#1
As The Los Angeles Times reported from Benghazi, rebels are roaming the city "rousting Libyan blacks and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa from their homes and holding them for interrogation as suspected mercenaries or government spies."
Well, yeah. It's not like it's Easter in Dublin. Not that the British then fighting for 'democracy' would ever act in a similar way. Who'd we align with against the evil Hun just a year (1917) later? There is no perfect.
Steyn is on his game.
So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we're also happy to serve as the Qaddafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it's rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist he's willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn't exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we've got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Qaddafi's forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?
#1
Steyn is on his game. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but its rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist hes willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesnt exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once weve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Qaddafis forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?
But after reading that, my question is: Why bother in the first place? The Arabs outside Libya don't seem to care enough to get involved. The Egyptian and Saudi air forces would be the most capable to get involved. If they don't care, why should we?
If you want to understand better why so many states--from New York to Wisconsin to California--are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Every state in America today except for two--Indiana and Wisconsin--has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees--twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.
#1
The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.
What are you going to manufacture in New Mexico? You don't have an adequate water source to support most industrial manufacturing. The one major manufacturer in the state is the Intel Processor Planet in Rio Rancho which operates on tight water management as it is. Shipping gets a bit expensive trying to get to and get from there. It's not like the Rio Grande is navigable to Las Cruces let alone Albuquerque. And yes, New Mexico has a lot of government jobs largely because its the state a lot of NIMBY projects end up in. Remember they nuked New Mexico first! Want to store low level nuclear waste, want to shoot missiles and practice intercepts, want to conduct supersonic and low level aircraft training, etc. What's not done in other's backyard seems to end up there along with the government jobs that go with them. The devil is in the details.
#2
Don't know about Wyoming, but New Mexico has many federal facilities, e.g, Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia Lab, Kirtland AFB, Cannon AFB, Holloman AFB, White Sands Missile Range, National Park Service facilities, Indian reservations with their necessary staffers & federal law enforcers, and the Bureau of Land Management, which cares for 13.4 million acres of public lands plus 26 million acres of federal oil, natural gas, and minerals, just in New Mexico. The BLM is responsible for a total of 38,417,600 acres, which by my calculations is 49% of all the land in the state. That's federal land, not counting city or state stuff. New Mexico only has 2 million people. It seems more than reasonable that NM has a high percentage of government employees to match its level of government ownership & responsibility.
#3
How much of this is due to more government workers generally speaking, and how much is due to the fact that as private sector wages and benefits for unskilled/semiskilled labor stayed high well past the point that other countries had the trained workers and infrastructure to manufacture things and a hugely lower labor cost, the manufacturing jobs here simply moved overseas?
If the populace had kept its demand for compensation more in line with the market cost for its labor, many of those jobs would have stayed here and by that alone much of the imbalance between public sector and manufacturing jobs would not have occurred.
Agriculture? Not gonna happen. Outside of a few boutique items that comprise a statistically insignificant portion of our output, agriculture is entirely capital intensive. It is unlikely that agriculture will ever employ more than 5% of the population going forward. in 1900, that number was over 40%. For three generations those people who lost agricultural jobs went into manufacturing. Then they priced themselves out of those jobs over the next generation.
The housing boom picked up the slack and made for a set of conditions where a lot of guys could become small contractors. But with 13% of the houses in the country and anywhere from 10% to 30% of most urban commercial real estate now empty, we don't need people building things. That's a non-starter.
Those that have the skills could go into professions like law and medicine and dentistry and accounting and engineering or successful small business in certain cottage industries. Those that can't end up unemployed or working for the government doing useless things, on average. If citizens were willing to do what illegal aliens now do for minimum wage and the government shut down employers who employed illegal aliens, that would help, but I'm mot sure how much. Too many Americans think that that sort of manual labor is "beneath" them, anyways. I would say no job is beneath anybody, but I suspect those words would fall on deaf ears. A bloated welfare/unemployment benefits apparatus allows them the luxury of taking that attitude. And I'm not sure how many politicians of either party have the will to pursue this as a policy.
The desire by the elites and some workers to create a world where there is perfect income and pension security combined with outcome egalitarianism has brought us to this pass. I'm not smart enough to figure a way out of this situation, other than to suggest that our economic woes may last long enough that the public sector workers, too, will lose their precious, precious perfect job security, which will bring us all back down to the ground, and engender more realistic material expectations of life. At that point perhaps things can be fixed.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
04/02/2011 6:46 Comments ||
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#4
Nope. The nation and it's currency WILL collapse. Sorry folks. Thats what democrats wrought on you.
#5
This is not well argued. That there are too many government workers stands alone as a statistic.
But the argument is muddied by comparing them to manufacturing jobs, which is apples and oranges apart.
If America is so fond of manufacturing jobs, then why is there such emphasis on higher education? Precisely so that people won't have to work in manufacturing jobs, but in other forms of employment.
Who is doing the manufacturing in the world right now? People in low wage jobs in the third world. The US can't sustain UAW wages and benefits in competition with that, unless there are sky high tariffs, and all manufactured products are extra expensive.
It's just easier and cheaper to migrate our workforce into other forms of work and import foreign made goods.
Certainly, if there is a huge international depression, we will have to go back to making stuff for ourselves; but we can do that if we have to.
We have massive energy reserves, and there are very few vital metals that we don't have, which we have carefully put into strategic reserves. So the bottom line is that we really don't need the rest of the world.
None of which has anything to do with how we manage ourselves by hiring too many government workers, and paying too much largess.
