Jobs miracle in Britain as employment hits new record high

Britain is one of the most heavily governed countries there is.  Everything is regulated.  Britain was once a dynamic innovative place but enveloping bureaucracy stifles all that these days.  One index of that is that Britain has still  not got a single fracking well producing commercially, despite excellent geology for it.  The drillers have had to go through years of red tape.

But it seems that the old spirit of business is still there in the hearts of British businessmen -- and recent events have unleashed it.  For the last two years the British parliament has talked about almost nothing except Brexit -- how Britain will relate to Europe once Britain leaves the EU -- which is now due at the end of this month.  So while the parliament has been wrangling about Brexit, they have not had time to poke their noses into other things.  Britain has had two years of very little new legislation and regulation.

So without Nanny continually trying to run their affairs, British businessmen have thrived.  And part of that thriving is a big boost in jobs as British businesses branch out into new activities.  You can read the result below


Unemployment fell to its lowest level in 44 years at the start of 2018 as Britain’s businesses defied Brexit worries to put on a new hiring spree.

Employment surged by 222,000 in the three months to January, almost double the expected growth.

This was the fastest pace of jobs growth since 2015, flying in the face of fears that political uncertainty was starting to bite. There are now more than 32.7m people in work, a record high.

Compared with the same time last year, an extra 473,000 people are in work, the Office for National Statistics said.

Full-time employment accounted for 90pc of the increase.

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Lower the voting age? Let's raise it instead

by Jeff Jacoby

AYANNA PRESSLEY'S first legislative proposal as a Massachusetts congresswoman was an amendment to lower the voting age for federal elections from 18 to 16. On March 7, the House of Representatives made short work of the measure, defeating it by a large bipartisan majority.

In her floor remarks before the roll call, Pressley claimed that 16- and 17-year-old kids are qualified to vote by virtue of the "wisdom" and "maturity" that comes from being alive and confronting the "challenges, hardships, and threats" of 2019. "Some have questioned the maturity of our youth," she told her colleagues. "I don't." If that was her best argument for lowering the voting age, it's no wonder 70 percent of House members weren't persuaded.

Then again, if Pressley has such unquestioning faith in the maturity of high school sophomores, why seek merely to give them the vote? To be consistent, she should push as well to lower the legal drinking age to 16. And the minimum age for buying cigarettes, handguns, and recreational marijuana. And the age at which one can adopt a child. And at which a criminal offender is automatically prosecuted as an adult. Come to think of it, Pressley should also want to lower the age of enlistment in the military to 16, and to require everyone reaching that age to register with the Selective Service System. After all, if the wisdom and maturity of 16-year-olds qualifies them to vote, why shouldn't it qualify them to be treated as adults in every other way?

The reason all these activities are legally barred to kids in their mid-teens is because, as almost all adults understand, the "maturity of our youth" is in fact highly questionable. Certainly there are some 16-year-olds who are thoughtful and astute, but as a general rule — and public policy relies on generalizations — maturity comes later. That's a function not just of experience, but also of biology: Adult and teen brains operate differently. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with rational judgment and awareness of long-term consequences, doesn't fully develop until the mid-20s. Teens more often rely on the amygdala, the more emotional, primitive part of the brain. It isn't from gratuitous animus that car-rental agencies make it difficult for young drivers to rent a vehicle. Or that the Constitution establishes 25 as the minimum age to be a member of Congress.

Of course, another reason that 16-year-olds are subject to so many restrictions that don't apply to grown-ups is that they don't know anything — or in any case, they don't know enough to be trusted to make sound decisions about liquor, firearms, joining the Marines, and governing the United States. The ignorance of teens is practically a cliché. "If you go to any college campus and talk to the first thousand 18-year-olds you meet," wrote Josh Gelernter for National Review in 2014, "you'll find five who are qualified to vote and 800 who don't know who Churchill was."

In 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age nationwide from 21 to 18, largely on the strength of the claim that if 18-year-olds were old enough to be drafted — many young men were being called up and sent to Vietnam — they were old enough to be given the vote. The moral force of that argument couldn't be denied, but let's face it: The quality of American politics and governance wasn't improved by letting 18-year-olds vote.

