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How ignorant is Rep Barbara Lee? This open letter from Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek will give you an idea.
… Fred Barnes reports in the Weekly Standard that you refuse to use computerized checkout lanes at supermarkets (“Boneheaded Economics,” Oct. 24). As you – who are described on your website as “progressive” – explain, “I refuse to do that. I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”
Overlooking the fact that you overlook the lower prices on groceries made possible by this labor-saving technology, I’ve some questions for you:
Do you also avoid using computerized (“automatic”) elevators, riding only in those few that still use manual elevator operators?
Do you steer clear of newer automobiles equipped with technologies that enable them to go for 100,000 miles before needing a tune-up? I’m sure I can find for you, say, a 1972 Chevy Vega that will oblige you to employ countless mechanics.
Do you shun tubeless steel-belted radial tires on your car – you know, the kind that go flat far less often than do old-fashioned tires? No telling how many tire-repairing jobs have been destroyed by modern technology-infused tires.
Do you and your family refuse flu shots in order to increase your chances of requiring the services of nurses and M.D.s – and, if the economy gets lucky and you and yours get seriously ill, also of hospital orderlies and administrators? Someone as aware as you are of the full ramifications of your consumption choices surely takes account of the ill effects that flu shots have on the jobs of health-care providers.
You must, indeed, be distressed as you observe the appalling amount of labor-saving technologies in use throughout our economy. It is, alas, a disturbing trend that has been around for quite some time – since, really, the invention of the spear which destroyed the jobs of some hunters. …
Then again, maybe Barbara Lee takes the lead from her president. This post from The Money Illusion contains an item from the Suskind book about the administration. If you remember, Obama had the same problem with ATM machines.
A couple days ago I suggested that Obama might not be particularly well-informed about economics:
“It seems increasingly clear that Obama doesn’t have a good understanding of economics. He approaches issues like a very bright non-economist using his common sense.”
It now appears that it’s even worse than I thought. I found this quotation from Ron Suskind over at DeLong’s blog.
‘ Both, in fact, were concerned by something the President had said in a morning briefing: that he thought the high unemployment was due to productivity gains in the economy. Summers and Romer were startled.
“What was driving unemployment was clearly deficient aggregate demand,” Romer said. “We wondered where this could be coming from. We both tried to convince him otherwise. He wouldn’t budge.” ‘
Mort Zuckerman was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
‘It’s as if he doesn’t like people,” says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn’t seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.
The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was “pleading for some kind of adult supervision” in Washington and “desperate for strong leadership.” Writing soon after the historic downgrade of U.S. Treasury debt by Standard & Poor’s, he wrote, “I long for a triple-A president to run a triple-A country.”
His words struck a chord. When I visit Mr. Zuckerman this week in his midtown Manhattan office, he reports that three people approached him at dinner the previous evening to discuss his August op-ed. Among business executives who supported Barack Obama in 2008, he says, “there is enormously widespread anxiety over the political leadership of the country.” Mr. Zuckerman reports that among Democrats, “The sense is that the policies of this government have failed. . . . What they say about [Mr. Obama] when he’s not in the room, so to speak, is astonishing.” …
… Unprompted, he spends much of our discussion reminiscing about the Reagan presidency. Mr. Zuckerman has for years owned U.S. News and World Report, and in 1986 its Moscow correspondent Nicholas Daniloff was seized without warning by the KGB.
Mr. Zuckerman immediately flew to Russia but returned home when Soviet officials refused to release their new prisoner. “I worked in the White House for the next four weeks virtually every day and through that I met Reagan,” says Mr. Zuckerman. Reagan secured Mr. Daniloff’s release in a swap that included a Soviet spy held in the U.S.
“Reagan surprised me,” says Mr. Zuckerman. “He got the point of every argument. . . . He was very decisive. And everybody loved working for him. They followed his lead because they really respected his decisiveness and his instincts.”
‘I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him,” continues Mr. Zuckerman. “And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don’t want to do and to like it. And that’s what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That’s what this president has lost.”
“Democracy does not work without the right leadership,” he says later, “and you can’t play politics.” The smile inspired by Reagan memories is gone now and Mr. Zuckerman is pounding his circular conference table. “The country has got to come to the conclusion at some point that what you’re doing is not just because of an ideology or politics but for the interests of the country.”
