In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until
the status quo becomes more painful than
change.
Laurence J. Peter
When It Rains, It Pours
My windshield wipers died on an interstate highway on a rainy early Friday evening; it wasn't the blades themselves, which I had replaced with a premium pair earlier in the week. Via my auto service, I managed to catch a shop that was closing up for the day. While I was worrying about booking a hotel and car rental, a couple of the auto mechanics volunteered, on their own time, to check if it was just a minor fix or a more problematic repair. Fifteen minutes later, I was back on the interstate with fully functioning wipers. An act of kindness and professionalism which I appreciate and repay down the line.
Contrast that experience with the USPS. I recently looked into changing my address through the USPS portal. It wanted to validate using credit card verification with minor amounts; I've seen similar processes, say in setting up brokerage links to one's bank account. Years ago I would run into verification problems of the type that some vendors might break out an apartment number on a separate line. For some reason, USPS rejected the transaction, with little more feedback on the nature of the problem other than effectively "Care to try another card?" It's been years since I've had to deal with this type problem. What was the problem? I might guess it has something to do with the zip-plus-four format. I called up my card issuer whom confirmed that USPS successfully posted minor hold amounts against my account. Then why did USPS reject the transactions? The agent offered to reorganize my address information, but I wasn't willing to modify what works with all other vendors just to blindly guess why USPS falsely rejected the transaction.
Then I went to my closest nearby post office. I know in the past there were change-of-address forms. I didn't see a single related form among any transaction form display (not even one for a mail hold); you might think they might have a self-service kiosk for handling these tasks, but you would be wrong. (However, I did see a popular kiosk that automates things like weighing packages or mail, so there is some progress.) So that was a wasted trip; I had no desire to wait in a long queue just to ask about filing a change of address. I'll probably handle it "old school": send the local postmaster the specifics of my address change. It's worked in the past. But this is the kind of nonsense with a quasi-governmental entity which can't automate what has been routinely handled by the private sector (e.g., magazine publishers) for 20 or more years. Any time and effort beyond penning a simple letter to the postmaster is a waste of the customer's valuable time. If they want my professional opinion, they'll have to pay for it.
The December jobs numbers are awful (under 100K gain). Keep in mind that the ObamaCare mandate is coming online, and that is one consideration which particularly hurts lower-income worker opportunities. The Dem talking point is about how some are doing well in an implied or asserted zero-sum consideration. First, note that if the rich do well during a boom cycle, they often do worse during a bust cycle. Of course, if you have a lower income with modest assets, it doesn't take long to drain those assets. Obviously if you had a net worth of $7B, and it went down to $4B, you're still in a far better off situation to wait out an economic malaise than someone with, say, under $20K in assets. But nobody seems to notice that the $3B loss; they do notice if a recovering stock market recovers much, if not all of what was lost. Some of that reflects the Federal Reserves' put on interest rates: historic P/E ratios reflect a normal interest rate. Lower interest expenses usually result in higher income, which means an investor is willing to pay more to get the higher income. Second, in a growing economy, employers hire to exploit higher demand and business opportunities. As hiring exhausts slack in labor (unemployment), employers bid higher for labor. The Democrats have been counterproductive, increasing the costs of employing workers (which most people don't see, because it's on the "hidden side" of compensation, but cost shifting via private sector plans is a de facto tax increase: that is, employers have to spend more to accommodate the mandate, but the government doesn't directly tax or reimburse the costs of its policies, so they don't appear on the government's books) and now there's been a raging debate over increasing the minimum wage, which affects about 2% of the employed, many of those young people not the heads of their households. In a more robust economy, competition for workers and/or increased productivity of those workers would organically increase relevant compensation without government intervention. The minimum wage laws are actually a deterrent to hiring, an implicit tax not appearing on government books. We have the old supply/demand curves: higher wages translate to lower demand for workers. The government is not doing anybody a favor; if the economy was strong enough, wages for low-skill positions would already increase. All a higher minimum wage would do is price people out of the labor force whom would be employable at lower wages. Liberals make much ado about "races to the bottom" but the fact is even in the post-tsunami era with historically high unemployment, we didn't see employers cut wages to the minimum; in fact, many, if not most workers maintained or increased compensation. Part of the problem (of low-wage jobs) is stagnant productivity; for example, improvements in technology increasing the throughput of hamburger assembly would allow the fast food worker's increased costs to be spread across the sold burgers without compromising a thin margin. If anything, artificially higher wages would provide a financial incentive to invest in labor-saving technology: why hire the teen down the street to shovel your driveway when you can invest in a snow-blower?
