The Great War Against Employers Continues

Wonderful.

We now have another class of aggrieved in this nation...and it used to be ME! Sadly, I lost my special status even before I got a chance to use it.

Hey, I've been there. I'm still only cobbling together a living after losing my job in the construction sales industry a couple years ago. (Thank you Jennifer Granholm!) I spent many months completely out of work and many more months "underemployed" as today's dynamic social sciences lexicon might refer to me.

Barack Obama's so-called jobs program includes a priceless little gem that would allow me to sue the pants off of any of the scores of potential employers that didn't hire me during the blight of my unemployment.

One can imagine the additional costs that could be amassed by any business with over fifteen employees that makes the mistake of filling its only opening after accepting 100 applications and interviewing ten finalists. Any one of those spurned 99 percent that might happen to be unemployed at the time of their application could be encouraged to sue for damages.

Here in Michigan there are often thousands of applicants accepted for only a handful of jobs. How many Alice reruns do you suppose the average unemployed job seeker would have to sit through before the Law Offices of Sam Bernstein or Robert Goldwater started peddling their sue first meme over job discrimination?

While the law does specifically exclude applicants who are unqualified or incapable of handling the job in question, the mere threat of litigation and the financial requirements of walking the regulation tightrope will have a chilling effect on many potential employers.

This chill might effect not only the routine hiring process conducted by any employer, but even base-level decision making that might be considering potential company expansions or relocations. How will a company pay for any unforeseen litigation costs? How much more expensive will their product become in order to defend against unjustified accusations?

Of course, these concerns are not a major problem for those who demand that a 'jobs bill' be signed immediately regardless of its actual impact. The great war against employers continues apace.

More at Overlawyered.

Anwar al-Awlaki Meets His Maker

I know that Ron Paul and the ACLU are very concerned that the US would target an American citizen for assassination when he has never been truly charged with any crime, but I'm not quite so sentimental.

Anwar al-Awlaki strove for the status he acquired and relished his meteoric rise to the top of the anti-American Muslim jihadist movement. He was a spiritual adviser to at least two of the nineteen 9-11 hijackers, was a correspondent and adviser to the Fort Hood shooter, and was behind the radicalization of many African jihadists including the underwear bomber.

Perhaps the Justice Department should have charged the late al-Awlaki, but such maneuvering would have been largely cosmetic to begin with and it is doubtful that having charges against the scumbag would in any way blunt Paul's or the ACLU's ultimate disfavor.

Had al-Awlaki been hiding in New Mexico or Texas, I'd agree with Ron Paul. We don't assassinate American citizens on our soil because we have other options. But, in the hostile sands of the Mideast where the Allah-commanded murdering of nearly anyone, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, is commonplace, we are somewhat limited in our legal arsenal if not the one held by our military.

Dick Durbin and the Bank Profit Dyke

Dick Durbin is a painfully predictable communicator which, it seems, he attempts to compensate for by spewing out of his acerbic pie hole fantastic claims that do nothing more than provide evidence of his mind boggling ignorance.

One of Durbin's biggest legislative accomplishments is the inclusion of the Durbin Amendment to Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, an act signed into law last year in response to our current economic malaise. (It should be noted that many critics of the Dodd-Frank fiasco point out that the act responds to our current economic crisis by addressing exactly zero of the factors that contributed to the economic crisis, that it would not have headed off the recession had it been passed in previous years, and that its passing will contribute significantly to the likelihood that we might fall face forward into the second half of a disastrous double-dipper.)

It does all of these things because it misinterprets the major causes of the recession to begin with. It blames Wall Street and the big banks for the recession (two easy-to-hate culprits) while it conveniently forgets that it was a predictable housing bubble coupled with a government-mandated relaxation of lending standards that were the principle motivators of the credit crunch. Then, when benevolent bureaucrats swooped in to save the day, they exacerbated the problem by holding risky lenders largely unaccountable for their ill advised exploits while siphoning out of the private sector badly needed capital.

Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars flowed into the coffers of careless banks, conveniently blinded mortgage lenders and insurers, poorly managed car companies, overspending state and local governments, and ill-advised green energy favorites until those numerous billions, now adding up to trillions, had been fatally squeezed out of the American economy and no longer were available to private enterprises who needed the capital resources to expand their businesses while also expanding their employment bases.

Dick Durbin, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd were three of the swooping bureaucrats--all of them partly responsible for the catastrophic credit meltdown in America, and all of them equally as guilty of misdirecting blame for their own complicity at Wall Street and the banking boardrooms.

