Self-Interest 1, Dogma 0: Al Gore Is Out Of The Closet Again

By Austin Hill

Sunday, February 03, 2013

 

Our former U.S. Vice President Al Gore just sold one of his business holdings and earned a bit profit – and he contradicted himself while doing it.

 

Gosh, I am shocked! Aren’t you?

 

The headlines tell us that Gore is being pummeled with criticism from his fellow liberal-progressives because he sold Current TV, a television network that he co-founded, to Al Jazeera, a television network based in Qatar. In the liberal-progressive worldview, this transaction is problematic on two accounts.

 

For one, Gore did business in an oil-producing country (Qatar), and for liberal-progressives, this is an un-forgivable sin. In their view, it simply doesn’t matter that the civilized world (the United States included) runs on oil, and needs a lot of it every day. It also doesn’t matter that everyone who is reading this right now (liberal-progressives included) is likely using a computer that is made, in part, with oil-based plastics, and may even be consuming electricity that was generated by – gasp! – oil.

 

These realities generally don’t matter for liberal-progressives. On the contrary, it is simply accepted as an un-examined “truism” that oil companies are evil, and the production and consumption of petroleum-based products violates the orthodoxy of environmentalism. This is the first reason Mr. Gore’s transaction is being criticized.

 

But Gore’s business dealings in Qatar are regarded as bad for yet another reason: they appear to have been extremely profitable for him. Worse still, Gore appears to have intentionally violated his own dogmatic hostility towards the oil industry in pursuit of his profit-making.

 

For liberal-progressives, businesses exist to serve the “collective interests” of “everybody” – however one might define those things. And if an individual business owner or company makes “too much profit” (again, the definition of “too much” is ambiguous), yet another un-forgivable sin has been committed.

 

Common Western thought on economics, shaped largely by about five thousand years of pre-American civilization and Adam Smith’s ground-breaking philosophical work “The Wealth of Nations,” teaches that every human being naturally pursues their own self interest. This becomes obvious when we take an honest look at how most of us live today.

 

For example, most of us who work, quite rationally seek to earn as much as we can in exchange for our labor. Likewise, when we acquire products and services provided to us by others, we generally try to get the best product or service at the best (read “lowest”) possible price. This is not a matter of being greedy – it’s a matter of being a good steward with one’s money, time and talents.

 

Similarly, when we take money that we have earned and invest it in a business venture – such choices generally entail the risk that the venture might fail and we might lose all our investment money – we quite rationally hope to produce a “return,” or a profit, from that investment. When viewed this way, there is seemingly nothing immoral, certainly nothing illegal so far as we can see, with Mr. Gore’s business deal.

 

The most problematic point in all of this is that so many American liberal-progressives seem to not understand these most basic, natural realities of self-interest and economics. Perhaps equally as disturbing is the fact that, apparently, many liberal-progressives have never before noticed the serious inconsistencies between Al Gore’s words and behavior.

 

For well over a decade Mr. Gore has preached the gospel of hostility towards oil companies and predicted cataclysmic disasters because of its consumption, while flying around the world on energy-inefficient private jets and being shuttled across town in fuel-guzzling limousines. He commands that the world practice energy conservation, while for many years he sold so-called “carbon credits” from his own for-profit corporation. And in 2007 an investigation conducted by the Nashville Tennessean newspaper revealed that the home that Gore and his then-wife Tipper shared at that time consumed approximately twenty times the amount of energy consumed by most comparably-sized households.

 

The travesty of Al Gore is not that he’s done business in an oil producing country, or that his business dealings have produced profits. It is that his public life has largely been a charade for the past many years, and he has perpetuated a culture of false assumptions which has now become a culture that is turning against him.

 

Will liberal-progressives learn from this, before they crown their next iconic “leader?”

Newtown Chooses Good Guys with Guns

By Paul Jacob

Sunday, February 03, 2013

 

On a December day last year, a disturbed 20-year-old murdered his mother. He then drove to an elementary school where he killed 20 young children and six adults, reportedly using several firearms.

 

Something has to be done to stop this sort of massacre from happening again. If that is possible.

 

Or, according to some, something has to be done whether such prevention is possible or not.

 

So immediately politicians who had long supported gun control laws argued that the Newtown atrocity proved the need for those laws. Despite government studies showing that a past assault weapons ban had no impact on gun-related deaths, numerous politicians called for a new assault weapons ban, tighter controls and reporting requirements, and the like.

