Back to Basics

The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (aka “jobs council” aka “who?”) hadn’t met in over a year, and today they officially disbanded:

President Barack Obama created it in 2011 and filled it with prominent business leaders and economists. Its authority runs out Thursday, and the White House says it’s not renewing the panel.

Instead, a White House official says the administration will focus on new ways to engage with the business community and create jobs, including expediting permits for infrastructure projects.

Obama met with the jobs council only a handful of times, most recently in February of 2012.

Playing the part of Yoko in this particular group’s breakup was the president’s full plate, and it probably didn’t help matters that the president’s council recommended things the president didn’t like.

Drudge strikes again:

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey examines what happened on the job creation and workforce front during the life of the “jobs council.” However, the purpose of the panel wasn’t to do something as much as to give the appearance that something was being done, as the original head of the council sensed:

The panel’s start-up was delayed, and Volcker, known for taming inflation as Fed chairman in the 1980s, told colleagues he sometimes felt it was more of a public relations tool for the White House, according to a person familiar with his views.

Picture it: You’ve just been re-elected as president, and you want some feedback on how to create some jobs. What’s one of the first things you do? Exactly — call up the guy your campaign portrayed as a heartless and possibly felonious job destroyer for his thoughts on how to turn the economy around and give the middle class a boost.

From ABC News:

President Obama will meet privately with former Republican rival Mitt Romney at the White House Thursday, their first meeting since the election, the White House announced Tuesday.

The president and the former GOP nominee will meet for lunch in the private dining room, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced in a written statement.

The meeting fulfills a promise the president made on election night to work with Romney going forward. ”We may have battled fiercely, but it’s only because we love this country deeply, and we care so strongly about its future,” the president said at the time. “In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward.”

A Secretary of Business job offer for Romney, perhaps? Hopefully Mitt would realize that addressing a bloated government’s crippling effects on private sector industry by creating yet another government job to figure it out is incredibly counterproductive and paradoxical. In other words, it might be more of a job for Biden.

Meanwhile, Obama’s plan for the fiscal cliff is simple: Cushion the impact with a nice, soft pile of Twitter hashtags.

The Obama administration released a disturbing report on Friday that revealed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars poured into a program that failed to achieve its goals and was discriminatory against women, whereby 84 percent of the beneficiaries were men.

The report regarding an internal investigation conducted by the Inspector General of the Department of Labor increases suspicion of the ineffectiveness of the Obama administration’s Green Jobs Training Program, according to members of the House of Representative.

“As is customary in the nation’s capital, bad news is always released on Friday so it gets a minimal amount of news media and public attention,” said political strategist Jerry Norstrom.

According to the report, specifically requested by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), the IG confirmed suspicions that the Labor Department has further “squandered taxpayer money since the program was flagged by the IG last year.”

“The green jobs training program belongs in the long list of the [Obama] administration’s bad investments including the bankruptcies of Solyndra, Beacon Power, Abound, and just this month, A123,” said Chairman Issa.

“Not only was the program poorly thought-out, mismanaged and dysfunctional, but it served as a slush fund to reward friends of the Obama Administration. Millions of dollars went to groups like the National Council of La Raza, the Blue Green Alliance and the US Steelworkers union,” Issa stated.

The BlueGreen Alliance unites 14 of the nation’s largest labor unions and environmental organizations, according to its web site.

The House Oversight Committee has held three hearings and sent multiple inquiries about the $500 million stimulus-funded “green” program and the program’s abysmal results, according to Rep. Issa.

The IG’s investigation revealed that the DOL trained more criminals than veterans: 9 percent of the people who received training (about 10,000 individuals) had criminal records, while 7 percent were veterans. Out of a target of 81,254, grantees collectively reported only 30,857 participants (38 percent) entered employment.

For many people who received training, it was not beneficial: Of the 81,354 participants who completed training, 42,322 (52 percent) already had jobs. According to the IG, “Grantees were authorized to train incumbent workers who needed training to secure full-time employment, advance their careers, or retain their current jobs. However, for the 81 incumbent workers we identified in our sample, we found no evidence that they needed green job training for any of these purposes.”

