Conning the country on jobs

Matt's Meditations, Rants and Reviews Conning the country on jobs by Matt Holzmann

In a sound bite broadcast on the radio this morning, the President was once again head blaming his predecessor for today’s poor job picture. Shortly after this at a LED lighting plant in Durham, N.C. 2 1/2 years after spending close to $1 Trillion, he said “shovel ready was not as shovel ready as expected.” In the meantime, his administration has been doing its best to stymie jobs creation since his inauguration.

It starts with his energy policy. The president is at war with conventional energy if you haven’t noticed. From his mismanagement of the BP oil spill to the shut down of offshore drilling to the new battles in Congress to remove “oil & gas subsidies” to the revelation the other day of the machinations by the Director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in attempting to cancel the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site to his war on the coal industry, the president has clearly articulated his vision of America’s energy future and it is directly at odds with those jobs he says he wishes to create. His policies are raising the cost of goods and services at a time when we are becoming ever less competitive.

Last year, the President visited one of the recipients of his bailout largesse, Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer favored by the administration, who received over $600 Million in federal loans and guarantees. Today, Solyndra, who were touted to be creating thousands of green jobs, is barely surviving. He visited a windmill plant in Indiana a few weeks ago. No one is sure if he tilted at one while there. In the meantime, small businesses, the primary engines of job creation, can’t get loans and the big just keep on getting bigger. It seems every merger means job losses these days in the name of efficiency and synergy.

A year ago, the president modified his rhetoric to tout “jobs created or saved”. Most of those jobs were saved, and most of those jobs were in the public sector. Huge bloc grants were made to a number of states where the administration sought political advantage in order to maintain what in many cases were bloated union payrolls and overwhelmingly Democratic Party loyalists.

While the President was in Durham, 125 miles to the south in N. Charleston, S.C. a Boeing plant that will create 10,000 high paying jobs is in jeopardy. The National Labor Relations Board has filed suit against the company on behalf of the Machinists Union in Seattle, who feel it is their right to dictate where the company operates and to hold the company hostage every few years when contract negotiations come along. The average salary for a Boeing manufacturing worker is $59,000+/year before benefits and overtime. It is not uncommon with the massive backlog of orders at Boeing and delays in many cases caused by union slowdowns for these workers to make well over $100,000/year. Boeing is the nation’s largest exporter and provides hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout their supply chain. The president is holding the company hostage for his political supporters.

The administration’s industrial policy, if you can anything so haphazard and corrupt such, is about as logical as playing the lottery. There is no coherent plan or analysis of technology, markets, or opportunities. Green is good. Everything else is bad. It has taken the President 2 1/2 years to come up with a grab bag of proposals that he will be rolling out over the next two weeks.

In the meantime, the real estate industry is constipated with properties in default that have been held up in the foreclosure process by slick attorneys and populist politicians. These are people who are 8 – 10- 12 or months overdue, and who have basically been spending the money that should have gone to their mortgages on everything but in many cases. We have become a nation in default. Is there any wonder there is a crisis?

Fear has become the American Way of Life for the first time in our history. Fear of job loss. The loss of medical care. The loss of one’s dignity. And we are being conned like a Three Card Monty hustler on Fifth Avenue. With the current occupant of the White House, one must watch what he does, not what he says.

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