 

The president got involved, and repackaged this agenda under cover of his deep and abiding empathy for the loss at Newtown, describing that day as the worst day of his presidency, the saddest day.

 

The days he himself ordered drone strikes on allied countries, without a declaration of war, killing innocents — including hundreds of children — apparently didn’t have a similar effect.

 

Oddly, nothing in the new gun control proposals advanced by the president or those in Congress would have deterred the massacre in Newtown.

 

While the federal government seeks to take away rights, the local government in Newtown has decided to add protection:

 

Late Thursday the Newtown Board of Education voted to request the presence of two kinds of guards inside the town’s elementary schools. The vote, for now, only represents a request — it still needs to clear budget and logistical boundaries since the guards would come from the town's police resources as opposed to the school board itself. But the plan “would put two eyes and ears — one armed, one unarmed — at each Newtown school,” reports Bronxville Patch's Davis Dunavin. The guards, officially called school resource officers (SROs), were already a fixture at all Newtown schools in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, but until this vote they were budgeted only to be a presence at middle and high Schools. . . .

 

This may serve as a worthy blow against gun-grabbing hysteria. Instead of lashing out at “the usual suspects” (the infamous category of guns called “assault weapons,” despite the fact that these weapons account for a small and declining percentage of murders in this country), Newtown’s move to put armed professionals in schools to protect children puts common sense back into our concerns for our children.

 

It is a major blow against the “gun-free zones” utopianism. Putting up a sign to say something is unlawful doesn’t stop criminals. But it does put the kibosh on good guys with guns protecting folks (including children) against criminals. The “gun-free zones” notion is a mere pious hope, a wish, a dream. With a kick against the cause it allegedly supports.

 

Newtown’s vote reverses that revered trend.

 

And it’s about time.

 

The vote also takes a metaphorical slap at all those who have made the NRA their whipping boy. It was the NRA, you will remember, that came out after the massacre and advised putting armed police protection in all schools, arguing that, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” (I had made the somewhat less expensive suggestion that the gun-free zone idea be repudiated, and trained teachers and administrators be allowed to carry weapons to school.)

 

This “Good Guys with Guns” meme received a lot of ridicule.

 

Now, despite their loudly expressed loathing for the NRA, the advocates of further gun control legislation were quick to claim that they had no intention (or even the merest hankering!) to take away any guns now legally in the possession of law-abiding citizens. But the chief sponsor of the new federal legislation, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), has long been on record wanting to make “Mr. and Mrs. America” turn over their guns to the government.

 

Meanwhile, these same politicians, along with their adoring media lapdogs, began attacking the National Rifle Association as somehow the responsible party to the Newtown shooting and all other “gun crimes” (as if weapons defended by the Second Amendment and an organization supporting the Second Amendment were more to be feared than the trigger-pulling murderers).

 

Funny thing is, politicians are themselves guarded, daily (sometimes nightly and routinely), by women and men (presumably good men) with guns. And no one, I mean no one in politics, would consider disarming their own guardians. So “gun control” is very selective indeed.

 

The Newtown education board, by siding with the NRA’s solution as the only near-term viable policy, does not address every issue regarding guns and “control” in America. But by repudiating the wishful thinking utopianism of “Gun Free Zones” and by emphasizing the addition of protection rather than the subtraction of the same, the Newtown vote hits a bull’s eye.  

Armed Guard Saves School Last Week (Gun Control Freaks Wrong Again)?

By Doug Giles

Sunday, February 03, 2013

 

Vice President Biden unfurled his genius during a Google+ “fireside” hangout last month stating that having “armed guards in schools would be a terrible mistake.”

 

Really, José? Why don’t you rock up to Price Middle School in Atlanta on Monday morning and bray that insanity to the teachers and students who were spared an early grave because an armed guard took out the latest Lanza wannabe before he could waylay his peers?

 

Oh, I’m sorry. Y’all haven’t heard about the armed guard taking down a shooter who passed his gun through the metal detectors at an Atlanta middle school? My bad. I forgot that the Lamestream Media doesn’t report on commonsense solutions to potential mass murders. It doesn’t fit the fables they’re trying to foist upon us, ergo they give it dog meat during the evening “news.” God … I’m so stupid to assume that you had heard about it. I’ll never learn. Click the link in the second paragraph if you want the lowdown on this situation, which totally validates the no-duh fact that a gun in the hands of a good dude stops bad guys before things get ugly. Durrrrrrrrr.

