Last year saw many positive things happen in our country

January 20, 2026

Well, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term has now been completed. Yes, the United States of America still has problems. It always has had, and it always will have. But some improvements have been recorded.

Let’s be clear, Trump is not perfect; he has his problems. But the same is true of Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, Hakeem Jeffries, Hillary Clinton, Jasmine Crockett, Eric Swalwell, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and every other human being.

But Trump may be the most heavily criticized POTUS ever, or at least he is in recent memory. 

It truly appears that some people oppose what Trump does because of how much they dislike him, irrespective of what he is doing that may be is good for the country.

Michigan Republican Congresswoman Lisa McClain gave an example of just how wild and crazy the dislike of Trump is, saying, “President Trump could have the cure for cancer and the Democrats would still be upset."

But despite the fog that interferes with how some folks view things, the economy has some positive aspects, and some other factors will likely improve as time passes. The following information was provided by WhiteHouse.gov.

Egg prices are down 84 percent; gas is less than $3.00 per gallon for the first time in four years; the federal deficit is down 40 percent, the lowest since 2019; we have global contracts of $170 billion, which is 14 times as much as in the Biden administration.

Michael & Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to fund Trump Accounts for 25 million children; Black Friday showed a record-breaking $11.8 billion in online spending; we have $12 billion in aid for American farmers; the trade deficit fell to $52.8 billion, down 35 percent, year-over-year; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent projects 3 percent GDP growth this year, despite the shutdown.

Eli Lilly will build a $6.5 billion Texas plant; tariffs will bring Volvo XC60 production to the US.

On the foreign policy front, there has also been some positive movement. According to the U.S. State Department, “Under the first year of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s leadership, the State Department has implemented a bold America First foreign policy focused on making America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.

“Since January, the State Department has helped stop the flow of deadly drugs into the United States, created American jobs by advancing commercial interests abroad, secured additional defense investments from our allies, streamlined foreign assistance programs, and ushered in a new era of peace through strength, all while slashing waste and reorganizing the agency to ensure that our government serves the American people as efficiently and as effectively as possible.”

The State Department has also done some house-cleaning. It “secured cost savings of $270,860,693 via 659 descoped contracts and 533 contracts that were terminated or not renewed, as reflected in the Federal Procurement Data System. The Department trimmed travel budgets, spending $100 million less on travel than last year.”

The Cato Institute reports that the number of federal employees has dropped from about 3,000,000 at the beginning of 2025 to less than 2,750,000, a reduction of approximately 250,000 as of early December. Fewer federal employees require less tax money for their salaries, lowering federal spending a bit.

One of the areas drawing the most anti-Trump opposition is the effort to remove illegal aliens from the country, focusing primarily on those with criminal records or criminal charges. Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, and illegal reentry is a felony.

Numbers from December show that more than 2.5 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, including an estimated 1.9 million self-deportations and more than 622,000 deportations, as reported on the DHS website.

Last year, between Jan. 20 and Dec. 11, about 595,000 illegal aliens had been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Department of Homeland Security reported that 70 percent, or approximately 416,000 illegals, had "criminal convictions or pending criminal charges" in the United States.

While so many Democrats/leftists/progressives condemn the actions of ICE to remove illegal and often criminal aliens from blue cities and states, the number of that group who have expressed sorrow or horror because of the many Americans who have been murdered or otherwise attack by illegal aliens remains quite small.

 The Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) posted a list of hundreds of Americans who were murdered by illegal aliens, or were died from actions such as vehicle wrecks.

In comments prior to the list of those killed, ALIPAC noted the following: “We did not include our thousands of documented cases of illegals raping, robbing, assaulting, and harming Americans in other ways to focus this section on those who lost their lives due to our government's failure to protect our states and citizens from invaders.”

The Trump administration has a long way to go to get things where Trump wants them to be, and where the 77 million Americans who voted for him want them to be. But many of these items take time to evolve, and things are moving in the right direction.

Coal has been and will be an important factor in our lives

 

October 10, 2023

Some of us remember the days of many years ago being in downtown Bluefield, West Virginia and looking at the then-Norfolk & Western railyard, and seeing dozens, perhaps hundreds of train cars filled with coal, waiting to be taken to market. We also saw dozens of empty cars waiting to be taken to the mines to be refilled.

Those were the days when Bluefield, southern West Virginia and southwest Virginia were bustling with businesses and higher populations, largely due to a vibrant coal industry. But, alas, things began to change, and Bluefield and the surrounding area are much different today as a result.

Changes to coal’s popularity and broad usage have had a big impact on our area and other coal-producing areas. Some of the change was due to normal evolution, as other fuels became more popular and took more of the market. 

But more recently it has been a deliberate effort to kill coal as a fuel, highlighted by President Joe Biden and his fellow “progressives” as they drive toward the goal of killing fossil fuels in the name of protecting the environment.

