Jobs, not mobs!

Hat tip Gerard

Wages and jobs; jobs and wages!

Laura Ingraham gives Trump credit for being the first US President to stand up to China, which has become increasingly aggressive. She has Bob Lightheizer as a guest. He, as US Trade Representative, is trying to reverse a very bad trend for our workers, ranchers, and farmers: wages and jobs. Reduce the deficit!

Keeping the focus on jobs

Sundance reports at the Conservative Treehouse,

Earlier today President Trump led a discussion forum at the State Department library with cabinet members and corporate CEO’s to discuss ongoing economic policy and hear about the challenges.

One of the main challenges communicated by the business group was… wait for it.., yep, ObamaCare. This concern is directly connected to any tax reform plans and cuts to the heart of President Trump’s earlier economic strategy.

ObamaCare is, at the core, a massive tax program; and it becomes more difficult to navigate tax reform, with the anchor of ObamaCare dragging down opportunity for economic growth and the revenue growth that accompanies expansion.

Read more here.

Big focus on foreign policy

There will be a lot of focus on US foreign policy next week, beginning today with the NATO summit in Brussels, where Rex Tillerson addressed the group. Monday President Al Sisi of Egypt will be trump's guest. Al Sisi's friend Jordan’s King Abdullah II will meet with Trump and Tillerson on Wednesday. Then, on Friday Trump and T Rex host the entire China delegation of President Xi Jinping for the weekend in Mar-la-go, the Winter White House. Trump tweeted Thursday that he expects the China meeting to be difficult, since "we can no longer tolerate unfair trade balances and job losses."

hat tip The Conservative Treehouse

Nancy Pelosi refuses to clap for new American jobs.

hat tip Stephen Green

Carrier to keep most of its jobs in the US.

The Carrier plant in Indianapolis. The company had previously announced plans to move 2,000 factory jobs from Indiana to Mexico. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Nelson Schwartz reports in the New York Times,

From the earliest days of his campaign, Donald J. Trump made keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States his signature economic issue, and the decision by Carrier, the big air-conditioner company, to move 2,000 of them from Indiana to Mexico was a tailor-made talking point for him on the stump.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump and Mike Pence, Indiana’s governor and the vice-president elect, plan to appear at Carrier’s Indianapolis plant to announce they’ve struck a deal with the company to keep a majority of the jobs in the state, according to officials with the transition team as well as Carrier.

Read more here.

Flipping it

h/t Instapundit

Trump and jobs

Steve Reilly reports at USA Today,

Donald Trump casts himself as a protector of workers and jobs, but a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation found hundreds of people – carpenters, dishwashers, painters, even his own lawyers – who say he didn’t pay them for their work.

...the consistent circumstances laid out in those lawsuits and other non-payment claims raise questions about Trump’s judgment as a businessman, and as a potential commander in chief. The number of companies and others alleging he hasn’t paid suggests that either his companies have a poor track record hiring workers and assessing contractors, or that Trump businesses renege on contracts, refuse to pay, or consistently attempt to change payment terms after work is complete as is alleged in dozens of court cases.

...Edward Friel, of the Philadelphia cabinetry company allegedly shortchanged for the casino work, hired a lawyer to sue for the money, said his son, Paul Friel. But the attorney advised him that the Trumps would drag the case out in court and legal fees would exceed what they’d recover.

Read more here.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit suggests this for a Trump reply:

So the USA Today — very bad paper, they call it McPaper, but that’s unfair because McDonald’s offers real value, have you tried their dollar menu? Superb! — says I don’t pay my bills. That’s crazy, I’m like the best bill-payer you’ll ever see. I pay bills I haven’t even gotten yet.

But say they’re right, isn’t that what America needs, a guy who knows how to stiff creditors? See you people had the chance to elect Mitt Romney, a turnaround artist, a guy who’s really, really good at taking busted companies and fixing them. But instead you elected Obama, who’s doubled the national debt to $20 trillion, and when you count the unfunded obligations it’s more like 80 or 100 trillion, and America’s never gonna be able to pay all that. Never! We’re only still in business now because the Treasury’s good at stringing people along, and believe me, that’s something I understand too.