Speaking of fast food, I went to a McDonald's for the first time in a few years yesterday. I got a bit of sticker shock with the bill exceeding $7 for a burger combo. I could have sworn my last similar combo was nearly $3 lower. I've done more carbs than usual over the last couple of weeks, but I recently had a more filling, packed-with-veggies Subway foot-long combo at little extra cost, not to mention buying a Sam's Club rotisserie chicken for under $5, the latter 2 which could be stretched over multiple meals.
Finally, I realize that I had another missed post yesterday and suggested that my Internet access issues were over. In addition to my car problems yesterday, I found myself with unexpected Internet connection issues I finally resolved earlier this morning.
The USA Has Lost Its Trading Leadership
It seems while on my brief blog hiatus, we have seen Christie-gate break out, which I've briefly acknowledged in my cartoon selection below. Of course, public highway services should not be abused for political gamesmanship, but I've noted multiple times how I firsthand heard workers at National Archives talk about work slowdowns in late 2004, in anticipation of the election of President Kerry. We've had the IRS scandal involving targeting of Tea Party groups. I don't spend a lot of blog space discussing this stuff. Of course it's a corruption of public service; this particular instance reminds me of the stupidity of Watergate. McGovern didn't have a snowball's chances in hell of beating Nixon. The assertion that Christie staffers interfered with traffic flows to "punish" a Democratic mayor for not endorsing Christie is particularly stupid; first, Christie was going to win regardless of any endorsement; second, an endorsement and $5 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks; third, cross-party endorsements are a type of political suicide. I wouldn't have expected any GOP mayor or governor to endorse Obama. Former Florida governor Crist's warm embrace of Spender-in-Chief Obama was his political death, at least from the GOP.
But the link on Drudge Report that I noticed most was a British post noting in terms of aggregate exports and imports, China's $4T-odd total all but clinched a victory over not-finalized US numbers (the US would need unlikely blowout numbers in December, over a half trillion). China had recently outpaced the US economy in exports and oil imports. It's not all that surprising given the fact China has nearly 4 times the population; what is surprising is that while American "progressives" are trying their hardest to emulate the stagnant European economy with unsustainable social welfare net policies, China's surge has more to do with relaxing Statist constraints on the economy. If America has had a competitive advantage, it has to do with theoretically more robust liberties, less government drag on innovators and business. Instead the Democrat Statists try to engage in ever more enslaving vicious circles of burdensome regulation to deal with government failure. Under the Obama Administration, we've slipped almost 10 places on economic freedom indexes. I'm not underestimating the difficulty of turning the Titanic. We need to offset government drag on the economy. This includes both fiscal and monetary reform, streamline the government bureaucracy, lessen the counterproductive $1.8T regulatory drag and the highest marginal business tax bracket among the developed economies. We need to reduce employer mandates, aggressively expand free trade pacts, and radically reform unsustainable entitlements. The chances of Obama demonstrating the necessary leadership? Zero. In fact, Obama unveiled his version of a megalomaniac Statist 5-year plan to double exports four years ago. As Mark Perry points out in a recent Carpe Diem piece, exports have only increased about a quarter in real (inflation-adjusted) terms; only in one basic area (fossil fuel products), not one of Obama's priorities, have we seen this goal achieved.
Flake a Target of the Neo-Cons on Iran Sanctions
Another Drudge link involves a Free Beacon post on Jeff Flake; all but a couple of GOP Senators, two of my favorite Tea Party Senators (Rand Paul and Jeff Flake), have committed to supporting tough Iran sanctions. Rand Paul suggested recently (to my dismay) he might support sanctions as a tactic to force Iran to negotiate in good faith. Jeff Flake blinked on the issue in response to political attacks as he headed into the 2012 run to succeed Jon Kyl. I oppose economic sanctions in general; I think they hurt the wrong people, they play into the hands of target propagandists, and they contribute to destabilization and more likely military conflict. I do not want the US getting sucked into the vortex of yet another unnecessary war and/or occupation in the Middle East/Gulf Region. My guess Democrats will contribute enough votes to make Paul's and Flake's votes unnecessary. I would hope that the two senators in question stand on principle for the principle of free trade.
Facebook Corner
(Drudge Report). Favorite memory growing up in America?
Being the flag bearer for my Boy Scout troop marching in the locally televised annual George Washington parade in Laredo.
(Tom Woods). If you are involved in this plan to bombard Mark Levin's book on Amazon with negative reviews because you do not like him, I urge you not to do this. We are better than this. Writing a book is very hard work, and an author is owed the decency of having his work read before someone criticizes it. We don't need to resort to this tactic. It is wrong.
The fact that you have to post this tells me that your fan club is actually NOT better than this. Fortunately, you can fit all of them in a phone booth.
Tom Woods must have the world's largest phone booth. Tom is simply reinforcing a message most college students pick up early: don't rely unduly on secondary sources.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Nate Beeler and Townhall |
Benny Mardones, "Into the Night"