 

Anyway, back to Biden and his ilk’s brilliance on combating mass murderers. Biden said that not only do we not need armed guards in schools and that such a thing would be a mistake, but he also chimed in that what schools really need is a more robust staff of shrinks to dissuade Scooter, Jr. from strafing his mates.

 

Not wanting to be out-Bidened, this week the DHS rolled out an instructional video that counseled those in a mass-shooting scenario to …

 

Number one: Call 911. Okay, this is generally a good idea. However, bear in mind that the average number of people killed by a mass murderer by the time the law has finally arrived is about fourteen. The average number of people killed when an armed civilian is there is 2.5. Thanks, DHS, for looking out for us. Remember, folks: When seconds count, the police are minutes away. Yep, the average response time for the police to get to such a situation is around five minutes … and the average response time of my .357 magnum shooting Hornady’s 125gr. FXT Critical Defense rounds out of my S&W Airlite is 1,200 feet per second.

 

Number two: Hide under the desk. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that the Virginia Tech tool who killed many co-eds shot them while they cowered under their desks. Cowering under a desk, playing opossum, is not the way this cowboy wants to be remembered. I think this is what is called the “Pussification” of the American male.

 

Number three: Use scissors. Another thing that floored me in the video was the DHS advising those who are forced to field such a crappy conundrum to pick up some scissors and confront the culprit. Scissors? Really? What kind of scissors, Janet? Pinking shears or Floyd the barber’s clippers? Look, I’m not beyond sticking a pair of scissors into a murderer’s skull if that’s my only recourse, but I still think a gun would be a better weapon —just like our president once said while campaigning: “Never bring a knife to a gun fight.” If the DHS wants to play “Glock, paper, scissors” with my life, I’m going for Glock every time.

 

You know the Left yarbles on and on about how precious our children are and how they want to protect the kids, but they think armed guards on our campuses is oh, so cave-mannish. Meanwhile, they protect the president, congressmen, governors, and celebrities; they protect sporting events, jewelry stores, gold caches, banks, office buildings, factories and courts with guns, yet they defend our kids with “Gun Free Zone” signs and recommend teachers use scissors. Pardon my French, parents, but you’re bat crap crazy and these mass shootings will go on and on if you keep listening to the asininities of the lunatic Left.

A Not-So-Doomed GOP

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, February 01, 2013

 

The Republicans are doomed. Conservatism is over. President Obama is conducting a mop-up operation at this point.

 

That’s the basic consensus in places like New York City; Washington, D.C.; and other citadels of blue America.

 

And let’s be fair, liberals have every reason to gloat — a little. The GOP has its troubles. Long-term demographic trends; often-irrational animosity from Hollywood, the media, and academia; a thumbless grasp of the culture on the part of many Republicans: All of these things create a headwind for the party and the broader conservative movement.

 

But here’s the weird part. That’s all true of presidential politics, but less so when it comes to state politics or even other federal races. In 2010, the GOP had its best performance in congressional races since 1938.

 

In North Carolina, a state that is supposed to represent the trends benefitting Democrats — it’s attracting liberal northern transplants, immigrants, high-tech workers, etc. — the GOP now has veto-proof majorities in the state house and senate. Last November, North Carolina became the 30th state with a GOP governor.

 

What gives?

 

There are a lot of possible explanations that are not mutually exclusive. Obama is more popular than his party. Mitt Romney was less popular than the ideas he had such a hard time expressing. Presidential electorates are different.

 

This last one is definitely true when you compare who voted in 2010 and who voted in 2012. The 2010 electorate was older and whiter. The Obama coalition of 2012 included younger voters, minorities, and so-called “low-information voters.”

 

No matter the merits of these observations, they don’t fully explain why Republicans are doing so well on the policy front. In states as diverse as Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Nebraska, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas, and a half-dozen others, Republicans have been implementing impressive — even miraculous — reforms.

 

In pro-Obama Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker beat back a historic attack from organized labor. And Michigan — Michigan! — recently became a right-to-work state, which I’m pretty sure is mentioned in the AFL-CIO’s bylaws as a sign of the end times.