Nile Gardiner notes the 1,000 days of this administration.
If recent polls are any indication, it is doubtful that President Obama will enjoy another 1,000 days in the White House. And looking at his track record over the course of his first 33 months in office, it is not hard to see why. It is hard to think of a presidency in modern times that has done more to damage the United States both at home and abroad than the current one, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter’s. Like his Democratic predecessor in the 1970’s, Barack Obama has left the world’s dominant superpower on its knees, with faith in US leadership now being questioned across the globe.
Since taking office in January 2009, President Obama has ushered in a period of relentless economic decline for the United States. His administration has added $4.2 trillion to the national debt (now standing at $14.9 trillion), lost 2.2 million jobs, introduced a vastly expensive health-care albatross, and spent nearly $800 billion on a failed stimulus package. At the same time, house prices across the country have tumbled at an unprecedented rate, consumer confidence has plummeted, and millions more Americans are now dependent upon food stamps. International confidence in the US economy has fallen to its lowest levels in decades, with credit agency Standard and Poor’s downgrading of America’s AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years in August this year. …
More from the Washington Times.
One day soon, someone will write a book titled “The Stumbling, Bumbling, One-Term Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.” It will be a best-seller – off the nonfiction shelf, of course.
Every presidency is, to be sure, fraught with missteps, mistakes and even fundamental misunderstandings of the task at hand. But President Obama has taken those pitfalls to new heights, and in so doing has exposed what can be called only “Amateur Hour in the White House.”
Just in the past month or so, the president and his jejune minions have delivered every bit of evidence needed to support the theory that no one in the big house knows what they’re doing. …
How about someone from the left. Like a card carrying liberal like Eleanor Clift.
… Washington’s scandal du jour has been Solyndra. The California solar company received a rushed half-billion-dollar clean-energy stimulus loan from the Obama administration, only to go bankrupt and potentially leave taxpayers on the hook—despite warnings from career officials that both Solyndra and the larger solar industry were facing financial pressures.
But it is far from the only blemish on the administration’s much-touted green agenda. In addition to weatherization problems, an internal Labor Department report disclosed this month that a multibillion-dollar program to retrain workers for green-energy jobs met only 10 percent of its goal of creating 80,000 jobs. A federal renewable-energy lab in Colorado that got nearly $300 million from another green-energy program began laying off 10 percent of its workforce last month.
Overall, as the $787 billion economic stimulus—the primary engine for the green-energy agenda—came to an end Sept. 30, it is clear that the program created far fewer jobs than promised. So-called green-collar jobs are notoriously hard to tally, but numerous estimates by gleeful Republicans put the taxpayer cost of each green-energy job created by the stimulus at more than $1 million. …
More from the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Can we finally put to rest the idea that government creates jobs? Can everyone finally agree that “green jobs” will never be part of an economic recovery — in Nevada or anywhere else?
There is simply no spinning or distorting the failure of one of President Obama’s biggest initiatives and campaign promises. “Hope” and “Change” hinged on creating 5 million green jobs in 10 years. As a down payment, the stimulus abomination set aside billions of dollars, including a $500 million grant to train 125,000 people for the noble work of the future.
As of this summer, of the nearly 53,000 people who had completed the training at a cost of $163 million, barely 8,000 had found work. Only 1,000 had held a job for more than six months, according to a report released this month by the Labor Department’s inspector general.
Is America just not ready for such new, high-tech positions heralding an age of renewable energy? Could that explain why so many people training for the jobs of the future can’t find work today?
Well, no. According to the inspector general’s report, some of the positions that fall under the administration’s definition of “green jobs” include: forklift operator, sheet metal worker, welder, plumber, electrician, car mechanic and garbage handler.
Did you really think 5 million people in this country would hold sustainable jobs manufacturing, assembling and maintaining solar panels and wind turbines? If you do anything that could conceivably benefit the environment — install a no-flush urinal or an energy-efficient appliance, drive a hybrid bus, collect used cooking oils, lobby against fossil fuels — you are a green-collar worker, as far as Washington is concerned. …