task at hand is not going to be pretty. Nothing but the toughest of decisions will have to be made to pull us back from the cliff we will be falling off if we stay on our current path. The Federal budget has to be severely slashed. The same goes for state budgets, because the bailouts from the feds are going to come to a screeching halt. Meaningful entitlement reform and dramatic earmark reform are absolutely necessary. This is our generation’s real Apollo project. Do we have the mettle to do the tough things for the sake of our children and grandchildren, or will we just do the easy thing and vote to increase the debt ceiling on our way to bankruptcy? I believe in American exceptionalism, and if we succeed in this daunting mission, the rest of the world will once again believe as well
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You are probably familiar by now with this infamous graph published by the White House in January 2009 highlighting their expectations for the impact of the Recovery Act on the rate of unemployment. Far from leveling off at 8% and then declining, the actual unemployment rate ran up to 10% by the end of 2009 and has declined only slightly since to 9.5%, largely due to a decline in labor force participation. This in spite of the rapid passage of the massive $787 billion stimulus bill in February 2009. (Geoff at the Innocent Bystanders blog deserves everlasting credit for being the first to point out this disconnect.) With the White House and other socialists resolutely sticking to their claim that the stimulus bill “saved or created” 3-4 million jobs, I thought it might be worthwhile to point out that the very same January 2009 White House report also included an industry by industry forecast of where these 3-4 million jobs would come from. Here it is: Thanks to the inclination of economists to model verifiable data (even when they are pulling numbers out of the sky), these industry categories happen to align perfectly with employment data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thus we can easily compare the actual changes in employment to the figures forecast by the White House. In the table below, I’ve calculated the net change in employment by industry from February 2009, when the stimulus bill was passed, to July 2010, using the latest data available from the BLS. (Click row headings for data source.) Jobs Created Forecast (Q4-2010) Jobs Created Actual (2/2009 to 7/2010) TOTAL 3,675,000 -2,629,700 Mining 26,000 -14,000 Construction 678,000 -862,000 Manufacturing 408,000 -660,000 Wholesale Trade 158,000 -173,900 Retail Trade 604,000 -288,900 Information 50,000 -161,000 Financial Activities 214,000 -321,000 Professional and Business Services 345,000 -246,000 Education and Health Services 240,000 +473,000 Leisure and Hospitality 499,000 -86,000 Other Services 99,000 -71,000 Utilities 11,000 -11,400 Transportation and Warehousing 98,000 -143,500 Government 244,000 -64,000 The figures speaks for themselves, but note that the difference between the total number of jobs the White House forecast would be “created” and the actual number of jobs lost represents an astounding delta of over 6 million jobs. Six million! Where are the jobs, indeed. Remarkably, even the total number of government jobs dropped, I imagine due to job losses at the state and local levels. And how can the Recovery Act be considered anything other than a complete and utter failure with over 1.5 million fewer construction jobs than forecasted? In spite of endless propaganda over shovel-ready projects, and the nation littered with roadside signs touting Recovery Act projects.
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