 

I think an overlooked part of the story is the fact that Americans tend to see federal and local governments differently. At the local level, people seem to have a better grasp that it’s their tax dollars at work. They are far more sensitive to tax increases and more easily outraged by spending boondoggles. They understand the importance of sustainable economic growth.

 

This fact benefits Republicans, although state-level Democrats tend to be more fiscally responsible at the local level as well. (Rahm Emanuel is far more fiscally responsible as Chicago’s mayor than he ever was as Obama’s chief of staff.)

 

Meanwhile, what gets Republicans elected at the local level gets them in trouble at the federal level. Again, there are many reasons for this. But I think one of them is that we’ve come to see the federal government as some sort of mystical entity empowered to right all of the wrongs in society. If there’s a problem, there “should” be a federal response, the costs or feasibility of that response be damned.

 

While Romney’s infamous riff about the “47 percent” was profoundly flawed, the simple reality is that millions of people who do, in fact, pay federal income taxes do not care about those tax dollars in the same way they care about their local tax dollars. This is true of people who get more from the federal government than they pay in, but it’s also true for millions of affluent voters as well.

 

Our presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, talk about their “visions” for America, as if being a president requires you to impose some quasi-religious vision on the country.

 

But the Democrats are simply better at talking about government in spiritual terms. Indeed, such testifying is Obama’s one indisputable gift. Democrats talk about the federal government doing things we’d want God to do if God dabbled in public policy. They use the logic of religion, which holds that there is a unitary and seamless nature to all good things, and therefore no good thing government does should come at the expense of some other good thing government might do. And, worst of all, they castigate anyone who opposes more spending on, say, “the children” or “the environment” as morally retrograde and “against children” and “against the environment.”

 

The challenge for Republicans is to convince the American people that the government isn’t magic, and that all of its money is your money, its debts your debts. I don’t think the GOP is doomed, but America might be if Americans remain unconvinced too much longer.

Immigration: Getting It Right

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, January 31, 2013

 

Immigration reform is coming. Let’s get it right. What counts as getting it wrong? The 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act, signed by President Reagan. It granted amnesty to the nation’s 3 million illegal immigrants and promised border enforcement.

 

Amnesty came. Enforcement never did. Reagan was swindled.

 

Americans are a generous people. They don’t want 11 million souls living in fear among them. They would willingly, indeed overwhelmingly, support amnesty — as long as it is the last. They don’t want another Simpson-Mazzoli, another bait-and-switch that lets in another 11 million illegal immigrants — and brings us back where we began.

 

There is an obvious solution: enforcement first. Hence the attraction of the bipartisan Senate deal reached by the “gang of eight,” led by Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republicans John McCain and Marco Rubio. It is said to feature border enforcement first, then legalization.

 

Not quite.

 

It is true that only after some commission deems the border under control will illegal immigrants become eligible for green cards and, ultimately, citizenship. But this is misleading, because on the day the president signs the reform — long before enforcement even begins — the 11 million are immediately subject to instant legalization.

 

It is cleverly called “probationary” legal status. But the adjective is meaningless. It grants the right to live and work here openly. Once granted, it will never be revoked.

 

Imagine that the border-control commission reports at some point that the border is not yet secure. Do you think for a moment that the 11 million will have their “probationary” legalization revoked? These are people who, in good faith, would have come out of the shadows, registered with the feds, and disclosed their domicile and place of work. Do you think the authorities will have them fired, arrested, and deported?

 

Inconceivable. “Probationary” in this context means, in reality, “forever.” (Unless, of course, you commit some crime.) It means they can stay and work here freely for the rest of their lives.

 

True, they must await the “enforcement trigger” before they can apply for green cards. But they already have the functional equivalent of a green card. They got that on day one. What matters more than anything to those living here illegally: the right to continue living here without fear. Forever. That’s the very essence of amnesty.

 

And all this happens before the first scintilla of extra enforcement takes place. Which brings us to the second problem. What does this extra enforcement consist of?

 

When I heard McCain talk about (among other measures) new high-tech border control with advanced radar and drones, my heart sank. We’ve been here. In 2006, Congress threw a ton of money at a high-tech fence. Five years, $1 billion, and a pathetic 53 (out of 2,000) miles later, Janet Napolitano canceled the program as a complete failure.

 

That was predictable. And some of us who predicted it were pleading for something much cheaper and simpler: a prosaic, low-tech fence. The kind built near San Diego (triple-layered) that resulted in an astounding 92 percent drop in apprehensions, or like the Israeli fence built along the West Bank that has reduced terrorist infiltration to practically zero.