You see, the rich and the banks they own make wonderful villains. They are the haves while we are the have-nots. They board corporate jets to flit about the globe while we haven't had a vacation in years. They own yachts while we cannot afford fishing licenses. The rings on their fingers could pay off our mortgages. They are the millionaires while we live paycheck to unemployment check.

It is the evil banks and their excessive profits that Dick Durbin was aiming at when he slipped the Durbin Amendment into the Dodd-Frank disaster at the last moment. The villainous banks needed to have their profits reined in, and Durbin was just the man to do it.

And yet, even responsible banks must operate at a profit and must maintain a certain profit margin. Falling nether a particular profit margin makes banks, like any free market business, unworthy of investment. So, when the benevolent Dick Durbin struts around a bank and sees profits he feels are unnecessary or unfair, he attempts to plug those leaks with regulations. Unfortunately, when more and more of these profit centers become plugged with the pudgy fingers of Durbin, more and more seemingly unreasonable measures of revenue must be gathered elsewhere.

This is not because banks want to punish their customers for their patronage, but rather the banks are being forced to scrounge for dollars under the seat cushions because many of their conventional streams of income are being crushed by regulations.

Do I love banks? Nope. They piss me off as much as the next guy. My free checking went away years ago, my ATM charges keep climbing, and it is rumored that my e-banking might start costing me money. But, these seemingly unreasonable charges are becoming the norm these days because government regulators are busy trying to plug profit holes that they deem excessive even though eliminating them makes banks turn to more creative (and unreasonable) measures to maintain their profit margins.

Says Durbin:

“Earlier this year the Federal Reserve determined that the interchange fees Visa and MasterCard fix for big banks grossly exceed the cost of processing a debit card transaction by some 400%. These hidden fees were designed to boost big-bank profits by charging small businesses and merchants every time a debit card was swiped. And profit they did. Bank of America hauls in billions in debit interchange each year.”

“Thankfully, on October 1st that flawed system will be replaced by a more transparent and competitive market. Swipe fee regulation will still allow banks to cover the actual costs of debit transactions but will rein in the banks’ excessive profit-taking. Small business and merchants will benefit from fee relief and consumers will benefit from lower prices. And banks that try to make up their excess profits off the backs of their customers will finally learn how a competitive market works.”

The more 'transparent and competitive market' that Durbin has announced that will result from his brilliant private sector intrusion, in part, amounts to millions of debit card holders having to fork over an additional few dollars every month for the right to spend their own money. Other annoying charges are certain to follow in order to pay for Durbin's bulbous nose snuffling about my bank account, and to pay the salaries of the additional bank regulators necessary to pull off this sort of intrusion, as well as to pay the higher overheads incurred by banks that must install and maintain viable systems in a more regulated world.

Profits will not go down. But costs, as accompanied by all regulations, will go up. These will need to be paid for.

Thanks. Dick.

Debating the Next Potential Disaster

I have never liked debates as a way to determine the best candidate, and the latest spate of contentious gumsnappery has done little to change my mind.

Debates should be, at most, a small portion of what potential voters consider when they choose a candidate to champion. Unfortunately, in today's world of reality television and 24 hour a day populist news jibber-jabber, it is the candidate who is quickest on his rhetorical feet that gains most on the staged political stage.

Newt Gingrich, a candidate who carries more baggage than a Michelle Obama stoop-shouldered bellhop, did nibble around the edges of my argument when he challenged debate moderators on two separate occasions to ask serious questions of the debaters rather than trying to manipulate potential presidents into embarrassing exchanges as if they were Snooki and Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino.

Each of the presidential candidates in the current Republican stable have years of history in business or politics or both, and a voter's investigation into these histories is a far better way to judge a candidate than whether or not they can deliver a scoring soundbite in the form of a quick comeback. And yet, this is not how I see many voters choosing candidates.

Debate moderators are offered but a few opportunities to dig into this history. Unfortunately it seems that they, and their bosses, would rather turn these events into entertainment spectacles rather than embrace their utility.

My Mom is a true believer in conservative principles; she believes an ever expansive government is dangerous, that a government, as well as those that it governs, should live within its means. She is a conservative that believes that the federal government should not nose its way into state issues, that the state government should not nose its way into local issues, and that local government should not nose its way into private issues. My experience is that she has no problems with parents nosing their way into children's issues, but that is another story.