In addition to, or perhaps a part of that effort is the announcement by former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg of a $500 million commitment to expand the Beyond Carbon campaign. Its goal is to close the nation’s remaining coal-fired power plants, to cut natural gas plant capacity in half, and stop any new gas plants from being opened within the next six years.

An email from the West Virginia Coal Association (WVCA) contains a statement from the president of the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, Rachel Gleason. She commented that “It is an absolute attack on our state, our livelihoods, and our families. It is un-American that someone would use their wealth to destroy our state and nation’s industrial base and also seek to send a large segment of the 381,000 American workers in industry to the unemployment line while destabilizing electric reliability and security in America.” 

Likewise, our area will be further affected by this action. And Chris Hamilton, President of the West Virginia Coal Association, expressed his concerns about the future if this effort continues: “Energy experts agree that the U.S. will not have enough reliable energy production to meet demand, and Bloomberg’s efforts, if successful, may result in black- and brown-outs across the country. Bloomberg, the ultra-liberal national Democrat Party, and their environmental extremist group co-conspirators are marching America off an energy cliff and dooming American families to darker days.”  

This also concerns other coal-producing states. Wyoming’s Mining Association Executive Director, Travis Deti, also commented on this development. “It truly is astonishing to see an eccentric billionaire spend his fortune on cutting off people’s electricity. Bloomberg should be held accountable for his callous actions.”

In a communication from the WVCA, Hamilton tells about the coal industry today, and paints the dismal picture that West Virginia faces: “Remarkably, there’s been over $8 billion dollars in new investments in West Virginia mining operations over the past several years, including approximately $2 billion in 2022-2023. These investment dollars may not be of much value to those chasing shiny objects or, like President Biden, forcing a questionable transition away from fossil energy, but to 50,000-plus West Virginians who show up at a mine every day it is extremely important, and will serve to keep our state’s coal industry a vital part of West Virginia’s economy for decades to come.

“The impact the production of met coal alone has on West Virginia is significant, generating approximately $9.6 billion in total economic activity, supporting about 30,500 jobs, contributing nearly $554 million in tax revenue for US state and local governments, and producing about $2.5 billion in labor income in 2019. West Virginia is the leading producer of met coal nationally and we supplied nearly 63 percent of all the met coal distributed to U.S. coke plants.

“The coal industry also provides jobs in predominantly more rural areas of the state, allowing employees who choose to work in the sector the opportunity to stay in their communities.”

Whether the efforts of Biden and the others in the manic drive away from fossil fuels are built upon a true concern for the environment, or just one more effort to increase the level of control government has over the people it is designed to serve, is open to debate.

But if they were giving any value to the many scientists who say the war on CO2 is based upon faulty data, and that the country will not be able to function satisfactorily without a substantial amount of fossil fuel energy for many years in the future, they would not be so blindly determined to continue this war.

Some of the information presented comes from America's Coal Associations (ACA) which represent 381,000 American Workers and $261 billion in America’s economy. The ACA issued its statement on behalf of a dozen coal organizations across the country.

The problems of killing coal and the other fossil fuels are far from over.

While millions are unemployed, millions of jobs go unfilled

A Dow Jones survey of economists earlier this year showed that one million new jobs would be added to the economy in April. Instead, only about a quarter of that number were produced, as just 266,000 new jobs were recorded. And, instead of the unemployment rate dropping from 6.0 percent in March to 5.8 percent in April, it rose to 6.1 percent.

That is sharply higher that the 50-year low of 3.5 percent in February of 2020, before the COVID pandemic hit.

This result received not-pleasant headlines. “Hiring was a huge letdown in April,” CNBC reported. Bloomberg said, “The numbers are out, and on the top line they are way worse than expected.” And Axios called it “the biggest miss, relative to expectations, in the history of the payrolls report.”

Digging into the specifics of this disappointing result, DailyWire.com noted that “The black unemployment rate increased, 18,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, no construction jobs were added, unemployment for Americans without any college education increased, and women had a net loss in jobs.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that nearly 10 million Americans, 9.8 million to be exact, remained unemployed in Biden’s economy.”

The New York Post reported that prices have increased for some goods, described as “surging due to shortages connected to supply-chain issues and other factors.” The story went on to say that some economists believe the country will experience inflation for months.

CNN’s Christine Romans said that “if you haven’t felt [inflation] yet, it’s coming.” She predicted higher prices for many goods, such as toilet paper, diapers, soft drinks, plane tickets, and a full tank of gas, adding that, “Whirlpool is raising prices of some of its appliances by up to 12 percent.”

The Post noted that business owners, especially in the retail and travel industries, are struggling to recruit new workers. And it cited comments by economists and companies that blame government stimulus payments for making it more attractive for people to remain on unemployment than for going to work. They make more money on unemployment than on the job, and going back to work and making less money would actually make things harder on their families.

This idea has been advanced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As reported on Daily Wire: “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce directly blamed the Biden administration’s stimulus spending for the worsening economy, saying that he was paying people to not work.”