Like Pressley now, Senator Ted Kennedy then was sure that giving teens the vote would be a boon. "We will gain a group of enthusiastic, sensitive, idealistic and vigorous new voters," Kennedy said at the time. He was wrong. Newly enfranchised young people immediately became the least engaged cohort, invariably turning out to vote at a lower rate than any other age group. Speculation about a "youth wave" revives every election season, but it never amounts to anything: Turnout among voters in their teens and early 20s always lags far behind turnout among their elders.

I don't share the popular fetish for maximizing voter turnout, and have long argued that people who don't have an interest in voting shouldn't be hectored to do so. Nonetheless, if Pressley wants to increase the level of voter participation and involvement, I have a suggestion.

Instead of trying to lower the voting age, Boston's new congresswoman should lead an effort to raise it. Let's require Americans to wait until they are 25 before they can cast a ballot. That would immediately boost voter turnout, since participation in elections rises as the concerns of adulthood rise. The more likely people are to have jobs, to support themselves, to be married, to worry about schools or mortgages or taxes, the more likely they are to take an interest in how they are governed — and the more likely to show up on Election Day.

Pandering to children will do nothing to elevate our democracy. Restoring the link between democracy and adulthood, on the other hand, just might. Young people who join the military should immediately be entitled to vote; everyone else should have to wait until they turn 25. Keep Americans from the polls until their prefrontal cortex has finished growing. More mature voters might just mean more mature politics. Isn't that an outcome worth pursuing?


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Build the Wall to Save Taxpayers Billions

President Donald Trump launched another battle for border-wall funding on Monday, calling for $8.6 billion additional dollars in his proposed federal budget for next year. Top Democrats came out swinging, bashing a border wall as "expensive and ineffective."

The truth is, Dems are not leveling with the public about the billions we're already forced to spend on shelters, food, diapers, medical care and child care for migrants sneaking across the border and claiming asylum.

Not to mention the costs of public schooling and healthcare provided free to migrants once they are released into communities. The wall will pay for itself in less than two years. It's a bargain.

Look what it costs us when a Central American teen crosses the border illegally without an adult. Uncle Sam spends a staggering $775 per day for each child housed at a shelter near Florida's Homestead Air Reserve Base. There they have access to medical care, school and recreation. They stay, on average, 67 days at the Homestead shelter before being released to a sponsor. Do the math. That's almost $52,000 per child. American parents would appreciate the government spending that money on their kids. Imagine the government handing you a check for $52,000 for your teenager.

However, there are bigger costs ahead. The number of illegal border crossers just hit an 11-year high with a total of more than 76,000 during the month of February alone. U.S. and Mexican officials predict hundreds of thousands more in the coming months.

The migrants use the word "asylum" as their get-in-free card. When they say it to a border agent, they gain entry to the U.S. 80 percent of the time according to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. They are temporarily housed and eventually released with an immigration court date. But half never go on to file an asylum claim, disappearing into the U.S., said former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

They're turning asylum into a scam. The system is meant to protect victims of persecution, such as Cubans fleeing Castro's prisons. Now it's overwhelmed by Central Americans escaping poverty for a lifestyle upgrade.

Legal immigrants also want to better their circumstances, but they play by the rules. What a slap in the face to see migrants jump the line.

Unfortunately, a federal appeals court just made the asylum hoax even easier. Last week, the left-leaning 9th Circuit ruled that migrants who fail to convince border authorities they face danger in their home country still have a "right" to a day in court in the U.S. That bizarre ruling won't stand. Another circuit court ruled the opposite way in 2016, clarifying that a border agent's decision is final and entering the U.S. is a privilege, not a right. The Supreme Court let that earlier decision stand, so count on the Supremes to reverse the 9th Circuit.

In the meantime, though, taxpayers are getting fleeced by caravans of fake asylum-seekers.

Even before the latest surge, the Department of Homeland Security spent over $3 billion in 2018 sheltering and feeding illegals at the border, which is nearly double the cost from 2011.

Add to that the hundreds of millions being spent caring for unaccompanied teenagers in 130 shelters overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.

