Dirty Work

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The First Four Years Are The Hardest…

Dear Governor Romney,

My name is Mike Rowe and I own a small company in California called mikeroweWORKS. Currently, mikeroweWORKS is trying to close the country’s skills gap by changing the way Americans feel about Work. (I know, right? Ambitious.) Anyway, this Labor Day is our 4th anniversary, and I’m commemorating the occasion with an open letter to you. If you read the whole thing, I’ll vote for you in November.

First things first. mikeroweWORKS grew out of a TV show called Dirty Jobs. If by some chance you are not glued to The Discovery Channel every Wednesday at 10pm, allow me to visually introduce myself. That’s me on the right, preparing to do something dirty.

When Dirty Jobs premiered back in 2003, critics called the show “a calamity of exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.” They weren’t exactly wrong. But mostly, Dirty Jobs was an unscripted celebration of hard work and skilled labor. It still is. Every week, we highlight regular people who do the kind of jobs most people go out of their way to avoid. My role on the show is that of a “perpetual apprentice.” In that capacity I have completed over three hundred different jobs, visited all fifty states, and worked in every major industry.

Though schizophrenic and void of any actual qualifications, my resume looks pretty impressive, and when our economy officially crapped the bed in 2008, I was perfectly positioned to weigh in on a variety of serious topics. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal called to ask what I thought about the “counter-intuitive correlation between rising unemployment and the growing shortage of skilled labor.” CNBC wanted my take on outsourcing. Fox News wanted my opinions on manufacturing and infrastructure. And CNN wanted to chat about currency valuations, free trade, and just about every other work-related problem under the sun.

In each case, I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.

Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)

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We have now raised several generations of Americans who think manual labor is the name of the guy who mows the lawn. That’s why we simultaneously have problems with high unemployment and illegal immigration.

Maybe we should make Ditch Digging 101 a prerequisite to a college degree.

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Is more government the answer?

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E.J. Dionne:

Government is the solution

Why don’t Democrats just say it? They really believe in active government and think it does good and valuable things. One of those valuable things is that government creates jobs — yes, really — and also the conditions under which more jobs can be created.

You probably read that and thought: But don’t Democrats and liberals say this all the time? Actually, the answer is no. It’s Republicans and conservatives who usually say that Democrats and liberals believe in government. Progressive politicians often respond by apologizing for their view of government, or qualifying it, or shifting as fast as the speed of light from mumbled support for government to robust affirmations of their faith in the private sector.

[...]

Decades of anti-government rhetoric have made liberals wary of claiming their legacy as supporters of the state’s positive role. That’s why they have had so much trouble making the case for President Obama’s stimulus program passed by Congress in 2009. It ought to be perfectly obvious: When the private sector is no longer investing, the economy will spin downward unless the government takes on the task of investing. And such investments — in transportation and clean energy, refurbished schools and the education of the next generation — can prime future growth.

[...]

Let’s turn Ronald Reagan’s declaration on its head: Opposition to government isn’t the solution. Opposition to government was and remains the problem. It is past time that we affirm government’s ability to heal the economy, and its responsibility for doing so.

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The older I get the more I appreciate the wisdom of guys like Tom Jefferson and Jim Madison. I consider them to be two of the brightest political philosophers that ever lived. They joined with a number of contemporaries like Franklin, Adams, Washington, Marshall and Hamilton to create something unique in history – a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

But our Founding Fathers were never in complete agreement. Some wanted a strong central government. Some wanted no central government at all. Most of them agreed that government is a poor servant and a terrible master. What they came up with was a limited government with enumerated powers. A government whose powers were divided up. A government that was prohibited from doing certain things.

The Founding Fathers realized that some government is necessary but too much government is bad. The real question is how much is just right? It’s been over two hundred years and we haven’t settled on an answer.

Dionne offers us a false choice. Government spending can stimulate the economy. But that does not mean that the best way to do that is hiring more government workers or investing in clean energy. Half a billion dollars was wasted on Solyndra alone. How many jobs were created? How many still exist?