The Chamber said, “The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,” and suggested: “One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit.” 

These $300 supplements result in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working, according to the Chamber’s analysis. Others do just as well, or nearly as well, on unemployment as when working.

Officially, there were 9.8 million Americans unemployed last month. And, there are 6.9 million jobs needing workers to fill them. Normally, thousands of jobs would have been created each month without the pandemic, according to Elise Gould, senior economist with the progressive Economic Policy Institute. She estimates that due to this factor, the number of unfilled jobs would be between 9 and 11 million. 

Some are asking if this condition is accidental, or if government is deliberately disincentivizing people from working to make them more dependent on government. The socialists among us would surely celebrate such action.

Whether it is a deliberate action or not, the country is suffering from too many people sitting on the sidelines. Tens of thousands of businesses have found it difficult or impossible to reopen, or to expand to previous operation levels.

Last week, CNBC reported on a March survey by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which “found that 42 percent of owners had job openings that could not be filled, a record high. Ninety-one percent of those hiring or trying to hire reported few or no qualified applicants for the positions they were trying to fill.”

Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center, commented that business owners “have made it to this point and they’ve adjusted their business operations to get through the worst of the pandemic, and now they are saddled with not being able to increase business operations when they find the opportunities.”

Many businesses have raised wages to attract workers, but many others cannot raise wages. The restrictions on occupancy in restaurants, bars and similar businesses reduce business income. Increasing costs by raising wages when income is made lower by restrictions puts the business at further risk of closure.

And yes, some workers are worried about being exposed to the coronavirus if they return to work.

The government must stop these supplemental unemployment payments that make it more attractive for some formerly employed folks to stay on unemployment instead of getting back to work. The repercussions of not ending these payments is a very serious problem for small businesses, and for the economy.

Government’s job is to create an environment conducive to businesses, not to have policies that discourage people from working.

Jobs combat poverty; over-regulation discourages businesses and jobs

Magatte Wade was born in the West African nation of Senegal, was educated in Germany and France, then came to the U.S. She is a frequent speaker at business conferences and college campuses, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, and Wharton. She has started businesses and with her husband is working to create schools in Senegal.

Part of one of her addresses featured on YouTube dealt with how not to be poor. What she said to her audience is a good lesson for everyone.

“People are poor. Why are you poor?” She answered, “you're poor when you don't have enough money to meet your basic needs.” 

And then, the big question: “Where does a source of income come from for most of us?” The answer is, as former Vice President Joe Biden famously said: that three-letter word: ‘JOBS.’

This is not a bolt from the blue to most of us, but to her audiences in colleges and in her native Senegal, this solution may not be so obvious. In fact, some of her audiences responded that jobs actually come from government.

Yes, she responded, some jobs are provided by government. But where does government get the money to pay its employees?

“It comes from taxes. People who work, employees; people who hire them, the companies and employers, pay [taxes] so that we in turn pay these government people.”

So, “we're back to commerce … we're back to business.”

“So I say,” Wade continues, “okay, if ‘jobs’ is the solution to this massive, massive problem we have out there of poverty, then don't you think that maybe we should try to think about where jobs come from?”

If jobs are the answer, and jobs come from entrepreneurs, businesses, “then don't you think that we should really try and pay attention to what type of environment those businesses get to operate in,” Wade asked?

What a concept! Since businesses large and small provide the jobs people need to avoid poverty, and enable workers to pay taxes, and pay taxes themselves to support the government, let’s be careful about the environment that we create for businesses.

In America, it should be easy for someone with a new idea or just the drive to start a business that will provide goods or services, and hire some people to work in it, so long as it follows reasonable laws and regulations. The operative word is, “reasonable.”

Far too often, this is not easy, and sometimes impossible. 

Writing in Business Insider, Michael Snyder addresses this issue. “Small business in the United States is literally being suffocated by red tape. We like to think that we live in ‘the land of the free,’ but the truth is that our lives and our businesses are actually tightly constrained by millions of rules and regulations.” 

“Today there is a ‘license’ for just about every business activity,” Snyder adds. “In fact, in some areas of the country today you need a ‘degree’ and multiple ‘licenses’ before you can even submit an application for permission to start certain businesses.” It gets worse. “And if you want to actually hire some people for your business, the paperwork nightmare gets far worse. It is a wonder that anyone in America is still willing to start a business from scratch and hire employees.”

“The truth is that the business environment in the United States is now so incredibly toxic that millions of Americans have simply given up and don't even try to work within the system anymore.”

To put the regulatory issue into perspective, the Federal Register is where federal rules are catalogued. The number of pages in it was about 2,600 in 1936. That’s a lot of pages of rules, but it pales in comparison to the calendar year of 2016, when the number of Federal Register pages stood at 95,854.

Certain variables factor into this: Some rules take more pages than others, and page size is also important. However, most novels have 250 words per page, and a really long novel has 425 pages. At the end of 2016, the Federal Register had as many pages as 225 long novels, and 383 normal-sized ones.