President Trump has tried several strategies to protect taxpayers from these rip-offs. First, he barred illegal migrants from asking for asylum, requiring that asylum-seekers enter the country through official ports of entry. That would have reduced the numbers considerably. But in November, a federal district judge, also from the 9th Circuit, nixed the president's regulation.

Then, Trump devised a "Remain in Mexico" arrangement to make Mexico the waiting room for asylum-seekers. As long as they're south of the border, the U.S. doesn't have to house them, and they have no "right" to public schooling and emergency medical care on our tab. The program, if successful, will save U.S. taxpayers a bundle. It's one way Mexico is already helping to pay for the wall.

Dems claim it's a waste to spend billions on a wall. But the facts show we can't afford not to build it. As the cover of the president's new budget says, "Taxpayers First."

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Rabbi Spero Leads Protest Against Anti-Semitism at Speaker Pelosi’s Office

Rabbi Aryeh Spero, along with numerous Christians and Jews, gathered at the Capitol Hill office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday to protest the apparent growing anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party and specifically the anti-Semitism of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

Rabbi Spero is the leader of the National Conference of Jewish Affairs, which, the rabbi explained in an email to CNSNews.com, “speaks for the conservative and non-left leaning segments of American Jewry” and believes that “politically and socially conservative positions more accurately reflect the authentic view of historic Judaism, and is thus good for the Jewish people and good for America as well.”

At the protest, Rabbi Spero said that House Speaker Pelosi “failed us -- she had the chance to condemn [Rep.] Omar. She didn’t.  She had a chance to condemn, stand alone by itself, anti-semitism.  She didn’t. She failed us.”

Rabbi Spero was referencing the anti-Semitic remarks made by Rep. Omar over the last several weeks and the resolution, crafted by Pelosi and other top Democrats, to condemn anti-Semitism.

Although the resolution condemns anti-Semitism, it also condemns other forms of bigotry, such as white supremacy and anti-Muslim prejudice. As a result, some critics claimed the document was overly broad. Rep. Omar and her anti-Jewish remarks are not mentioned in the resolution.

The House of Representatives “rejects the perpetuation of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the United States and around the world, including the pernicious myth of dual loyalty and foreign allegiance, especially in the context of support for the United States-Israel alliance,” reads part of the resolution.

It also “condemns anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry against all minorities as contrary to the values of the United States."

Rabbi Spero said, “What this resolution basically says is you better remain silent, because if you respond to anti-Semitic remarks coming out of the mouth of the Islamic congresswomen or a member of the Islamic community, you’re Islamophobic. You’re racist somehow.”

“Well, that’s a formula for silencing us all,” said the rabbi.

Back on Feb. 10, Rep. Omar retweeted a post about members of Congress defending Israel and she remarked, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” meaning money. She later said that AIPAC, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee was paying the lawmakers.

Omar also retweeted an item that said “Israel is like the south before 1963.” Back in 2012, Omar tweeted, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

At Pelosi’s office, Spero declared, “I think that Miss Omar is here to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. And to malign all of us… Who believe in supporting Israel.”

On Capitol Hill, CNSNews.com asked Rabbi Spero, “What would you say was [Rep. Omar’s] most egregious example of those anti-Semitic remarks?”

Spero replied,  “I would say that the Jews — if they support Israel — are disloyal to America. I mean, listen, I’m sure she supports the Islamic countries (there 57 of them) and she was just recently taking a tour [of them] and nobody accused her of being disloyal to America because she supports certain Islamic governments.”

There were about twenty protesters at Pelosi’s office with Rabbi Spero. A group of about a half-a-dozen counter-protesters from Code Pink also showed up. Code Pink is a feminist grassroots organization that supports Palestine over Israel.

One of the Code Pink protesters said in an interview with CNSNews.com, “We are just here to support Ilhan Omar because she is absolutely amazing, and I love everything that she said about Elliot Abrams, and I love the way that she is a representative who is — you know — speaking truth to power.

“And she is out here, as a role model for young women, especially young Muslim women who don’t usually see representation of themselves in Congress,” said the activist.

SOURCE

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Trump derangement



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