A "caring" society

I was talking to a Leftist lady recently.  I guess I was lucky to be able to do that.  Leftists won't normally talk to conservatives.  We have a habit of mentioning inconvenient facts that challenge their beliefs and they are very attached to their beliefs.

And one thing she said gave me a quiet chuckle.  She said what she wanted was a "caring society".  That would mark her out as a good and wise person among her fellow Leftists but she obviously had no idea how that sounds to conservatives.  There IS no caring society, there never has been and never will be.  There are some caring individuals but that is all.

So what conservatives hear is that the Leftist wants to FORCE people to be caring.  Conservatives have no difficulty at all in expanding the phrase into what is really meant by it. It is an advocacy of tyranny and authoritarianism. To conservatives it has a whiff of Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler:  Not desirable company.  So the lady I spoke to presented herself very badly to my conservative ears -- quite contrary to her intentions. But it's very rare for Leftists to have much self-insight.

I did however put it to her that what she wanted was to take money off people who have earned it and give it to people who have not earned it.  I asked her was that fair?  She conceded that it was not fair but rapidly recovered. No self-insight into her authoritarian inclinations emerged.  That she is a perfumed would-be dictator did not seem to be obvious to her.  Or maybe  tyrants are fine by her. If so, she's got no morality at all -- just Leftist fake righteousness

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Trump Right on Trade Predators

Is America still a serious nation? Consider. While U.S. elites were denouncing Donald Trump as unfit to serve for having compared Miss Universe 1996 to "Miss Piggy" of "The Muppets," the World Trade Organization was validating the principal plank of his platform.

America's allies are cheating and robbing her blind on trade.

According to the WTO, Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the EU pumped $22 billion in illegal subsidies into Airbus to swindle Boeing out of the sale of 375 commercial jets.

Subsidies to the A320 caused lost sales of 271 Boeing 737s, writes journalist Alan Boyle. Subsidies for planes in the twin-aisle market cost the sale of 50 Boeing 767s, 777s and 787s. And subsidies to the A380 cost Boeing the sale of 54 747s. These represent crippling losses for Boeing, a crown jewel of U.S. manufacturing and a critical component of our national defense.

Earlier, writes Boyle, the WTO ruled that, "without the subsidies, Airbus would not have existed ... and there would be no Airbus aircraft on the market."

In "The Great Betrayal" in 1998, I noted that in its first 25 years the socialist cartel called Airbus Industrie "sold 770 planes to 102 airlines but did not make a penny of profit."

Richard Evans of British Aerospace explained: "Airbus is going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they bleed and scream." And another executive said, "If Airbus has to give away planes, we will do it."

When Europe's taxpayers objected to the $26 billion in subsidies Airbus had gotten by 1990, German aerospace coordinator Erich Riedl was dismissive, "We don't care about criticism from small-minded pencil-pushers."

This is the voice of economic nationalism. Where is ours?

After this latest WTO ruling validating Boeing's claims against Airbus, the Financial Times is babbling of the need for "free and fair" trade, warning against a trade war.

But is "trade war" not a fair description of what our NATO allies have been doing to us by subsidizing the cartel that helped bring down Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas and now seeks to bring down Boeing?

Our companies built the planes that saved Europe in World War II and sheltered her in the Cold War. And Europe has been trying to kill those American companies.

Yet even as Europeans collude and cheat to capture America's markets in passenger jets, Boeing itself, wrote Eamonn Fingleton in 2014, has been "consciously cooperating in its own demise."

By Boeing's own figures, writes Fingleton, in the building of its 787 Dreamliner, the world's most advanced commercial jet, the "Japanese account for a stunning 35 percent of the 787's overall manufacture, and that may be an underestimate."

"Much of the rest of the plane is also made abroad ... in Italy, Germany, South Korea, France, and the United Kingdom."

The Dreamliner "flies on Mitsubishi wings. These are no ordinary wings: they constitute the first extensive use of carbon fiber in the wings of a full-size passenger plane. In the view of many experts, by outsourcing the wings Boeing has crossed a red line."

Mitsubishi, recall, built the Zero, the premier fighter plane in the Pacific in the early years of World War II.

In a related matter, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit in July and August approached $60 billion each month, heading for a trade deficit in goods in 2016 of another $700 billion.

