Paul M. Jones

The jobs that people are thinking about when they talk about "good manufacturing jobs"--the kind where you take a C-student straight out of high school, stick him next to a machine, and the machine makes him productive enough to justify $25 an hour--have gone away, lost not just to China, but to a machine who doesn't need to sleep, eat, or take a sick day when hunting season starts.  

...

In this economic environment, it doesn't make sense for an employer to sit down and try to put an entry level worker through two years of calculus and machine language.  The training required is too expensive and intensive.  

It isn't just that that isn't what they're good at; it's that most of their candidates are going to find that they are not cut out for these higher end jobs--a process that currently happens in community college training programs, where many of the students flunk the math or otherwise wash out.  If employers take over this training, they'll end up spending quite a bit of money training future non-employees who just aren't cut out for a high-end manufacturing job.  

. . . along with a lot of future non-employees who are.  Anyone who makes it through your training program will now have a valuable skill they can take anywhere.  Another employer can probably pay them more than you can, since they didn't have to, y'know, pay for all that expensive training.  This is why apprenticeships used to essentially involve signing on for seven years of slavery; it allowed the employer to enjoy some of the benefits of the investment in training.

In the modern world, where that sort of thing is illegal, the employee is the only one who can permanently appropriate the benefits of the human capital investment.  Economic logic tells us that therefore, they're the ones who should pay the cost, and take the risk, of acquiring it.

Read the whole thing. Via Why Can't Companies Find the Workers they Need? - The Daily Beast.

These, and countless other employers across the country, are not doing an impression of Montgomery Burns. They are simply responding to economic reality.

Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government’s requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans.

ObamaCare’s rules make expansion expensive, particularly for the 500,000 US businesses that have fewer than 100 employees.

Suppose that a firm with 49 employees does not provide health benefits. Hiring one more worker will trigger the mandate. The company would now have to provide insurance coverage to all 50 workers or pay a tax penalty.

In New York, the average employer contribution for employer-provided insurance plans, runs from $4,567 for an individual to $ 12,748 for a family. Many companies will likely choose to pay the penalty instead, which is still expensive -- $2,000 per worker multiplied by the entire workforce, after subtracting the statutory exemption for the first 30 workers. For a 50-person company, then, the tax would be $40,000, or $2,000 times 20.

That might not seem like a lot, but for many small businesses that could be the difference between survival and failure.

Emphasis mine. Via The 49ers - NYPOST.com.

A government’s sole function is the protection of individual rights; all other functions the modern U.S. government has assumed are usurpations which have required the violation of the very rights the government was established to protect. This strictly delimited function of government requires the establishment of a police force, a military, and a judiciary system. As such, the government’s position on the economy of the nation should not be to steer it or bolster it, but to stay out of it.

As Yaron Brook and Don Watkins write in Free Market Revolution, “If a rationally selfish individual is told that by surrendering his paycheck he will help ‘the economy,’ his attitude should be ‘To hell with you; it won’t help my economy!’”

via Want To Fix Healthcare? Acknowledge That It's the Responsibility Of the Individual - Forbes.

Over the past six years, the United States has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation in the world.

Efforts to curb so-called man-made climate change had little or nothing to do with it. Government mandated "green" energy didn't cause the reductions. Neither did environmentalist pressure. And the U.S. did not go along with the Kyoto Protocol to radically cut CO2 emissions. Instead, the drop came about through market forces and technological advances, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.

Breakthroughs in how natural gas is extracted from underground shale formations were the key factors that led to the reductions, the report said. Natural gas has a low carbon footprint and is widely available in the United States. As a result, entrepreneurs are flocking to extract it from new areas.

"It's good news and good news doesn't get reported as much,” John Griffin, executive director of Associated Petroleum Industries of Michigan, said of the lack of reporting about the CO2 reductions. "The mainstream media doesn't want to report these kinds of things."

via Shhh, U.S. Leads World In Carbon Emissions Reductions [Michigan Capitol Confidential].

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

via How A Failed Commune Gave Us What Is Now Thanksgiving - Forbes.

