Blue Collar Blues

The past nine recessions — spread between 1953 and 2008 — battered men, whose employment rates were notched down each time and never fully recovered, and sectors that employed the least-educated men were hit the hardest. Women, on the other hand, have fared better and remain on pace to recover the jobs lost during the most recent recession, the Stanford Report Card on Poverty and Inequality reports.

But the people who write articles about this issue are shut in a mental box. For example: After discussing the employees at a Volkswagon plant

Finding workers was and is surprisingly hard, said Bill Kilbride, president of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. The chamber advertises and holds job fairs, but attendance is often sparse, he said.

Despite an impressive placement rate, Chattanooga State Community College’s technical training programs for the most in-demand fields, such as welding, aren’t full, said Jim Barrott, president of the College of Applied Technology.

Others believed that men just didn’t want to work and they had abandoned both work and family because they had lost their moral backbone.

But a study released in January indicates that what is more likely affecting those men is economic segregation in neighborhoods and schools, the rise of income inequality and the rising share of single-parent homes in communities.

Think about that last sentence and then tell me how it follows logically. What are the skills required to work on an assembly line? Economic segregation is a fancy way of saying that there are poor neighborhoods and rich ones. The way you move from one to the other is to earn more money. What does income inequality have to do with applying for a job in a factory? What does having one parent have to do with applying for a job in a factory? Studies like this are ways of applying statistics to pre-determined solutions.  The answer is never about welfare incentives.  It's never about the culture.  It's never about the individual.  It's always about "the system."

The benefits of well educated baristas.

The Wall Street Journal has an article bemoaning the well educated barista economy. Of course they don’t put it quite that way in their article, the subhead if which is: A new study offers an unsettling explanation of why young adults have been hit so hard.

But in the spirit of those who hailed the benefits of losing your job. Not only can you get a chance to do your own thing, but according to Nancy Pelosi, those unemployment benefits you get create more jobs.  And if you lost your job becaue of ObamaCare, it's really not a loss, but an "escape." 

With that view in mind, I want to explain why college educated baristas are a net plus for the American people.

Let’s face it, modern college graduates have just left the greatest brainwashing system since the Communists invented the “re-education centers” to set their enemies right. Do you really want those budding neo-Marxists to get on the first rung of the ladder of success?

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry – to say nothing about the lesser lights of the current regime – are the product of the counter-culture of the 1960s academy. Today it’s no longer the counter-culture but the firmly entrenched establishment – the Ruling Class - who will defenestrate you of you step out of line. “You say you believe marriage is between a man and woman? HOMOPHOBE! No job for you!” Use the wrong term-du-jour for someone with a different skin color … RAAAACIST! Mention that the President seems to spend an inordinate amount of time playing golf: RAAAACIST. Wonder why women need their birth control pills provided by the taxpayer? SEXIST!

You can be sure that the current crop of college graduates firmly believe these things. They have internalized them so that they no longer think about them. Or they have learned to mouth the correct phrases, kept their heads down to stay in college or keep a job. Do you really want these brainwashed robots doing anything but serving coffee until the conditioning wears off?

Hurray for Starbucks!

Obama abandons the phrase “hard working people.”

Not since the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union has the Left in this country done such an abrupt 180.  Read the history book and you find that after the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, marking the beginning of WW II in Europe, the American Left worked tirelessly to keep us out of war.  Accurately expressing that view, the old Communist Pete Seeger penned a song with the line

  “Franklin Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J.P. Morgan war.” 

Once Hitler attacked Stalin it was no longer J.P. Morgan’s war; instead the Left demanded a gun:  

“So, Mr. President, we got this one big job to do, that’s lick Mr. Hitler and when we’re through, let no one else ever take his place, to trample down the human race, so what I want is you to give me a gun so we can hurry up and get the job done.”

On February 4th the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)  announced that over 2 million people would probably quit working thanks to ObamaCare.   It wasn't quite the invasion of Russia, but it was still something of a shock.  

It took less than a day for the Left to abandon the idea that all Americans wanted to be hard-working, even if those who could not find a job.  Instead the new meme is that working Americans are wage slaves and ObamaCare has freed them from those shackles.  Google “Obama hard working people” and you get 674 million results.  But that was before the CBO report.  