So, at the end of the of the past couple of debates, she has decided that she is a supporter of Mitt Romney. This is not because of his long history of offering big government solutions, but because he is such a good debater.

I'm sorry, but this is akin to spending weeks investigating the best kind of car to buy, spending many hours digging into the option packages, the gas mileage, the warranty, the attendant service agreement, and then, when it is all said and done, choosing the pretty green one.

If not for his debating skills (and the not so subtle endorsement of mass media) a former community organizer with no business or administrative or foreign policy experience would not now be sitting at the helm of a country sliding off the end of the earth. A man who has never created a job in his life, but for political debates, would not be in charge of the national strategy of creating jobs. A man whose self-admitted real life administrative experience prior to his election amounted to nothing more than running his own presidential election campaign, but for debates, would not now be the CEO over the largest economy on the planet.

So, sure, pay attention to the debates. Let's see how quick witted and fast footed these celebrities of politics are. But, in the end, lets look at some history and track records. Perhaps we can avoid the next disaster.

A Belated Political Humor Trifecta

I've been gone for ten days and blogging, as always, is difficult when I'm on the road.

While I was gone I saw several things that I believe are worthwhile reposting here.

First, with a hat tip to NewsBusters...Martin Short sings a lasting tribute to Osama bin Laden.



Then from Moonbattery I ran across this:



But not to be left out, Iowahawk jotted down a number of questions he wished to be asked of the president during his twitter press conference a few weeks back. My favorite among many hilarious queries..."Why do you need permission to be clear, and not need permission to bomb Libya?"

9/11/2011

...Daniel F. Libretti...

I've been watching the somber 9/11 memorial proceedings on Fox News and Daniel's name has just crossed the bottom of the screen in what seems to be a never ending scroll of the murdered.

This is a day of rather raw emotions. Anger. Pride. Grief.

America has been accused of not letting go. Of not getting on. We've been accused of celebrating this day and turning it into a holiday.

This is no holiday. While it might be a day on the calendar that many Americans circle in red ink, it is more likely a day that most of us simply allow our eyes to become circled in moist redness.

I would guess that a vast majority of those that stand solemly today on that ground once buried under thousands of tons of rubble, do so not because they want to be there, but do so because they have to be there.

...Luis Manuel Lopez...

That was a day of disbelief.

We vowed then, ten years ago, that we would not forget the images of bodies as they tumbled out of the sky, that we would not forget the images of the towers as they fell, and that we would not forget the sacrifices of those who selflessly charged into fiery buildings fated to fall.

But, I think what we vowed to remember on that day has become more than the simple evil that attacked us. We also remember the good that is America.

Today, as we feel the painful effects of the baring of old wounds, as we watch names circle the bottom of our television screens, we also salute the goodness that is America. We remember the vivid past, but we are also being reminded of who we are, as a people and as a country.

Ten years on and we have not forgotton.

...Joseph Ross Marchbanks, Jr...

I Cannot Wait

I will not be watching our President as he makes his much anticipated jobs speech tonight in a joint session before some of both houses of Congress. It is being predicted that his Majesty will be regurgitating parts of several past proposals that at one time or another, within divergent contexts and in different financial times, a few of his detractors might have endorsed.

Well, I personally am not so thrilled at what I believe will be his $450 billion worth of slush fund projects to get Americans working again. As we saw in his beloved bailout bill, much money will be channeled toward hard left union constituencies where the taxpayers get totally screwed. The money enters a narrow pipeline where the recipients of said funds will be providing to the taxpayers no more than a fifty cents on the borrowed dollar value.

I'm not so thrilled either about proposals that would supposedly reward businesses for hiring new employees or not laying off the ones that are already unjustified given current economic conditions. First of all, with the rising flood water of employment regulation just around the corner these tax credits do nothing but temporarily negate the inevitable higher cost of doing business under Obama. Secondly, if any company is ever rewarded for not letting go of unnecessary employees we toss the entire working apparatus of the free market system and capitalism out the window.

But lets look at the timing of this jobs speech in the current business context.

We have one company, Boeing, that has been told by the Obama administration that it cannot operate a factory in South Carolina because doing so, according to the NLRB, would be an act of punishment aimed at unionized labor. The Department of Labor has demanded that Boeing keep production at its union facilities in Washington rather than let right to work state South Carolina provide the several thousands of employees that would operate the factory.

Now, Boeing is not shuttering the Washington factory. In fact, since its announcement of building a plant in South Carolina became public, it has actually added hundreds of jobs in Washington.