What’s the least defensible special break in the U.S. tax code? With so many distortions to choose from, it’s hard to name just one. If forced to pick, I might say the deduction for state and local taxes, which cost $67 billion in fiscal 2011, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

This one overwhelmingly benefits upper-income households in a handful of upper-income states, while rendering the entire nation’s finances less transparent. It’s also a potential source of friction in the “fiscal cliff” negotiations between President Obama and the Republicans (but we’ll get to that in a moment).

While we're at it, get rid of the mortgage deduction as well. Via Charles Lane: The best deduction to chop - The Washington Post.

When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster [on food stamps] we become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college.  But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color.  Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- irrelevant forever. The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it.  The only thing the English grad is "qualified" for in this economy is the very things s/he is already doing: coffeehouse agitator, Trader Joe's associate, Apple customer.................................................. and spouse of a capitalist.

Read the whole thing. It is hilarious and insightful. Via The Last Psychiatrist: Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1.

Update: Just wait until you get to part 2. Fantastic and terrifying.

[C]all for an end to the deductibility of mortgage interest above $500,000.  The burden of paying this new tax would mostly fall on people who live in high cost “Blue” states and other wealthy swells who live in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Obama.  The next order of business would be to reinstate  the excess profits tax on the  Hollywood’s movie and entertainment industry.  Make the Democrats defend Kim Kardashian over local small business people.  Continue with the theme of excess profits taxes and go after another unpopular sector of American society: lawyers.  Tax contingency fees for legal judgments over $10 million and force Democrats to defend their rich lawyer allies. Finally, end the deductibility of local and state taxes so that the vast majority of Americans in lower tax states are not forced to subsidize the reckless and profligate spending of the “Blue” state politicians and public employee unions.  If they want to persist with bankrupting their states, that’s fine, but the rest of us don’t need to help fund it.

I mean, if you really want to hit the rich, hit the ones that are your political opponents, right? Cia Waging A Scorched Earth Political War Over the Fiscal Cliff | Alan Charles Itzkoff – the Conservative Top 10.

If a country runs a deficit (as a percentage of GDP) that is equal to its growth rate, the debt level will remain constant. This year U.S. GDP will be a little less than $16 trillion, and its historical growth rate is 3.25%. That works out to what we might call a “safe” deficit of $520 billion, or even $600 billion if you allow for a little inflation. Last year, however, the U.S. deficit was $1.1 trillion -- or roughly $500 billion too much.

That gap could be closed by ending all tax cuts, tax breaks and stimulus payments for everyone, according to the Tax Policy Center. But two-thirds of the burden would fall on the middle class -- something both political parties want to avoid. All the proposed tax increases on the wealthy, however, even combined with the end of the payroll-tax cut, would raise only $295 billion. So unless there were spending cuts twice as big as the ones currently scheduled, the deficit would still be too large.

So if raising taxes on the rich nets you $295 billion on a deficit of $1100 billion, what's the point? It's like spending $11,000/year too much, and getting a job that only pays you $2950 for the year. I submit that raising taxes on the rich is not a plan to actually close the deficit hole; it is instead a ploy to encourage you to vote for them what's raising the taxes. Via Investment Advice as the U.S. Approaches a Fiscal Cliff | TIME.com.

America has an unfortunate history with secession, which led to the bloodiest war in our history and divisions that persist to this day. But, in general, the causes of secession are pretty standard around the world: Too much power in the central government, too much resentment in the unhappy provinces. (Think Hunger Games).

So what's a solution? Let the central government do the things that only central governments can do -- national defense, regulation of trade to keep the provinces from engaging in economic warfare with one another, protection of basic civil rights -- and then let the provinces go their own way in most other issues. Don't like the way things are run where you are? Move to a province that's more to your taste. Meanwhile, approaches that work in individual provinces can, after some experimentation, be adopted by the central government, thus lowering the risk of adopting untested policies at the national level. You get the benefits of secession without seceding.

Sound good? It should. It's called federalism, and it's the approach chosen by the United States when it adopted the Constitution in 1789.

via Column: A solution to secession fever -- federalism.