Everyone on the Left was momentarily stunned.  But since ObamaCare HAD to survive, the negative had to be turned into a positive.  So Jay Carney was trotted out to tell us “what great news!”   And that gave the media their direction.  A mere week ago the Left asserted that those who were not working were desperately looking for a job.  Today we are told that those same people don’t want to work, don't need to work, in fact they should not work,  because they are living the dream. 

Of course the unemployed dream-catchers were all portrayed as sympathetic figures.  The single mom able to stay home and care for the children, the elderly who can now retire, the over-age student who can now pursue his study on a cure for cancer and the common cold in one little pill.  Rush Limbaugh was able to aggregate statements made by many of the Democrats who hailed the end of work.

Here’s Keith Ellison, (D-MN) on the benefits of not working:

What the Congressional Budget Office is saying is that we’re gonna discourage kids having to have latchkey. We’re gonna have parents being able to come home working reasonable hours. People are gonna be able to retire. People might be able to actually cook dinner rather than have to order out and get some takeout.  Americans work way more than the average of industrialized countries around the world.  We need a better work-life balance.  Ask a working mother, okay, if she could use a few more hours in a day to take care of her family.

Now actually, that’s not what the CBO said, or the reality.  When people drop out of the work force they are not “able to come home at reasonable hours,” they are going to be home, period.  So the image of the parent working a few hours less and spending time cooking a healthy meal thanks to ObamaCare is a fantasy.  Ellison’s “working mother” may be a mother, but she’s not working if she drops out as part of the CBO’s 2 million plus. 

E.J. Dionne (D-WaPo) gives us this charming picture of the couple taking a sabbatical from life:

Just think about the money put in people's pockets when they're saving on their insurance from subsidies! Think of two people.  We're supposed to be for family values.  You have a couple where somebody wants to leave the labor force for a couple years to take care of their kids.  Under the old system, if that person carried the health insurance, they didn't have the option to leave.  Uh, now they can!  What you're doing is expanding people's choices.

Let’s say they do exactly that, and now that the kids are older they decide to apply for a job  Let’s not even ask what they have been living on for the “couple of years” they've taken off.  Let’s say they are a well-paid professional couple with no mortgage or other debts and they were living off their savings.  They go to a job interview and explain how they have been spending their time.  What are the chances?When you hire someone you want someone who’s committed to his job, who’s anxious to work, who you can depend on for a long time.  Let’s just say that E. J. Dionne’s free spirits would be hired in the fast food industry where annual turnover is 100%, but most other employers would look for someone who's more committed to their career.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also thinks that not working is a great idea; it’s "freedom":

What CBO said is that many American workers would have freedom. Now, that's a good word, freedom to do things that they couldn't do. The single mom who’s raising three kids has to keep a job ‘cause of health care can now spend some time raising those kids. That's a family value. The student, 27 years old, wants to finish school quickly so he can get a great job, can't ‘cause he needs health care, is now free.

Well, actually health care is not “free” and never has been.  It’s quite expensive.  The question is who’s paying for it.  Presumably not the single mom or the student living the life in Schumer’s world.

But thanks to the Left’s commitment to ObamaCare they are now firmly embracing the new concept that not working is a “family value” and staying home is perfectly fine.  Which means that those millions of unemployed are not going to be described as wanna-be “hard working”  any more.  That’s apparently no longer a family value.  In fact if you spend too much time working to feed, clothe or house your family you may have a screw loose. 

It may take a few weeks or months for the Obama’s speech writers to take out references to “hard working” Americans from his teleprompter, but take my word for it,  the new minstrels of the Left will tell us:  

“So, Mr. President, we got us some leisure time to take, that’s the end of hard work for me, and when we’re through, me and my baby momma, we’ll sit in the sun, so what I want is that ObamaCare application so we can take this job and shove it.”

And Obama will smile because suddenly unemployment is not a bad thing.  In fact it's a "family value. " And when his "year of action" on jobs proves to be as big a bust as all his previous jobs plans, the press will tell us that's a good thing.