President Donald Trump has implemented efforts to reduce regulations by signing an executive order on Jan. 31, 2017 for the agency requesting a new regulation to cut two older regulations.

A Daily Caller story said that the Trump administration “reported $23 billion in savings from 176 deregulatory actions in fiscal year 2018. Even more consequential, the administration has issued 65 percent fewer ‘significant’ rules — those with costs that exceed $100 million a year — than the Obama administration, and 51 percent fewer than the Bush administration, after 22 months in office.”

That’s a start, but a lot more needs to be done to give Americans the freedom and ability to start a business or get a job.

A final word from Magatte Wade: “Not living up to our potential is a failure for which the only person who can possibly be responsible is oneself.“

She’s right, of course, but things like over-regulation make that much more difficult for even those who are determined to succeed.

Wouldn’t it be great if we would buy “Made in America” again?”

 

Part of President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mission is to reinvigorate U.S. manufacturing, and like nearly everything Trump says or does, that idea produced much criticism. A lot of that is the automatic Trump-hater response, but some resulted from reasoned thought and philosophical differences.

National Review roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson discussed this in an essay titled “Made in America: Not Important in the 21^st Century,” where he offers examples of products assembled in America that actually contain some or perhaps most parts made in other countries. The question is: do these products really deserve the “Made in America” label?

Calling Trump’s encouragement for us to buy products “Made in America” to support our manufacturers “a good slogan … [but] bad and incoherent policy,” reason.com’s Nick Gillespie went on to note that using more expensive American labor would increase the price of our products, and protectionist measures to exclude foreign-made materials from our markets runs counter both to the personal freedom the USA provides us, as well as the concept of free trade.

America is a “post-industrial nation,” Gillespie noted, and “the fact is that manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the work force peaked in 1943 and has declined ever since.”

He then urged pursuing policies that create new jobs, new opportunities and new wealth through “lower government spending, flatter and less distorting taxes, and less regulation.”

Opposition to Trump’s idea also includes the Chamber of Commerce and major players in the energy sector. As the Commerce Department worked to meet a late July deadline to present a plan to the president requiring oil and gas pipelines to be made with American-made steel, Trump’s allies in the energy sector warned that this might play havoc with his goal of energy dominance.

Gillespie is correct about the low percentage of manufacturing jobs. This decline occurred over many years, largely through natural progression, but as Gillespie hinted, external factors have also contributed. They had a significant negative effect that increased the decline, and removing those influences can provide some relief to manufacturing job losses.

Whereas technological advancement reduces the need for human work, natural progress in foreign countries is also a factor. In poor nations, people gladly work for pennies or quarters a day. While it may seem cruel to some of us to pay people so little for their efforts, those pennies or quarters are what enable them to achieve a better life in the less developed economy of their country.

If those workers can produce things that cost a fraction of what they cost if made by American workers, even after shipping them across the waters, businesses will go for the less expensive product in order to both enhance their economic situation, and to keep the price of their products lower.

But we often do things that increase our costs compared with other countries. High taxes and over-regulation on businesses, both of which put pressure on American companies to reduce costs to remain competitive, help push manufacturing jobs overseas.

The coal-mining sector is a good example of the effect of external factors. While natural gas usage was increasing and coal use was naturally trending down, Obama’s war on coal sped up that process through anti-coal regulations. That forced a dramatic decrease in coal use, wreaking havoc and harm much greater than if natural economic processes had been allowed to work.

Like coal mining, other manufacturing jobs are affected by the negative factors of over-regulation and high taxes. As Gillespie suggested, flatter and less distorting taxes, and less regulation would help make American steel and other products more competitive.

Other factors will also help to make American products more competitive, and provide a boost to U.S. manufacturing, such as a border-adjustment tax. The purpose of this tax is not to generate tax revenue to offset tax cuts, but to create jobs by evening out the playing field.

The U.S. is one of the few countries that does not tax imported goods and reward those exported to other countries, explains Newt Gingrich in his new book “Understanding Trump.” Taxing goods coming into the country, as other countries do to American goods, makes domestic goods more competitive, and helps create jobs and higher wages.

Gingrich also said that this “incentivizes businesses that want to sell in the United States as well as in other countries to move here, because it allows them to avoid the import tax.”

And lower the 35 percent corporate tax rate to something near that of nations to which American businesses have moved jobs. This will encourage those companies to bring back some, perhaps a lot, of the $2.5 trillion that they hold offshore to avoid the high U.S. corporate tax.

American manufacturing cannot return to 1943 levels, of course, but we have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot with anti-business policies. We need to reduce corporate tax rates, impose a border-adjustment tax, and roll back harmful regulations to free up American manufacturers.

This will enable the creation of thousands of new jobs, increase productivity levels and bring in new tax revenue. It will make it easier and smarter to buy products “Made in America.”