For that same amount of money we could have given 500,000 unemployed people $1000 checks every month for ten months. $1000 may not seem like a lot to some people but when you’re broke it’s a huge amount. Every damn one of them would have spent that money, stimulating their local economies.

The Obama Stimulus borrowed and spent $750 BILLION, and created only 3.3 MILLION jobs. According to my meager math skills that’s nearly $230,000 per job created.

And now they want to do it again.

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SCOAMF facepalm moment of the year

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Obama Tells Woman: “Interesting” Unemployed Husband Can’t Find Job

During his Google+ hangout Pres. Obama tells a woman that her husband shouldn’t be unemployed from the growth he has seen in the economy. Obama said he finds it “interesting” because he is getting “the word” that someone in her husband’s job field “should be able to find something right away.”

Obama offered to do something if she would just send him her husband’s resume.

The woman wants to know why Obama is extending visas for foreigners when there is tons of demand for American jobs by Americans.

“I don’t know what your husband’s speciality [is], but I can tell you that there is a huge demand around the country for engineers,” Obama told the woman.

“I understand that,” she responded. “But how am — given the list that you’re getting, I mean we’re not getting that. You said in the State of the Union address for business leaders to ask what can they do to bring jobs back to America

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I think we should all send our resumes to Obama and say “Find me a JOB!”

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The Coming Apocalypse Ain’t Coming Yet

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John W. Smart has made his predictions for next year. I’m not going to argue or quibble about them, but I do want to discuss his closing:

I’ve demurred from the most drastic predictions, though a few above are scary. This should not be taken as an assumption that far worse can’t happen in 2012. It can. It might. In a decadent culture – and we are one – the membrane surrounding and protecting civil society is wafer thin. It takes only one black swan event to rip the artifice apart. Reagan did not destroy the Soviet Union. Chernobyl did. The Arab Spring erupted after decades of corruption because one Tunisian man cried out in horrifying anguish. I cannot predict such an event will happen here. I can say we’re closer to one than we’ve been in over a century. A shattering event in 2012 would not surprise me in the least. This society no longer works. Everything has become a commodity. Every moment of our lives is constructed to make a profit for someone else. The worst go unpunished. The good get taken. We claim to love our young, but all our actions say we don’t give a rip about them. We give lip service to responsibility, but never take it. None of this can last. It stands in opposition to humanity itself.

Will the system finally break in 2012? I doubt it. But it could. The membrane holding us together is thin. And getting thinner. If pushed, I’d predict we’ll bumble on until 2016 or so. But 2012 might be just the year for a cleansing fire. Lots of people say so.

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I’m not sure who the first post-apocalyptic visionary was but we’ve been seeing this idea expressed in literature and movies for generations. Basically it is humans living like savages in the ruins of cities as a new Dark Age covers the land. Civilization has collapsed and the survivors are trying to rebuild.

The reasons for the collapse aren’t always given – sometimes it’s a war, other stories it was an environmental disaster. The cause changes over the years – in the fifties it was nuclear war, in the sixties we worried about overpopulation. Then Stephen King made the superflu popular, and now it’s the zombie apocalypse.

There are three main alleged causes of the apocalypse, internal, external and environmental. The last is the least likely – least likely to foresee and least likely to take place. A natural disaster like a super-earthquake that wiped out the entire west coast would still leave the rest of the country untouched, while a major meteor strike only happens every hundred million years or so.

An external threat is slightly less unlikely. Like it or not, we’re still the big dog on the block. Neither Canada nor Mexico has the capability nor the desire to invade us. The nations that might have both the willingness and the ability are too far away.

As long as we retain our nuclear weapons the biggest outside threat to us is a rogue state or a terrorist group detonating a bomb in one of our cities. That would be tragic but would not wipe out the whole country, and whoever perpetrated such an act would cease to be a threat to anyone for all time. Carthago delenda est.

As for internal strife, it’s over-rated. Who’s gonna revolt? Poor people? There’s not enough of them, they are too spread out and they are dependent on the current system. The same goes for OWS, and it’s especially true for the government union workers who fill out the OWS ranks whenever they stage a big event. If we overthrow the government, who is gonna pay the government workers?