So when we go bust — and we will — don’t you want a guy at the helm who can stiff his creditors and still come out smelling like a rose? Of course you do! And that’s me, not Crooked Hillary!

Obamacare to cost U.S. two million jobs in the next decade

Doug Ware reports for UPI,

The Congressional Budget Office on Monday announced new findings that say the domestic economy will lose about 2 million jobs over the next decade due to President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act. The CBO said jobs will be lost partially because workers know they no longer need employment for health coverage.

Read more here.

Why have racial relations gotten worse under Obama?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at PJ Media,

A small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty — no more than 3-4% of the general population — is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed. Blacks are 5-8 times more likely to commit rather suffer an interracial crime, which makes up less than 10% of most violent crime. Both the analysis and solution have become taboo subjects. Writing the above is a near thought crime.

...would crime decline in the inner city if there was more emphasis on curbing illegitimacy, drug use, and single-mother families, while privileging study and academic excellence over sports and the cult of machismo?

...Few see resolution of the half-century-old argument, except that much of non-white America (Asians, East Asians, Arabs, Latinos, etc.) does not yet see racism as the cause of a lack of parity; e.g., so far there is not a Korean Al Sharpton, a Latino Jesse Jackson, or a Punjabi Louis Farrakhan.

... If the president’s own attorney general can exonerate Officer Darren Wilson and the president can still persist in referencing Ferguson, racial relations, as the polls suggest, are going to get even worse.

...Obama in recompense for favoring the aristocratic elite feels that by expanding food stamps, disability insurance, housing, legal, and education subsidies, etc., the lower classes will be satisfied in lieu of a high-paying job on a fracking rig, in construction, or welding on the Keystone pipeline.

...the subsidized lower classes still see little chance of getting all the stuff they see advertised on television and computers, or the opportunities of the middle classes, and don’t wish to accept that their smart phones, Kias and air conditioning make them princes compared to the wealthy of 1970. Throughout history, the absence of parity, not the lack of means, has been the criterion for revolution. I’d go further: the more affluent the consumer underclass becomes due to Chinese-made goods, inexpensive high-tech appurtenances, and federal and state largess, the angrier it become that others have even more. Looters focus on sneakers and electronic goods, not flour and vegetables. Should Obama cut taxes, lift regulations, become pro-energy and pro-growth, and reform entitlements and the tax code to expand the economy at 5-6% growth per annum, would not all sorts of new opportunities open up for African-Americans?

African-American elites envision the urban underclass the same way that some La Raza third-generation Latinos view impoverished illegal immigrants from Oaxaca. Social disparities among the poor become arguments for affirmative-action leverage for elites, as if Barack Obama getting into Harvard Law or Lisa Jackson serving as EPA administrator will lower the crime rate in Baltimore or help change attitudes about illegitimacy in Oakland. Until we confess class is a greater barometer of privilege than race, I see no solution to the escalating tensions. How odd that upscale, one-percent African-Americans at NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC monotonously blast white privilege, as if their own lives are always far more hurtful than those in Appalachia or rural Oklahoma.

Currently, blacks make up about 12% of the population. The president of the United States, the present (and former) attorney general of the United States, the secretary of Transportation, the secretary of Homeland Security, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the head of NASA are African American. Twenty-one percent of the Postal Service employees are African-American; seventeen percent of the entire federal work force is black. Seventy-eight percent of the NBA are African-American. Sixty-seven percent of NFL players are black. Sixteen percent of the teams have African-American head coaches; twenty-four percent of the teams have black general managers. Has the definition of diversity become that overrepresentation in some areas (the Left’s word, not mine) of African-Americans, based on percentages in the general population, is still diversity, while underrepresentation of blacks in the physics department at Caltech is proof of endemic racism? Or does a physics professor enjoy more perks and money than a NFL general manager?