People without jobs, and jobs without people

Back in 2008, Sen. Joe Biden, D-NJ, then a candidate for vice president, commented that the economic plan his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, R-NM, released does not address the number one problem facing the middle class, and “it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S."

Whether you spell “jobs” with three or four letters, having enough jobs is a critical issue today. President Donald Trump has made bringing back jobs that were moved out of the country a major goal, as well as improving the economy so that new jobs will be created. So far, several companies have pledged to bring jobs back to the U.S.

The U.S. jobs picture at this time is a subject of conflicting numbers. A contributor to a Bloomberg Television program last week referred to the U.S. job situation as “near full employment,” obviously referring to the currently very attractive, though horribly misleading, U-3 Unemployment Rate, which stands at 4.8 percent.

The U-3, however, ignores the 95 million working age Americans who have given up and dropped out of, or are only marginally attached to, the labor force. Leaving out this huge contingent of Americans working less than full time and those not working at all, but wanting a job, pushes the U-3 rate down into respectable territory. However, those folks are included in the calculation of the U-6 Unemployment Rate, which shows unemployment of nine percent, a long way from “near full employment.”

Not only are there tens of millions of Americans of working age who want to work sitting on the sidelines, but there are also lots of employers with millions of unfilled jobs looking for workers. The Glassdoor Economic Research Blog lists 5.1 million unique U.S. job listings, and calculates the total value of estimated base pay at $272.6 billion that the economy is missing out on because the jobs are unfilled. Those open jobs, which average about $53,600 annually, represent lost productivity to employers, and good opportunities for workers.

“Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe puts the unfilled jobs number a half-million higher than Glassdoor at 5.6 million. Many of these are blue-collar jobs, for mechanics, welders, electricians and so forth – the so-called “skilled trades.” Rowe notes that learning blue-collar skills actually teaches you more than just that skill, and laments how the idea that everyone needs a college education has redirected many young people who might have pursued a blue-collar skill for their livelihood that fills an open slot. Instead, they are in college pursuing a degree that they hope will serve them well as adults.

The technology sector also has many open jobs, according to cio.com, a branch of IDG Enterprise catering to chief information officers. CIO utilized Glassdoor information and one of its community experts, Scott Dobroski. “There's a lot of economic opportunity that's going unfulfilled in technology right now, both inside and outside purely IT companies,” Dobroski said. “Retail, professional services, manufacturing, healthcare, web and mobile platforms – all these types of companies are IT companies, and they all need software engineers," he said.

The CIO story noted that “When broken out by job title, roles with the highest levels of demand and in shortest supply tend to have the greatest value associated, like software engineers, for which there are 13,198 open jobs with a value of $1.3 billion.” And, "These aren't unnecessary roles that companies can simply ignore or leave vacant – these IT roles, in particular, are critical for growth, innovation and competition.”

On Rowe’s point, many young people choose college who really would be better off pursuing a job that doesn’t require college. “With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated,” according to a USA Today report on a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles. Further, the graduates have to take lower paying jobs while they await a job opening in the field of their college degree.

According to the College Board, the average “moderate” budget for the academic year 2016-2017 was $24,610 for an in-state public college, and $49,320 for a private college. A four-year degree, therefore, will cost on average nearly $100,000 at an in-state public school and nearly $200,000 at a private school.

Quite a few college graduates with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt chose a career field that may have “felt” right for them, but was not a vibrant field that would provide them a career opportunity. Consequently, they cannot find a job in their chosen field and they must work a lower paying job waiting for a job in their field to open up, and their steep college loan debts eat away at their meager earnings.

All the while, many good paying jobs that fill an immediate productivity and economic need remain unfilled because of a lack of trained job seekers. Many, perhaps most, of these jobs, require much less of an investment than a college degree, and some of them teach the skill on the job, requiring no up front investment.

October’s jobs and economic numbers do not warrant much celebration

President Barack Obama’s last chance before the election to show that Democrat policies are producing favorable economic and job conditions has ended, and October’s economic numbers contain some positive news, but not a lot.

Among the better news, the most often cited unemployment rate dropped slightly, and average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 10 cents.

President Obama and the Democrats are thrilled that the U-3 unemployment rate dropped a bit in October to 4.9 percent, the same level at which it stood in June, July and August before rising to 5.0 percent in September. Unemployment of 4.9 percent is a respectable rate, so long as other factors do not provide contradictory facts. But, alas, they do.

The U-3 rate is one of six different looks at alternative measures of labor underutilization in the country, and counts those in the labor force who are working as well as those who have lost their job, but are actively looking for another one.

The weakness of the U-3 is, however, that there are a tremendous number of Americans of working age who are not working or looking for a job any longer because they became discouraged at being unable to find a job, and have dropped out of the labor force, although they would gladly go back to work if the business climate improved and the economy produced a job for them. The U-6 rate reflects the unemployment rate with these folks included in the calculation, and stood at 9.5 percent at the end of October. The U-6 rate is far more reflective of the actual health of the employment environment than the more frequently cited U-3 rate, and 9.5 percent is not good.