#6
personal experience: my Local Agency staff typically supervise bridge construction with 4 people - myself half-time and a full-time Resident Engineer, as well as my two Surveyors as needed. Our state agency uses up to 20 to do the same job.
No fat there.
Nosirreeee
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/02/2011 19:38 Comments ||
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#7
Yep, and the real reason real wages for the middle class has been stagnant or going down for the last 40 years. The fall in real income has become alarming since 1/2 the "making" jobs (the stuff people buy) have been shipped overseas in the last 20 years.
#9
Crazyfool: It took over 30 years (til 1982-83) to lose 1/3 of manufacturing jobs. During that 30 years productivity increased by more than the loss of those jobs, so the net amount of goods manufactured per person increased. (I.e. the standard of living increased. Actually the production increased til about 1970. After that the loss of manufacturing jobs was greater than the productivity increase)
While the graph looks like a linear decline, the loss of jobs has been accelerating as a percentage of the remaining manufacturing base. Since 1982, half of all remaining manufacturing jobs have been lost. Has productivity doubled just to provide the same amount of goods? No even close.
So how has America avoided a situation where more and more people chase after fewer and fewer goods? Imports.
How are excess imports paid for? With savings and transfers of technology. Well, the savings of Americans are exhausted and the credit card companies are breathing down debtors necks. We're broke. No more cash for stuff unless we count the endless lines of US treasury printing presses. How long before the goods providers wise up to that?
Transfers of technology? Even visit a foreign factory? They are often more modern, automated and efficient than ours since they have invested their export earnings into upgrades. Heck we've even transferred out latest nuclear weapons designs to the Chinese. So no more joy there.
What's left #1? The US is still #1 in weaponry. Too bad it gives away several times more in feel good foreign adventures and aid than it brings in in weapons sales.
What's left #2? Financial swindles. See Financial crisis of 2008. Too bad the American taxpayer was the pigeon of that scam and two trillion dollars was given away to domestic and foreign banks, so the net foreign debt increased by a frightening amount. The US taxpayer is still on the hook for trillions more. Financial swindles #2B: Inflate your way out of debt - See Quantitative easing.
What's left #3? Foreign invasion and looting. The problem - see #1: Feel good foreign adventures.
What's left #4? Cut consumption, bring "making stuff" back in country and try to work off the debt. Good luck w/ exporting our way to financial health. No other nation is stupid enough to open wide their markets to foreign products, less rig it so that foreign products have a built in advantage.
The least painful solution? #4 in combination w/ #2B. Make stuff again and make our debts worthless. Either way, that means less stuff to buy until our production rises to what we have been accustomed to.
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY, 62, is such an inescapable figure in France of mockery, admiration, amusement, envy that he is by now unembarrassable. Making his mark young as a philosopher, he was satirized neatly by a critic with the words: God is dead, but my hair is perfect.
But in the space of roughly two weeks, Mr. Lévy managed to get a fledgling Libyan opposition group a hearing from the president of France and the American secretary of state, a process that has led both countries and NATO into waging war against the forces of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
04/02/2011 9:48 Comments ||
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#3
I remember the multi-part article in Atlantic - I was still a subscriber, then. He came over as a sanctimonious A-hole, tripping lightly from power/intellectual centers, on the east and west coast, with a short stopover in Las Vegas (IIRC) and generally looking at the inhabitants of these United States as if he were examining freaks in a very upscale carnival. I hated his guts after reading the article series, and would have gladly contributed to fund to keep him on the far side of the Atlantic forever.
#4
Fairly typical of the preferred writing style of Atlantic writers -- please to not call them journalists. While reading it seems as if one, too, is thinking deep thoughts, but afterward it's a bit hard to remember all the details, lacking in true perspective. Agreed, Sgt. Mom, he seems very much the cleverly facile, widely read anthropologist. But then, that was the point of the exercise, which would have provided material for his audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, one has to respect Mr Levy's work on the Pearl story, which needed to be told.
I much prefer the dear departed Jean-Francois Revel, also known as a journalist-philosopher, who had a true affection and respect for America as well as a serious approach to his subject matter. Not to mention a brisk writing style much more to my taste.
#5
Yokay, I'll bite, doth not "North Africa" include the former "FRENCH NORTH AFRICA" - it sems to me that France + UK + Italia should be interested in Regional andor Country-specific thingys as a matter of course???
Remember that Third Palestinian Intifada facebook page we and other bloggers were picking on a few days back? The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated it and several other similar intifada facebook pages that they found, and discovered what amounts to a socially networked invasion plan. The means: Get all the Palestinians scattered all over the world to return to Israel at once, on May 15, 2011, to overwhelm the Jewish state.
Facebook took the Third Intifada page down this week, but several others with allied messages remain live, and Im sure the folks behind the Third Intifada page have already set up an alternative. As MEMRI notes, May 15th is the 63rd anniversary of the establishment of modern Israel. Not all of the pages that MEMRI found are as clear in threatening violence, but they all share the same goal, which is to destroy Israel, and they all share the same date: May 15.
All of this takes on some additional weight when you consider the following. In Islamic apocalyptic thinking, the Mahdi (the awaited 12th imam who will, according to this line of thinking, Islamicize the entire world) will not return until Jerusalem is in Muslim hands. And Iran, an aggressively radical Islamist state run by a regime that is known to be strongly influenced by this apocalyptic world view, is pushing Mahdi propaganda right now.
It will be interesting to see the proportion of enthusiastic "Like" clickers to those who act on May 15th. Well done yet again, MEMRI!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