The fact is most people are too invested in the current system to overthrow it. We don’t have people starving in our streets, in fact we have fat poor people. People in this country don’t realize how rich they really are. People in other countries do, that’s why they want to come here.

Yes, there are a lot of people out of work right now, BUT MOST PEOPLE STILL HAVE JOBS. Most people still have homes to live in and food to eat. For most of us this is the worst economic situation the country has seen in our lifetimes. But we’re still here, and the sky hasn’t fallen. You want proof?

Last week people were fighting over $190 pair sneakers!

For what it’s worth here’s my prediction:

Things will get worse before they get better, but they WILL get better.

So sayeth the Klown.

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How Obama wasted the stimulus

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Via Hot Air:

Theoretically, for the stimulus to have worked, the government would have had to target idle resources. Instead, the government funneled money into already-existing government contracts. Similarly, for the stimulus to have worked, state leaders would have had to spend stimulus money on top of what they were already spending. All too often, they used stimulus dollars to cover general expenses rather than to increase overall spending.

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They should have asked me:

As historian J.D. Hicks pointed out in Republican Ascendency,

“. . . money poured in at the top of the economic system tended to stay there, whereas money poured in at the bottom tended to rise through all levels of business and to strengthen the economy as a whole.”

Guess where Dick and the Dickocrats poured the money?

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Obama would have done better if he had just given the money directly to the unemployed.

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This doesn’t add up

Alabama immigration law blamed for drop in construction jobs

Alabama’s construction industry is losing jobs faster than almost every state in the nation, and industry experts say some of the losses are due to the state’s strict new immigration law.

Figures from the Associated General Contractors, an Arlington, Va.-based trade group, showed that construction-related employment in Alabama has fallen from 85,900 in June, when the law was passed, to 80,700 in October.

Construction employment in the Birmingham-Hoover metro declined from 24,900 in June to 23,800 in October, according to AGC figures.

“Some of it has to do with the immigration law,” said Henry Hagood, head of Alabama AGC chapter. “Crews have left the state. That’s not the only reason for the numbers. Our market is down at the bottom. Every little thing, when you don’t have as much work, contributes to it.”

Alabama’s one-month loss of 3.2 percent, or 2,700 construction jobs from September to October, was the second highest nationally, surpassed only by Nevada’s 4.6 percent decline, according to AGC figures.

For the 12-month period ending in October, according to the trade group, Alabama lost 7 percent of its construction jobs, a steeper decline than all but three states — Georgia (9.5 percent), New Mexico (9.2 percent) and Wisconsin (8.6 percent).

John Wyatt, a vice president at Gary C. Wyatt General Contractor in Birmingham, said the immigration law has caused job shortages for construction companies across the state.

“There have been no-show employees in various trades from job sites since the immigration law has taken effect,” he said.

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Correlation doesn’t imply causation.

If 1000 Walmart employees suddenly quit, Walmart doesn’t lose 1000 jobs, they have 1000 job openings. Logic would say that in a period of high unemployment in the construction industry there would be plenty of available workers to fill those positions.

But there is another issue here I want to talk about. We always hear that we need illegal immigrants because they take the shitty jobs nobody here will do. Now I don’t know about where you live, but around here construction is considered one of the better blue-collar jobs.

In fact, many of them are union jobs. That means that illegal immigrants are undercutting unions. Democrats are pro-union. Democrats are also pro-immigration. This does not compute. (Republicans oppose both, so at least they get points for consistency)

I know I am committing heresy for even trying to discuss this topic. Left-wing dogma is that illegal immigration is good and anyone who opposes it is a racist xenophobe.

Except I’m not some racist xenophobe. I’ve lived my whole life around immigrants. They are mostly good people. I don’t blame them for coming here because they can make a lot more money. They don’t come here for welfare, they come here to work.

But we need to take care of our own first. Right now the real unemployment rate in this country is about 20%. Add to that the number of people that are underemployed.

Illegal immigration is a complex issue. Before we can fix it, we need to be able to discuss it.

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