The program didn’t broadly increase employment: Three and a half years since the stimulus was signed, this $500 million program has only placed 11,613 individuals (16 percent of the goal) into jobs that have been retained for more than 6 months. Only 38 percent, or 30,857, were placed into employment at all.

The training was often between one and five days long: According to the report: “Of the 81,354 participants who completed training through the Green Jobs program, 47 percent (38,366 participants) received 5 days or less of training, of which 21 percent (17,374 participants) received only 1 day of training.”

Furthermore, “Of the total 30,857 reported as entered employment, 4,874 were for participants who received only 1 day of training. This included 3,213, or 66 percent of incumbent workers who were reported as entered employment after only 1 day of training.”

Obama’s DOL disproportionately trained men: 84 percent of trainees were male, according to the report.

UPI

Tonight is the final installment of the Kabuki performance called the American Presidential debates. While the ideologues, talking heads, spinmeisters and party hacks get all hot and bothered over what is said in their efforts to reinforce the false left/right paradigm, what is not said – and, in fact, never discussed in the two single-party choreographed gab fests inaccurately called debates — is much more telling.

So here is my (partial) list of things you won’t hear — but should — from the mouths of one or the other of the two puppets vying for the “highest office in the land.”

Despite what we’ve been saying for months, Presidents do not create jobs in the private sector. We can advocate policies that either get government out of the way of job creation or stymie job creation. We can foster an environment that is friendly to job creators and encourages job creation. But there is no way I can say of a private sector job, “You didn’t build that; I did.” I would like to tell you that I can make you a job, but I would be lying. Such honesty would be refreshing but no doubt misunderstood by the voting public, which has come to believe in an all-powerful government.

On my first day in office, I’m going to give a copy of the Constitution with Article I, Section 8 highlighted to each of the 435 members of Congress and tell them that any legislation that does not fit into the parameters of the 17 enumerated powers contained therein will be vetoed, even if it means reducing the power and perks I would enjoy as President. The Presidency has essentially become a four- or eight-year monarchy. The Founders purposely divided government into three branches (and further divided one of those branches in two) in order to keep it out of the hands of a despot, an oligarchy or a plutocracy. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58: “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” In Federalist No. 10 he wrote: “[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others.” The Congress has abdicated its authority to the President on the issues of legislation, the Federal bureaucracy and, more importantly, war powers.

The National Defense Authorization Act and the USA Patriot Act are unConstitutional and violate the 1^st, 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th Amendments and should be repealed immediately. I will do that. Self-explanatory.

Government is too big, too oppressive and too totalitarian. I’m going to do all I can — within the bounds of the Constitution — to reduce the size and scope of government as quickly as possible. Some of the things I do will be unpopular, but I will do them without concern for my future political prospects.

PHOTOS.COM

Do you need a job? Take what you can get.

The race for the Presidency is focusing on which candidate will best help people get a job. During the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama weighed in on the matter: “We (she and husband President Barack Obama) have to fix this. We have so much more to do.”

Whoever is elected in November, whether Obama or GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney, it will be his priority to improve the economy. If the economy does improve, that will create jobs. Yet two things strike me:

1. The individual, not the government, must assume responsibility for his career path.
2. It always has been difficult to find the job you want.

I was reminded of this when the first man to give me a job as a writer died last week at age 83. His name was Harald Gunderson and, as a teenager, he was a working cowboy. Later, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy. After that, he worked as a brakeman with the railroad until he finally got an opportunity to be a reporter for a small-town newspaper. A few years later, he got his big break and became a reporter for a large daily. He went on to successfully publish several magazines.

My dad, C. Vernon Myers, had a similar path.

In 1932, Vern had a college degree in geology and was awarded a gold medal as his college’s most outstanding graduate. He was certain he could get a good job and parlay that into the career that he wanted — to be a writer.

The Great Depression interrupted his ambitions for 12 years. There were no jobs available in the mining business, and the oil boom had not yet taken off in Canada.

Even though his parents had put every nickel they had in sending my dad away to college, he had to come back to the community and work on his parent’s homestead. He used to recount the shame he felt in their sacrificing so much only to see him working in the pen with hogs.