Thus far in 2016, employment growth has averaged 181,000 per month, compared with an average monthly increase of 229,000 in 2015. Neither level has been enough to help those millions of discouraged workers who have given up looking for work, as demonstrated by the U-6 unemployment number.

In October, 1.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force. While total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 161,000 in October, 487,000 discouraged workers dropped out of the workforce; three times as many people quit the workforce because they couldn’t find a job as were hired for a new job. That explains the small improvent in the U-3 rate.

“The sectors witnessing the strongest boost in hiring over the past year included education, health and professional and business services in October,” write Nick Timiraos and Josh Zumbrun on The Wall Street Journal blog. “The sectors with the weakest performance included manufacturing and mining.” Service sector jobs thrive while manufacturing sector jobs continue to suffer. And, since the last recession began in December of 2007, the number of new full-time positions and the number of new part-time positions are nearly equal.

Neither of these are good signs. Most people want full-time jobs, but they are in short supply, and that means lower earnings as a part-timer, or having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. And in terms of worker earnings, manufacturing jobs most often pay better wages than service jobs.

The Labor Force Participation Rate was at 62.8 percent at the end of October, muddling along at levels not seen since the late 1970s.

A participation rate of 62.8 percent means that of every 1,000 people of working age that are actively in the labor force or have dropped out but are willing and want to work, only 628 have a job, a little less than two out of three. That translates to 94.5 million Americans of working age that are not working. The highest the participation rate has been in 2016 is 63.0 percent and the lowest is 62.6. Until after the recession began near the end of 2007, the participation rate hovered around 66.0, and nothing President Obama has done in eight years has reversed the steady slide and the leveling out in the 62 percent range.

After seven years in office the Obama economy had produced an average real GDP growth rate of a weak 1.55 percent, ranking Obama as fourth from the bottom of previous Presidents of the United States. In October 2016, GDP registered a growth rate of 2.9 percent, by far the best this year. However, by comparison, U.S. real GDP growth averaged 3.79 percent from 1790 to 2000. The Obama administration’s over-regulation and poor tax policies hampered business activity, hence job production.

As voters go to the polls to complete the process of choosing Obama’s successor, a major question is whether they will vote to elect Hillary Clinton and stay on the present failed course for four or perhaps eight more years of economic weakness, millions of Americans out of work, weak GDP, and jobs forced overseas by foolish tax and regulatory policy.

Or, will they vote for a change by electing Donald Trump, who at least very well understands business and how economic policies like those of Obama and Clinton harm the very people they are elected to serve. Let us hope for the latter, and provide America the chance for better things in the future.

Presidential campaign has not focused much on important issues

The presidential campaign has not adequately addressed the issues and problems facing the United States, but the next president has a mountain of problems needing attention.

Looking at polls from major news organizations – CBS News/New York Times; ABC News/Washington Post; NBC News/Wall Street Journal – from May through October of this year, the economy/jobs is the leading issue in all polls, followed by the combination of terrorism, national security and immigration. Tam Warner Minton, writing on The Huffington Post blog, suggests that the Supreme Court is the most important of the issues.

All of these issues are important, but two of them – The economy/jobs; and the U.S. Supreme Court – are already affecting the country.

The thing to remember when evaluating the way Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton approach these problems is that one of them loves and lives for big and bigger government, while the other plainly prefers the private sector.

Looking at the economy and job creation, Trump has actually created jobs through his hotels, golf courses and casinos; while Clinton’s decades in the public sector leaves her with no real experience in this important sphere.

Her approach to jobs and the economy will rely on increased regulation, reducing taxes on the middle class and making the rich pay more. The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) analyzed the Clinton plan and said, “As currently presented, the Clinton tax proposals would increase taxes on high-income earners, reduce the exceptions to the corporate income tax, and increase estate taxes, in an effort to raise more revenue and bring greater equity to the current U.S. tax system. According to our NCPA-DCGE model, the plan would generate $615 billion in revenue over 10 years, with most of that increase coming from the federal personal income tax. The cost to the economy would be a net loss of 211,000 jobs by 2026, and a reduction in real GDP of 0.9 percent.”

Clinton has criticized Trump’s tax cutting policy, deriding it as “Trumped-up trickle-down,” a cute phrase, but a horribly ignorant economic reality. The NCPA explains why this idea will out perform Clinton’s: “Rather, insofar as tax cuts raise after-tax profits, they induce taxpayers to expand investment and, in so doing, wages, and jobs. Insofar as they raise after-tax wages, they induce taxpayers to enter the labor force and work longer hours. This is not the result of money “trickling down” from one person to another but of the reduction of disincentives to invest and work that are inherent to any tax code,” and especially one that punishes people with money to invest in job-creating economic activity.