For an advanced economy like the United States, such deficits are milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from abroad.

In the U.S. trade picture, even in the darkest of times, the brightest of categories has been commercial aircraft.

But to watch how we allow NATO allies we defend and protect getting away with decades of colluding and cheating, and then to watch Boeing transfer technology and outsource critical manufacturing to rivals like Japan, one must conclude that not only is the industrial decline of the United States inevitable, but America's elites do not care.

As for our corporate chieftains, they seem accepting of what is coming when they are gone, so long as the salary increases, stock prices and options, severance packages, and profits remain high.

By increasingly relying upon foreign nations for our national needs, and by outsourcing production, we are outsourcing America's future.

After Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax visited Italy to wean Mussolini away from Hitler. The Italian dictator observed his guests closely and remarked to his foreign minister:

"These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire."

If the present regime is not replaced, something like that will be said of this generation of Americans.

SOURCE

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Report: 4X As Many Native, Low-Skilled Men Not Participating in Workforce Than Immigrant Counterparts

A report by public policy analyst Jason Richwine about the effects of low-skilled immigrants on the U.S. native worker with the same skill set revealed that four times as many of those natives have dropped out of the workforce.

“Among natives without a high school degree, the fraction who were neither working nor looking for work rose from 26 percent in 1992 to 35 percent in 2015,” the report states. “Over the same period, the fraction of their immigrant counterparts who were out of the labor force actually declined from 12 percent to 8 percent.”

The report, Immigrants Replace Low-Skill U.S.-Born in the Workforce, focuses on men ages 25 to 54 and concluded: “The United States has been a magnet for low-skill immigration even as low-skill natives have worked less and less. This does not necessarily imply that immigrants push out natives from the workforce, but it does mean that immigrants replace natives, causing economic and social distress in the communities most affected.

“As natives leave the workforce – whether because of competition from immigrants, insufficient wages, overreliance on welfare, distaste for manual labor, or some other reason – employers turn increasingly to immigrants.”

At a panel discussion about Richwine’s report, hosted earlier this week by the Center for Immigration Studies at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., experts called for a temporary halt to the flow of low-skilled immigrants into the United States.

Charles Murray, a political scientist and the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said that while he has always seen the advantages of a global economy, he has come to the recent conclusion that the United States must make its citizens a priority when it comes to immigration policy, specifically the influx of low-skilled immigrants.

“I want to shut down low-skill immigration for a while,” Murray said, calling it a “grand experiment.”

“And I want to shut it down – and I say for a while because it may not work,” Murray said. “It may not work. The notion is this: We will have no good way of knowing how employers will respond until the spigot is cut off.”

“We will have no really good way of knowing the extent to which you will get feedback loops that will un-demoralize a lot of the people who are out of the labor force,” Murray said, adding that if these men were no longer competing with immigrants they may be more likely to seek employment.

“There will always be low-skilled people,” said Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School whose work addresses issues in social welfare law and policy, as well as the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets.

“They will always be there, just like the poor will always be there,” Wax said. “And by bringing in sort of fresh replacement troops – I am completely in favor of shutting down low-skilled immigration – the elites really are operating in bad faith.”

“They are essentially saying: ‘We don’t care about these people and we are not willing to give them a fair chance, perhaps at the cost of paying higher prices,’” said Wax.

“There are going to be some changes that will have to be made in society,” she said. “But, you know, we love the cheap labor.”

“It’s great for us,” she said. “But it is not great for our society in the long term.”

Other findings of the report include:

 *   Native-born high school dropouts worked an average of 1,391 hours (the equivalent of about 35 full-time weeks) per year between 2003 and 2015, while immigrant dropouts worked 1,955 hours (or 49 full-time weeks) per year.

 *   Native-born dropouts have seen their work time decline from 41 equivalent full-time weeks in the 2003-2005 period to 32 weeks in 2012-2015, while immigrant dropouts declined only from 52 weeks to 50 weeks.

 *   While natives fell from 56 percent of the nation's high school dropouts to 52 percent, their share of the labor performed by all dropouts declined much faster — from 50 percent in the 2003-2005 period to 40 percent in 2012-2015.

 *   Among men with more than a high school degree, there are no significant differences in work time between immigrants and natives.

SOURCE

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