George Rebane

Now how do I pull all those together into one cohesive topic?  Two former congressmen, Chris Cox and Bill Archer, just informed the country of our real debt problem, ‘Why $16T Only Hints at the True US Debt’ – something of which you fortunate RR readers were apprised of years ago.  It’s more than worth a read since you have to hear from someone besides moi.  The punch line of that piece is, “Hiding the government’s liabilities from the public makes it seem that we can tax our way out of mounting deficits.  We can’t.”

This truth has been and continues to be most successfully hidden from our progressives and those just plain stupid.  The ONLY legitimate way out of our mounting deficits is to set the stage for historically unprecedented GDP growth levels.  And all that invokes today is visions of a snowball’s chance in hell.

But what would make such growth levels possible is a brand new tax code, the shutdown of about a dozen rogue federal departments, bureaus, and administrations, a massive rollback of insane regulations, and the wholesale attraction of foreign STEM graduates from US universities.  The latter was promoted by Republicans in Congress pushing the STEM Jobs Bill, and predictably, being strongly opposed by that institution’s union sock puppets – aka Democrats.  The bill failed to garner the needed two thirds majority last September to pass the House.

The bill’s passage would have allowed all STEM graduates to automatically qualify for a green card, and climb on a fast track to US citizenship.  Opposing sanity are certifiable idiots like Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez who wants to continue our current worthless immigration law that permits only 55,000 annual immigrant visas drawn by lottery to enter America.

In response to recent efforts to reintroduce the legislation, Gutierrez asks the new century’s most stupid question to date – Aren’t the lottery drawn immigrants from Africa and East Europe “just as valuable, aren’t they just as worthy” as the US graduated STEM majors?  The country should echo coast to coast with a resounding HELL NO! but all we hear is crickets in support of the revised STEM Jobs bill.  And so it goes.

But wait, there’s more on the employment front.  To make sure that with each passing month every potential employer would have more difficult decisions when hiring new employees, we now are told of SCOTUS having agreed to hear a workplace harassment case.  It all depends on what the new national definition of ‘supervisor’ will be.  The decision will be handed down in 2013, and is expected to set new precedents for how poorly performing workers can be encouraged by their employers.

Something for all to ponder.  If you only have commodity skills to offer in the labor market, and you want to receive higher than commodity wages, what do you do?  You get together with your equally undistinguished colleagues at your workplace, and organize into a unit – let’s call it a ‘union’ – that can and will threaten your employer with massive financial loss or even the shutdown of his business if your demands are not met.  Since what you have to offer is nothing special – i.e. you can be replaced with any of a hundred immediately summoned workers – you can only keep your job if your organization is backed by the full force and fury of the government.  And that is not a difficult hurdle since the sumbiches there are regularly bought and paid for.

The employer’s alternative is to move the business activity someplace else with lower labor costs, or to replace the workers with machines that are smarter and more productive.  Technology is abetting the latter alternative as these pages have documented for years.  Now we add another such newsworthy item.  A company called Momentum Machines has built and is marketing a robot hamburger maker that can make every competing minimum wage patty flipper suffer the fate of the fabled John Henry.

To all this the Left’s understanding is equivalent to that of a freshly painted corral post that has just had Hayek’s Road to Serfdom read to it.

[30nov12 update]  The following graphic from the St Louis Fed is a devastating underline to the systemic unemployment picture I have been painting for the last several years.  The employment curve will not recover much because of technology abetted productivity increases and insane government policies that minimize entry of useful immigrants while at the same time, as argued above, driving existing jobs overseas.

We can also report that the STEM Jobs Act passed the House today.  It would let 55K STEM grads get green cards, instead of spraying that number of cards across a random population of applicants from third world countries.  It was pointed out that 38% of STEM grads from US universities are from foreign countries, and that three fourth of technology patents filed by US companies have one or more inventors as foreigners.

[12dec12 update]  The Association of Computing Machinery reports – “Engine Advocacy and the Bay Area Council Economic Institute have
released a report that details key findings on how technology sector jobs
impact the overall U.S. economy. The report, “Technology Works: High-Tech
Employment and Wages in the United States,” says that since 2004, tech
employment growth has outpaced the performance of the private sector by a ratio
of three to one, and tech jobs have been more resistant to fluctuations in the
economy. From 2002 to 2011, job growth was faster in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields than in all other occupations by a
ratio of 27 to one. The high demand is expected to continue through 2020 and
possibly beyond, with high-tech employment projected to continue to lead other
sectors in growth. The report says high-tech and STEM jobs paid 17 percent to
27 percent more than other jobs. The report also notes that tech jobs are key
to regional economic development. “The creation of one job in the
high-tech sector of a region is associated with the creation of 4.3 additional
jobs in the local goods and services economy of the same region in the long
run,” the report says.”

The original article is found here.