Where the U.S. Supreme Court is concerned, it can cause great harm to the nation if Justices stray from their Constitutional limits, and they often do.

In response to a question in a presidential debate, Clinton said: “If I have the opportunity to make any Supreme Court appointments, I’m going to look broadly and widely for people who represent the diversity of our country, who bring some common-sense, real-world experience.”

This answer displays a shocking lack of understanding of the job of the Supreme Court, and the purpose and meaning of the U.S. Constitution. The Court’s duty and function have nothing to do with ideas of diversity, or the supposed benefits of real-world experience. Its job is essentially to resolve legal disputes, being sure always to uphold the principles of the Constitution.

The Constitution is alive, but it is not a “living document,” the meaning of which would change with the winds of societal preferences. The Founders based the Constitution upon important principles that were intended for the ages. They understood that at some future point there may be a true need for modification, and they created a mechanism for doing so. That mechanism is not simply a majority of Supreme Court Justices wanting to make a change; it is a clear and difficult process, difficult by design to prevent foolish modifications to satisfy some momentary desire.

There are essentially two approaches to how justices interpret the Constitution: conservatism/originalism, which honors and adheres to the actual language and original intent of the Constitution; and liberalism, which is a willingness to interpret the language for some social or political end, which results in making law from the bench instead of in the Congress, as the Constitution requires.

Packing the Court with Justices who do not honor the original meaning of the Constitution in order to achieve some narrow ideological objective is a form of subversion, and Hillary Clinton is married to that goal.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, understands the great wrong of that goal, and has vowed to nominate judicial conservatives/originalists to fill Court vacancies.

The left likes for things to be easy: easy border control and easy citizenship; easy changing of the Constitution; easy to vote through early voting and without a picture ID; and easy to live off of government support, rather than facing the rigors of a job, among them.

Such laxness and failure to uphold traditional standards makes it much easier to turn America to liberalism/socialism through subversive measures than trying to persuade people to accept it. We must resist these efforts.

Lipstick on a pig: Administration putting a spin on the U.S. economy

It is natural for politicians to put things in the most favorable light, and the worse the general situation, the greater the need to do so. That serves as an appropriate introduction to the White House’s June economic analysis, which is summarized thusly: “The economy added 287,000 jobs in June, as labor force participation rose and the broadest measure of labor market slack fell.” As far as that statement goes, it is true.

That new jobs number is a decent number – the best jobs figure since October – and miles ahead of May’s revised number of only 11,000 new jobs. But it is not an outstanding number, and is only one of several really significant numbers.

Back in December 2009, six months after the end of the recession and 11 months into Barack Obama’s first term, economist Paul Krugman said that 300,000 new jobs each month were necessary to make up the job losses of the recession over the next five years, so the June figure falls short of that number. In the weak Obama recovery new job production has only met or exceeded 300,000 six times in 89 months. The last was in November of 2014 at 331,000.

Whether the 287,000 number holds up after revision we won’t know until August. May’s preliminary number was revised down by more than two-thirds to a mere 11,000; therefore August may show a downward revision, an upward revision, or a number that is pretty close to the preliminary figure.

Other relevant numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data set for June include an increase in the U-3 unemployment rate, the one President Obama prefers to cite, from 4.7 to 4.9 percent. Despite the increase, the U-3 rate still looks good because it discounts all those marginally attached to the labor force that involuntarily work part-time instead of full-time, or have given up looking for work because they cannot find a job. Those workers are included in the U-6 rate, which more accurately represents reality, and stood at 9.6 percent in June, and improved one-tenth of a percent since May, as some of the previously disaffected workers started seeking employment again.

Even so, the Labor Force Participation rate was still at the late-70s level of 62.7 percent. From 66.0 percent in December of 2007 when the recession began, the trend in the participation rate has been steadily downward and has been below 63 percent since March of 2014. The labor force is made up of those age 16 and older that are working, looking for a job, and not in prison or in the military, and totaled 94,517,000 people last month. That means that 56,228,000 working age Americans are not working, and not in the military or in prison.

In June, 1.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force. These are individuals who wanted to work, were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

Another 5.8 million individuals prefer full-time employment, but are working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they haven’t been able to find a full-time job.

The BLS reported, “Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates [U-3] for adult women (4.5 percent) and Whites (4.4 percent) rose in June. The rates for adult men (4.5 percent), teenagers (16.0 percent), Blacks (8.6 percent), Asians (3.5 percent), and Hispanics  (5.8 percent) showed little or no change.”

The 9.6 percent U-6 rate tells one part of the story, but the actual harm of the administration’s policies that keep the economy from cranking up are another story.

“Today’s jobs number can’t hide the ongoing struggles facing the country’s main jobs producers – small businesses – which are overwhelmed by over-taxation, over-regulation, and a lack of access to credit,” said Jobs Creators Network (JCN) president Alfredo Ortiz. “And it shouldn’t distract us from an underwhelming labor force participation rate—still the lowest figure since the 1970s.”