Lets look too at Gibson Guitars, a company incidentally that is owned and operated by conservative supporting executives. The Justice Department raided two of the company's factories in Tennessee to investigate whether or not the company was in violation of foreign timber harvesting laws. The company is not even being charged with violating any American laws. Gibson's largest American competitor, Martin, is not being scrutinized in the same manner even though its instruments are manufactured using many of the same woods. Martin is owned by big Democrat political contributors.

Lets look too at the fossil fuel industries. Barack Obama has suggested that he wants to bankrupt the coal companies. He has said that, under his plan, electricity rates must necessarily skyrocket.

Yet, at the same time that he heaps huge piles of red tape in front of efficient energy sources, he rewards his solar panel buddies over half a billion dollars worth of federal subsidies. Now that the company has gone belly up, FBI agents have raided the company, Solyndra, and seized a huge cache of information. How this information will be used, whether to indict Solyndra officials (unlikely since they visited the Oval Office over twenty times) or to cover up whatever hazy relationship has existed between the administration and its corporate lap dogs is anyone's guess.

So, the Obama speech is being anticipated by many. I wonder, however, how filled with anticipation the executives at Gibson Guitars are, or how excited the executives at Boeing are. I wonder how excited the owners of big oil and big coal are over the prospect of listening to the US President tell them how he is going to create jobs.

They all know that this administration is using whatever means it has available to it to actually shut down companies unfortunate enough to belong either to an unfavored industry or to be unwise enough to believe in a political ideal that runs contrary to the one held in the White House.

Politics when fought within the political arena can be an ugly game. Politics, when fought in the private sector, is as revealing as it is ugly. It tells us a lot about those that try to use their political power to shape industries and companies into instruments of the state itself.

This is not liberty, it is tyranny. This is not freedom, it is fascism. This is not the free market, it is a cobbled together obstacle course designed to trip up all businesses that do not parrot the talking points of this administration.

Ya, I cannot wait to read tomorrow what the President will say in a few minutes.

Well, You Can't Blame Him For Everything...

How many times have we heard this from defenders of Barack Obama as it relates to the horrible economic climate we live in these days?

'You cannot blame him for everything.'

Dozens of times? Hundreds?

It is an excuse used by this administration in its own defense as well as by progressive media pundits who acquired all they know about journalistic objectiveness in a beer tent outside an NEA rally. Certainly the basic tenet of the comment is true...Barack Obama did not create every single situation that led us too far down this road to economic ruin.

And yet, such defense of Obama is rarely evenly applied by the literati to George W. Bush who took office in charge of a largely dismantled intelligence community just nine months before a bloodthirsty collection of Mohammedan adherents decided the best way to serve their God was to kill a few thousand Americans in New York City, Washington DC., and an infamous Pennsylvania field.

In fact we fiscal conservatives were alarmed by Bush's inability to locate his veto pen until about year seven of his administration, and we felt horribly betrayed by the "compassionate conservative" after we found out that his brand of conservativism and compassion amounted to a perpetual commitment to growth in government. No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit are two far reaching intrusionist examples that expose Bush for the big spending Republican that he was.

But this post is not about Bush at all (he isn't still President, is he?) but rather about a barely wavering media and voting constituency of Barack Obama (as if they were two different things) who refuse to apply an equal standard to this President Messiah and his evil predecessor.

So, while Barack Obama cannot be directly blamed for everything that is leading us to ruin, we have to point out three things to those receiving their political education from National Socialist Radio.

1. While Obama did not create all the policies that are breaking the bank of our country, he philosophically supports nearly every one of them regardless of whether or not he was around to vote on them when they were instituted.

Some will argue that it was the expensive wars that created our problem or the greed on Wall Street. These arguments can be easily dispensed with when one looks at Obama's unnecessary and misguided escalation of the Afghanistan war partnered with his arrogant participation in a Libyan war where we don't even know who we are supporting. And while Wall Street does house a staggering number of greedy bastards, a majority of those greedy bastards are supporters of Obama and his trademarked brand of crony capitalism.

Bush supported a Wall Street banker bailout. Um, so did Obama. Obama also supports the sort of Keynesian intrusionism that allows the genius of bureaucracy to pick the industries and businesses that are supposed to win and lose. It is this genius that bails out automobile companies and their socialist workforces while it tries its hardest to castrate the oil, manufacturing, clothing, and agricultural companies that it finds socially unhelpful. It is also the genius that preys on companies like Exxon/Mobil while it slathers doomed-to-fail Solyndra Inc. with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

When Bush supported No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug benefit, he was only hounded by progressives such as Obama for their narrow scale. They were underfunded! They needed to be even bigger!