 

There’s a reason people have been building fences for, oh, 5,000 years. They work.

 

The current Senate proposal must be improved, either in the Senate or by the House. It’s not complicated. Build the damn fence. And give “probationary legal status” to the 11 million — not on the day the bill is signed but on the day the fence is completed. Have the president drive in the golden fence post at Promontory Point II and sign the amnesty right there. Great photo op.

 

With the sequencing — and thus the incentives — so properly aligned, I assure you the fence will go up with amazing alacrity. As it should. The point is not to punish anyone or to make things harder, but to ensure we don’t have to do this again: agonize over the next 11 million living here in the shadows.

 

I know many Republicans are coming over to immigration reform because of the 2012 election results. Fine. I’ve been advocating this for seven years. Welcome aboard.

 

But remember: Enforcement followed by legalization is not just the political thing to do. It is the right thing to do — an act of both national generosity and national interest. It has long been the best answer to the immigration conundrum. It remains so.

Doctored Videotapes are Peanuts

By David Limbaugh

Friday, February 01, 2013

 

Many have rightly condemned MSNBC's serpentine editing of a video to make it appear that certain gun rights activists heckled the father of a 6-year-old victim of the Sandy Hook shooting massacre, but let's not pretend this was a one-off event.

 

The liberal media long ago forfeited their respected role as watchdog over the government and have voluntary descended to the status of a public relations arm of the Democratic Party and various liberal causes.

 

It doesn't do it justice to call them cheerleaders, for they are active participants, every bit as much involved in bringing about the events as the party with which they collude.

 

They no longer merely report the news. They deliberately influence it to advance the liberal political agenda. So while they engage in plenty of deceptions on the micro level, they daily engage in a category of sin that far exceeds the despicable doctoring of videos.

 

For what they're about is grand deception on a macro scale. They aren't watchdogs, and they aren't just cheerleaders. Cheerleaders wear uniforms and are readily recognizable. These progressive media mavens are cloaked in a disguise of pseudo-neutrality and pseudo-objectivity, such that when they root for the political team that is assaulting America's founding principles and driving us headfirst into national ruin, many in their unwitting audience have no earthly idea they've got skin in the game.

 

The liberal media's fraud is so pervasive that by presenting the news through a distorted, progressive prism, they've created an alternate reality that bears little relationship to actual reality. What has emerged is a new normal, foisted on us by a cluster of malicious manipulators who long ago abandoned their honor and their professional calling.

 

This manufactured pseudo-universe is what allowed President Barack Obama to win re-election despite presiding over (and largely causing) the longest period of high unemployment since World War II and the worst recovery in 50 years. It's what enables him to enjoy a 60 percent approval rating despite being conspicuously radical, hyper-partisan, consciously divisive and dogmatically uncompromising.

 

Just ask yourself whether Obama could have won if the media had reported on his economy objectively and let the facts speak for themselves. But they did much worse; they apologized for him and his failures every step of the way, shamelessly conspiring with him to scapegoat his predecessor, President George W. Bush, even four years after his term ended. This was as immoral as it was preposterous, but they did it with such faux earnestness that those who rely on them for their news lapped it up and digested its poisonous seed.

 

These are media that appointed themselves the chief prosecutors against Bush for his alleged mishandling of the federal cleanup operation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They were on that story 24/7 from the outset, not to apprise the public of the conditions in New Orleans and other stricken locations but to cause premeditated political damage to President Bush. Contrast that with their orchestrated cover-up of the Obama administration's selective negligence for some of Hurricane Sandy's victims and affected areas.

 

This is a press whose superstars, with exceptions, insinuated themselves into moderating the presidential debates and actively interceded on behalf of President Obama, both in their questions and in their improper injections.

 

These are the "professionals" whose job is to hold our governing class to account with legitimate, pointed questions and follow-ups. Instead, they offer French kisses and free passes, despite the smorgasbord of corruption, scandal, mismanagement and policy failures that would be a welcome feast for journalists with a modicum of integrity.

 

Whereas they aided Democrats in constructing false scandals against the Bush administration, they wholly ignore very real ones under Obama, from the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case to "Fast and Furious" to Benghazi.

 

From the corruption and waste in the president's stimulus plan to myriad green energy schemes to the fraudulent calculation of projected Obamacare costs to their protective reporting on the administration's handling of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the media have done this president's bidding.