We are asked to believe that an entire generation of lower middle-class white and mixed-race Americans who came of age not during Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, but during the half-century of affirmative action and diversity set-asides are guaranteed winning slots in American because of their “white privilege.” When I see the local, broke, and white tire-changer, somehow I don’t think his coming of age in the 1980s was easier than that of Jeh Johnson or Eric Holder. When I see a video in which a privileged young white elite at $65,000-per-year Wellesley or Amherst confesses to “white privilege,” I wonder how many hours he has welded in Tulare or she has done data entry in a carrel in San Jose. Many of our problems derive from black elites feeding off the guilt of compatriot white elites of a like class in a similar landscape, who claim to speak for all whites, as if they shared something when in fact they share nothing much at all. I suspect that more white males feel an affinity, a stronger one based on shared ideas, with Ben Carson than any affinity on the basis of race with Hillary Clinton or John Kerry.

Because of our dishonesty on matters of race and the elite’s use of it for their own privilege, we will see not only little progress, but also much retrogression.

Read more here.

Can we nominate Victor Davis Hanson for President?

Victor Davis Hanson wonders

So how hard is it for a Republican simply to say, “I oppose illegal immigration because (1) it is illegal. It undermines the sanctity of the law and discriminates against the law-abiding waiting in line to enter the U.S. legally. (2) It benefits corporate grandees at the expense of working people. (3) It is driven by self-serving elites of the ethnic-grievance industry to enhance their own advantage, rather than to help poor folks struggling to find decent wages and schools.

Cannot a Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union simply say, “Mr. President, you are shamelessly taking credit for gas and oil production that you did all in your power to thwart. The middle class is enjoying a temporary cut in gas prices, despite, not because of, you.”

How hard it is for Republicans to say to liberals, “I accuse! The wealthy have their security details, most of them armed. The underclass has access to illegal weaponry as the armed crime sprees in a Detroit or Chicago attest. Why then go after the middle class, who neither outsource their security nor break the law? Before we issue sweeping edicts aimed at the law-abiding, let us disarm all the security guards of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., and put away for good the criminals who use illegal firearms to hurt the innocent.”

Hanson goes on to show how Obama's policies are hurting the middle class and young people. On fairness:

At some point cannot a conservative make the case that liberalism, as preached by its elites, is a psychological mechanism to shield wealthy progressives from the ramifications of their own ideology?

Cannot a Republican ask Obama at least to forgo Martha’s Vineyard next summer or the next zillionaire golfing outing if he wants to rant about the perks of the 1%?

How liberal was it that a few hundred Bay Area elites went to court over the last few years to divert about 20 million acre-feet of precious irrigation water to flow out to the sea, in vain pursuit of their fantasies about expanding bait fish populations in the delta or in hopes of seeing a salmon jump out of the river by Fresno? Tens of thousands of poor people will lose their jobs this summer, as irrigation water reserves are exhausted and acreage goes out of production.

He includes the green and diversity categories:

Are the heads of Hollywood studios reflective of the rich diversity of California? And if we are going down the diversity and fairness routes, then surely Al Gore needs a sermon — after he unloaded a failed network to an anti-Semitic, carbon-burning medieval sheikdom, in failed efforts to beat the new capital gains tax that he so strenuously supported. How fair, how egalitarian, how diverse is all that? What is the ethnic profile of Sierra Club membership?

Surely there is a populist case to be made — or is the Republican establishment to manage a permanent, sober, and judicious out-party, as it is demagogued to death by the privileged?

Perspective

Patterico writes,

deficits are projected to be $1 trillion higher than previously thought. To put that number in perspective, one trillion is greater than the number of times Barack Obama will use the word “I” or blame his problems on President Bush in all eight years of his presidency.

In addition, according to the Hill,

The new healthcare law will cost the nation the equivalent of 2.5 million workers in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in a report released Tuesday.

Robots can do it better!

Today is the day of the left's planned strikes and protests at fast food restaurants, demanding that the minimum wage be raised from $7.25 to at least %15 per hour. Glenn Reynolds reminds protesters that robots made by Momentum Machines can make 360 gourmet hamburgers per hour.