National Federation of Independent Business president and CEO Juanita Duggan commented, “Each month our survey shows that small business owners are trying to hire qualified workers,” and, “The job openings are there, but owners are not going to invest in new employment when labor costs are becoming insurmountable, and the political climate is wildly uncertain.”

All the way back in November of 2010 President Obama was already claiming a “new normal” for the economy: “What is a danger is that we stay stuck in a new normal where unemployment rates stay high,” he said on CBS “60 Minutes.”

Today, with a real unemployment close to 10 percent, Obama may be viewed as a pretty good prophet. However, rather than seeing the future, he engineered it, and the term “new normal” is much less a reality than an excuse. As the JCN’s Ortiz noted, high taxes, rampant and intrusive regulation and limited credit do not a good recovery make.

America deserves better. November’s election provides the opportunity to elect as president someone who understands job creation.

Besides benefiting pandering pols, why have a $15 minimum wage?

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Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders literally screamed through a bullhorn at a campaign event in support of raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15. “I’ve been pleased to march and struggle with all workers in this country who are fighting for $15 an hour and a union,” he told the crowd. “We are the wealthiest country in the history of the world, people should not have to work for starvation wages.”

The City of Seattle, Washington last year raised its minimum wage to $15 to take effect this month, San Francisco and Los Angeles, California followed suit shortly thereafter, and last week the California State Legislature passed a measure to raise the state’s minimum wage in steps to $15 by 2022, and Governor Jerry Brown pledged to sign it.

Politicians frequently advocate for higher minimum wages, which attracts a lot of positive attention from low wage earners. Campaign speeches focus on how hard it is to live on minimum wage, as if a large proportion of the workforce earns the minimum and that large numbers earning at that level are trying to support a family, and all of these people really are being enslaved by greedy businesses. Facts, predictably, tell a different story.

At the end of 2014 the number of Americans 16 and older earning hourly wages was 77.2 million. Of those, just under 3 million earned the minimum wage, about 4 percent. Among all workers that year, hourly and salaried, those earning at or below the minimum was just 2 percent, and only 1.04 million minimum wage workers held full-time jobs. Of the entire full-time workforce, only 0.7 percent earned at or below the minimum wage.

Who are these 3 million minimum wage hourly workers? Nearly half – 48.2 percent – are between 16 and 24 years of age, and 2.6 percent are 65 or older. More than half work in food preparation and related “hospitality” industries, 31.4 percent are high school graduates, 23.1 percent did not earn the high school diploma, and only 9.1 percent have a college degree.

Most of them are second or third earners in their household; the average family income of a minimum-wage worker exceeds $50,000 a year. Furthermore, most minimum wage workers graduate to higher wages quickly as their skills and experience increase, usually getting a raise in less than a year.

People generally make minimum wage when they get an after-school job, or to help out while they are going to college. They make minimum wage for jobs that require little skill, and are often supplemented by tips. People make higher wages when they gain experience or hold jobs requiring higher levels of skill. Professionals and technically trained workers make more than fast food workers, checkout clerks and grocery baggers, as it should be.

Those who run businesses have to decide how much they can afford to pay for the different types of jobs in their business. Wages are based upon the importance of each job to the business, the experience and skill of individual workers, the number of people available for each job, and the overall cost of labor and other expenses, balanced by business income.

When government edicts artificially increase labor costs, businesses must offset the increase by cutting costs, increasing income, or a combination. Every minimum wage increase of $1 an hour costs a business about $2,500 per employee per year in wages and payroll costs. Other employees making a little more than the minimum will either require a raise, or deserve one, dramatically increasing the labor costs. Something has to change to offset that expense.

Businesses likely will reduce staff, particularly cutting positions where several workers have the same job. Maybe they employ robots or other machines to do certain tasks. Have you been to a restaurant that has a touch-screen device on each table? You can order and reorder some items and pay your bill with a machine.

There now is a robot burger maker that can turn out up to 360 burgers per hour. It can grind, stamp and grill made-to-order patties. It can cut and layer the lettuce, onions, pickles, tomatoes, etc., put them on a bun, and even wrap them up to go. This device would replace three full-time kitchen staff and ultimately cost the business less.

Higher labor costs mean that prices of many items will necessarily go up, some significantly. Even as minimum wage workers get more money, they and everyone else will see their cost of living increase, gobbling up a good bit of the higher wage.

Few Americans earning the minimum wage really “need” a higher wage to survive. Analyzing the coming increase in Alberta, Canada to $15 per hour, Robert P. Murphy and Charles Lammam of the Fraser Institute concluded, “In short, the minimum wage is neither an efficient nor effective strategy for helping the working poor.”

Minimum wage earners need to work their way to higher pay through education, training and gaining experience, like Americans have done for decades. A federally mandated minimum is, and always has been, a colossal mistake. It will reduce jobs among the very people it is supposed to help.