The housing crisis and run up in energy prices, which are largely the cause of the current situation, are both the direct result of progressive socialist policies that Obama has always supported fully. As our gas prices rose Obama opined that "[energy] prices must necessarily skyrocket." As housing concerns tangled, Obama was actively involved in ramrodding, at the community organizer level, the federal policies that not only encouraged high risk mortgage candidates to buy homes they could not afford, but helped put taxpayers on the hook ultimately for their mortgage obligations.

Is it more important that Obama was not in office when the Community Reinvestment Act was voted on or not in office to help spearhead a disastrous and progressive energy policy, or is it more important to recognize that he is now and always was sympathetic in toto to the reasonings behind their commencements?

2. While Obama did not create all the policies that are breaking the bank of our country, he has used the regulatory powers of every federal agency that he has at his disposal to hamstring the growing of the American economy.

The EPA, the FDA, the Departments of Energy and Education and Commerce, HUD, the DOJ, the Department of the Interior and the Consumer Protection Agency, HHS, etc., etc., have all used their expanded powers of tyranny under Obama to not only destroy wealth but to hinder its creation at either the wellhead, in the laboratory, on the factory floor, or atop the tractor. I cannot wait until those 10,000 new IRS officers cut their teeth imposing Dodd-Frank and Obamacare mandates.

This ain't helping.

3. While Obama did not create all the policies that are breaking the bank of our country, it has to be recognized that Ronald Reagan inherited an economy from Billy Carter's dumber brother that was in many ways worse than the one inherited by drunk driver Onyango Obama's nephew.

Two and a half years after Reagan inherited a disastrous economy, the American economic machine had turned around. When he took office he faced higher Carter level inflation, comparable unemployment rates to those suffered by Obama, and interest rates of nearly twenty percent. Reagan faced a tumultuous Middle East, an oil squeeze, and a Congress decidedly of progressive vein.

Under Ronald Reagan America began the longest lasting period of sustained economic growth this country has ever known. He cut taxes, cut regulations, rebuilt the military, supported our friends abroad, and set free the American spirit.

Barack Obama believes in different tactics. He wants to raise taxes, introduce crippling regulations, cannot wait to gut the military, sold our traditional friends down the river, and has dismissed American exceptionalism as nothing more than cultural narcissism.

No, Barack Obama is not at fault for everything that this country suffers today.

But, that he agrees with all the policies that helped create this situation, that he has used every tool at his disposal to exacerbate the situation, and that Ronald Reagan took a worse situation and quickly turned it around all should give pause to even his most loyal progressive political groupies.

Down, Down, Down

Once again, the US economy has produced some unexpected news--job creation was low in August. In fact, according to today's Department of Labor report, no net new jobs were created. This is the first time since 1945 that there has been a zero job growth figure.

But, it gets even worse. The dismal job growth performances for the past two months have both been revised, wait for it...downward. A dismal July estimate of 117,000 jobs created was lowered to an even more dismal 85,000, and an embarrassingly dismal June estimate of 46,000 jobs was lowered to a wear-a-sack-over-my-head-dismal 20,000 jobs created.

This is the success story of Barack Obama and his army of economy killing regulators and Keynesian economists. You cannot wage a war on employers without it having a crippling effect on the numbers of employees they can afford to either keep on, or add to, the payroll.

Sanity, Ignorance, Ignorance, Sanity/Ignorance, Intrusion, and Intrusion with a Dash of Ignorance

How else can I describe the six cost-efficient ways that our ex-Governor and ex-First Gentleman have laid out to help this country create jobs?

We Michiganders are fully aware of the skill set that Jennifer Granholm and her trophy husband, Daniel Mulhern, brought to the Michigan statehouse.

Under Granholm's leadership the state became a wasteland of vacant homes and shuttered storefronts. The only good good news was that business was brisk in both the outbound moving van and Michigan Works! staffing sectors of the economy. For half of her time in office, Michigan led the nation in unemployment and was the only state in the union to actually lose population during the decade that contained her administration.

And this is the experienced perch from which Michigan's dynamic duo will point out to the rest of us 'six cost-efficient ways to create jobs.'