With his connection to a packing plant, he was able to get a job as a shipping clerk and had a guaranteed salary of $60 per month. He took various orders for hog livers, bacon and pork chops. He told me years later that he was dreadful at this job because he couldn’t keep the orders straight. And even though he was married at the time to his first wife (the daughter of the owner of the meat-packing empire), he wasn’t liked by the family. He was shipped off to the shipping floor where this once-college valedictorian spent his days hauling and packaging just-butchered pigs and cattle.

My dad had flat feet and was in so much pain he could barely walk home after a 10-hour shift. Physically spent and mentally unchallenged, he took his next job selling life insurance. He made a little more money and kept thinking about his ambition to be a writer. He read a book by Thomas H.

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Despite a growing population, fewer Americans have jobs today than when Obama took office. And the jobs pay less, too.

With the release today of the August job numbers, there are still 261,000 fewer Americans employed than when Obama became president. Almost a million — 822,000 — fewer Americans have permanent jobs.

And we have fewer jobs despite there being many more Americans than four years ago. There are now over 8.4 million more working age Americans. Normally about 60 percent of the working age population have jobs. Thus, it would have been necessary to add about 130,000 jobs each month just to keep the share of the working age population employed from falling.

The middle and upper income jobs lost during the recession are being replaced lower-wage jobs during Obama’s recovery. Middle income occupations accounted for 60 percent of the jobs lost from the first quarter of 2008 to first quarter of 2010, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been in lower-wage occupations. While we have lost jobs in skilled construction, real estate, and supervisors, most new jobs are in retail sales and food preparation. . . .

There are still over 316,000 fewer jobs than when Obama became president.  What has grown are temporary service sector jobs — we have 892,000 fewer permanent jobs than when Obama became president.  People have also noted how family income has fallen.  While that drop in family income might be occurring simply because of the drop in the number of people working, not surprisingly, wages have also been falling.

“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.

The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.

The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations — those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when employment began growing again.

Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.

The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009. . . .

A copy of the National Employment Law Project report is available here.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland Fed reports that the gap between output per hour and labor compensation is much larger than any time since WWII.  Since the recession hit, labor income share (compensation as a percentage of output) in the nonfarm business sector has fallen from 62% to below 58%.  There is no doubt that technological change and globalization have contributed to these trends.  The clearest path to mitigating these trends is better education and training programs as well as more investments by companies.

Obviously the key is worker productivity at the margin, which is difficult to measure.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports average output per hour (which is higher than marginal output per hour) and has shown that wages and average productivity have diverged over the past two decades.  Is the gap due to the costs of greater regulation?  Are firms afraid to make permanent hires for fear that they may face large costs in firing these workers in the near future?

A U.S. congressional report released on Friday documents the “strangling effect of red tape on job creation,” and claims that job creators across the country have described problems with these Obama administration regulations that prevent them from adding new jobs into the U.S. economy.

Following two previous reports on government regulation in the 112th Congress, the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee renewed its efforts to examine burdensome and job-stifling federal laws and regulations.

The report documents what the Committee heard — namely that while some regulatory improvements have taken place, many other examples of job killing red tape have not been addressed.

The report also notes what job creation experts say are some of the newest regulatory threats to job creation, according to Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA).

“Last week’s unemployment numbers remained stuck at unacceptably high levels. This reflects the poor climate for businesses that currently exists under the Obama Administration,” said Rep. Issa.

“Our government can create the environment for the private sector to grow jobs. But under this administration, it won’t. Small businesses, and not the government, are the primary driver of job creation in this country. This report explains why job creators say they are struggling to put Americans back to work under an ever increasing regulatory burden,” Issa stated.

For example, from 2010 to 2011, the number of final rules issued by federal agencies rose from 3,573 to 3,807—a 6.5 percent increase. During that same time frame, the number of proposed rules increased 18.8 percent. The published regulatory burden for 2012 could exceed $105 billion, according to the American Action Forum, headed by a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

In the past decade, the number of economically significant rules in the pipeline — those that could cost $100 million or more annually — has increased by more than 137 percent, according to the report.

Another expected job-killer will be the fully-implemented Obamacare, which will add more regulations, more taxes and more financial costs for businesses just to survive, according to political strategist Michael S. Baker.

“If the law covers businesses that employ over 50 workers, it’s not difficult to believe employers will only have 48 or 49 employees in order to avoid the added expenses for compliance,” said Baker.