 

Worst of all, Obama's media cohorts are helping him get away with not addressing the major culprit in our impending national financial catastrophe, entitlement spending. If it were not for the media's complicity, we could avert this imminent national calamity, but they simply will not perform even their rudimentary duties so as to expose this president as the uncompromising spendaholic ideologue he is.

 

So while we justifiably complain about doctored videotapes, let's not miss the larger point: that if this nation goes over a Greek-style financial cliff, we need look no further than President Obama's comrades in the institutionally corrupt media, without whom his destructive path could be deterred.

The Comfort of Welfare

By Charles Payne

Friday, February 01, 2013

 

This week Japan announced its intention to cut welfare payments by a billion dollars over the next three years because people live too comfortably.

 

Imagine that, a government would actually tell its citizens you are getting fat and lazy and have no incentive to work because someone else pays your bills. We just found out you can't get government work by telling citizens they're takers. But after its economy derailed, Japan slipped into a two-decade slumber marked by people giving up on old beliefs and traditions like Japan's legendary work ethic. When we thought Japan would conquer the world, including the United States, we marveled at their four hours of daily commuting and loyalty to a single employer.

 

During the past twenty years, Japan and its warrior culture faded. It failed to conquer the world militarily, and then economically. Sure, it's a rich nation, but that has also worked against them as the youth take those riches for granted. But debt and policies based on bailing out and propping up failed businesses sapped that eagerness and drive from the country. Consider Sony (SNE), was there any way it should have lost out on music devices that propelled Apple? What about televisions? All I used to buy was Sony, now it's Samsung.

 

In the midst of fading glory is a generation of children that probably only heard about the samurai spirit of the nation, but certainly haven't experienced it firsthand. It's resulted in a bunch of young men that won't even make the first move on dates. They live in cushioned cocoons that include very small circles of friends and visits to beauty salons and no desire to put in the kind of work that leads to an extraordinary life. They have no clue how to put in the kind of extraordinary work that builds a military machine that almost toppled America and an economy that almost bought America.

 

New leadership in Japan recognizes this, and they're taking action. Don't get me wrong, the samurai attitude resulted in inhumane acts of aggression against its neighbors and a fierce war with America. Yet, I long for leadership in America that doesn't lower the bar of achievement to the point where mediocrity is the goal. I fear the idea of everyone getting a trophy in school will muffle the inner seeds of innovation and competitiveness that historically blossomed into the leaders that changed the world.

 

Japan is correct. Poverty shouldn't be so comfortable you don't want to work.

 

The dole is more than just a handout, it's a way of life for those that get sucked into it long term. It's an insidious trap, and the longer one gets stuck, the more difficult it is to get un-stuck.

 

The promotion of welfare, food stamps and even higher minimum wage as birthrights rather than temporary aide afforded citizens is really disgraceful. Poverty sucks, I know this, but nothing is worse than being an American that never takes advantage of the opportunities this nation provides.

 

There is a fine line between down-and-out and comfort. It's too attractive in America to drop out of the job market. The goodies are like anchors to incentive and desire.

 

So, Japan has it right, and it only took twenty years to figure it out. How long will it take for America to get this right? The Great Society delivered by LBJ, picked up from FDR, put entitlements on steroids and created the modern welfare and food stamp society. It was supposed to erase poverty and make all Americans prosperous. It didn't work.

 

Speaking of Work

 

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity produced "Why Are Recent College Graduates Underemployed?" which pointed out several thorny issues with the economy and employment reality. Here are some highlights:

 

> 48% of employed US college grads in jobs that require less than four-year college education

> Five million college grads in jobs that require less than high school education

> 24.6% of employees in retail sales have college degree

> 10.2% of cashiers have college degree

> 115,520 janitors have college degree

 

It's an exhaustive paper, and I'm still trying to understand all the implications, but for sure it says this is an economy that's not generating enough jobs or the right jobs. College grads have to gut it out and resist the temptation to drop out of the work force. I tip my hat to them and know it should get better because it can get better. But you can see how the allure of moving to the sideline must look to frustrated and underpaid grads.

 

The irony is a lot of high school dropouts aren't gutting it out; they don't have to. Portrayed as victims, they get to demand greater slices of wealth from the rich and not-so-rich. You wonder how long college grads can hold out before checking out.