Before we explore the list, can we not at least ask an important question? If these two were so smart when they had tens of thousands of state employees and agencies at their beck and call, why didn't they use some of their expertise to, you know, actually help get Michigan's economy moving?

The answer to that question can be found within the six cost effective solutions they forward. They just don't get it--never have, and never will.

Here is the list.

1. Give global companies, which have parked more than $1 trillion in earnings offshore to avoid U.S. corporate taxes, incentives to "repatriate" those foreign earnings.

Of course, this is a borrowed stroke of genius from conservative economists and business leaders. One cannot plausibly argue with point one. It is the earmarking these two want to do with the repatriated funds that gives me pause.

2. Put half those proceeds toward a blockbuster "Jobs Race to the Top," modeled on the highly effective Education Race to the Top.

First of all, one would have to be two points shy of lucid to say the Education Race to the Top has been highly effective, but that is not the point. Secondly, has there ever been a scarier word than "blockbuster" ever attached to a government spending initiative?

Granholm and Mulhern do not recognize what private sector jobs are--they are a byproduct of a successful and profitable business, they are not the purpose of a business. Such failed logic is seen within the solar energy industry (one of the Mulherns' favorites) today where heavily subsidized companies are still going belly up because of the inherent inefficiency--not just the relative inefficiency of solar energy physics, but also because of the economics involved. As hard as it is to believe, solar industry leaders have been known to brag about their sector creating more jobs per Megawatt produced than any other energy sector. Hey dipsticks, this is not a feature, it is a flaw.

Imagine Henry Ford's success if he had tried to bring his product to market while employing more people per car produced than any of his competitors. (No, that an innovation of the UAW some decades later.) How many early model Fords would have been sold with such a claim to fame? How could the cars have become accessible to the American consumer if they were more expensive than any other car on the road? No, Henry went in the opposite direction and tried to produce more cars per employee rather than the other way around.

The solar energy industry has everything exactly bass ackwards.

If you really want to incentivize job creation, make profit more achievable. Leave cleverly disguised intrusions into the free market at home.

3. Invest the remaining proceeds toward capitalizing an infrastructure bank, broadly defined — construction for roads, bridges, technology, grid upgrades and schools.

Great, then lets spend the rest of the windfall in the same manner that was wasted on our other stimulus boondoggles--namely slathering money onto the Democrat Party's favorite monolithic voting constituency. But hey, if the hundreds of billions of dollars that have already been spent on supporting union jobs haven't been successful, what could a few billion more hurt?

Why can't we just use the windfall to pay down our huge debt? That would lower our debt obligations, strengthen the dollar, lower the costs of commodities, and maybe make it possible for me to eat a hamburger once in a while down at the restaurant. Why do socialists believe that every boon to the economy has to start with the spending of billions of taxpayer dollars?

4. Lower the nation's corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, and pay for it by streamlining the tax code and eliminating loopholes.

America's corporate tax rates are among the highest in the world. Even the socialist paradises of Europe have significantly lower income tax rates on corporations. So, what could my beef be with this?

It is once again a complete misunderstanding of economics. Lowering of tax rates helps grow the economy--as such, they all but pay for themselves. Letting anal retentive Democrats rewrite tax laws in order to pay for tax cuts will not turn out well. Just cut the tax rates to a level that is competitive with the rest of the world, and watch our economy grow.

5. Modernize our unemployment and workforce training systems.

Government funded job training programs are misguided, inefficient, and completely outside the responsibility of government.

How can Granholm and Mulhern ever possibly discern what jobs our evolving economy will need unless they also believe they can nudge this economy toward their own favored outcome? No person, not even a brilliant Harvard educated Canadian lawyer, can interject herself into an economy and determine what industries of the future will be successful. Corn ethanol anyone? Solar panels?

No, lets let consumers determine what products they will want in the future, and lets let business provide those products and train their own workforces to produce those products.

6. Adopt a federal clean energy standard to proclaim to clean energy businesses — which can locate anywhere — that a market exists here for their products.

And here you have it. Granholm and Mulhern believe the best way to achieve inexpensive job creation is to further regulate the American economy so that inefficient energy sources can compete with efficient ones. I wonder how much that will cost.

It is just another angle to the failed Keynesian principle that you can create wealth by destroying it.

I will not be buying the book by Granholm and Mulhern. Its a brand new book certain to contain glossy terms to describe the same tired old ideas. Ultimately, all we really need are the proper puppet masters to pull the right strings.

Granholm and Mulhern should be available shortly after the book is released.