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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Unemployment</title>
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		<title>Part-Time Nation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/part-time-nation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=part-time-nation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/part-time-nation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2014 04:50:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235822</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A deceptive jobs report obscures the dark truth about the Obama economy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/o-FAST-FOOD-WORKER-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235823" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/o-FAST-FOOD-WORKER-facebook-450x314.jpg" alt="Fast Food Freebies" width="298" height="208" /></a>Last Thursday, an Obama-centric mainstream media <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/03/investing/june-jobs-report/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">trumpeted</span></a> the creation of 288,000 jobs and the reduction in the unemployment rate from 6.3 percent to 6.1 percent. Lost in the manufactured euphoria are the sobering details: America is well on its way to becoming a nation where millions of workers can only find part-time, lower-paying jobs.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">On the surface, the numbers are impressive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the aforementioned 288,000 jobs gain, while the household survey reported a gain of 407,000. Yet those numbers pale in comparison to the rise in the number of voluntary and involuntary part-time jobs, coming in at 840,000 and 275,000, respectively. Since the BLS uses seasonally-adjusted figures to calculate jobs data, one cannot subtract the total number of part-time jobs from full-time jobs. However, data regarding seasonally-adjusted full-time jobs <i>can</i> be compared on a month-to-month basis and therein lies the true tale of woe.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A whopping 523,000 full-time jobs were <i>lost</i> in June.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As the graphs <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-03/june-full-time-jobs-plunge-over-half-million-part-time-jobs-surge-800k-most-1993"><span style="color: #1255cc;">here</span></a> indicate, this is the second largest decline of full-time jobs in the past year, but by far the largest addition of part-time jobs. So far this year the economy has created 926,000 full-time jobs and 646,000 part-time jobs. Overall, America now has 118 million full-time jobs compared to 28 million part-time jobs, according to the BLS. Thus, 23.7 percent, or nearly one-out-of-every four Americans, is working part-time.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Just over a year ago, it was <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/25/a_nation_of_part-timers_119356.html#ixzz2aThQSM2y"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reported</span></a> that economist Scott Anderson analyzed employment gains since January 2009 and found that in June part-time jobs accounted for 19.5 percent of total employment, amounting to &#8220;exactly the average share &#8230; since January 2009.” One might think an increase of nearly 18 percent in that average share might be cause for concern amidst the euphoria.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One would be wrong. For those uninterested in the details, the quantity of jobs rather than the quality of jobs is all that matters.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet it is precisely that quality that should concern every American. As the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> noted while June jobs gains were broad-based, &#8220;lower-wage sectors continued to account for the bulk.” While there was an increase of 67,000 jobs in the professional and business services sector, they were offset by the more than 40,000 jobs in the retail industry and 30,000 jobs in leisure and hospitality businesses. &#8220;Higher-paying sectors continued to lag behind in the jobs recovery,” the paper reported. &#8220;Manufacturing added 16,000 new jobs and construction added 6,000.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As for the &#8220;official unemployment rate” of 6.1 percent, the number listed under BLS’s &#8220;U-3&#8243; heading, more and more Americans are becoming aware of the bogus nature of this particular statistic, given that it doesn&#8217;t account for such realities as the number of part-time workers who want full-time jobs, or the number of people marginally attached to the workforce. The more accurate U-6 number, which takes these factors into account, puts the unemployment rate at 12.1 percent.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet both of those numbers would be even higher if they took into account the number of people who have dropped out of the labor force altogether. While the economy ostensibly surged, the number of Americans 16 and older who did not participate in the labor force <i>really</i> surged to a <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-number-americans-not-labor-force-june"><span style="color: #1255cc;">record-setting</span></a> 92,120,000 in June. That number represents a jump of 111,000 since April, and the labor force participation rate of 62.8 percent matched a 36-year low. In other words, job growth isn’t keeping up with population growth.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Another factor that skews the job numbers is something called <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/06/02/labor-dept-s-p-e-e-distorts-jobs-numbers/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Performance Enhancing Estimates</span></a> (P.E.E.). They are little more than educated guesstimates regarding the aforementioned seasonal adjustments as well as birth/death estimates determining how many companies were created or destroyed. In ominous context, a Brookings Institution study released last month <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/05/05/u-s-businesses-are-being-destroyed-faster-than-theyre-being-created/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reveals</span></a> that the U.S.&#8217;s economy is less entrepreneurial now than at any point in the last 30 years. Moreover, from 2009-2011, the last three years the study looked at, businesses were dying faster than they were being born—a dubious first time achievement. Thus, unless one assumes there has been a radical turnaround in the last three years, the long-term trend for job creation will be what the authors contend is &#8220;a continuation of slow growth for the indefinite future.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Federal Reserve seemingly <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-interest-rates-20140706-story.html#page=1"><span style="color: #1255cc;">concurs</span></a>. While Fed policy-makers have insisted a growing economy will lead to higher interest rates, 12 of the 16 members of the policy committee expect those rates to rise only as high as 1.5 percent by the end of 2015, and a majority expect a rise to 2.5 percent or less a year after that. For comparison sake, the interest rate in 2007 was more than double, at 5.25 percent. Anemic interest rates portend an economy like that of Japan’s, which has remained largely stagnant for more than two decades. Such conditions will more than likely exacerbate income inequality as well, because low interest rates favor corporate borrowers and the stock market, even as they crush those who want a decent return on their savings.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Does ObamaCare figure into the part-time employment mix? In March, the Huffington Post was <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/07/obamacare-part-time_n_4919117.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">sure</span></a> the dire predictions <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101196459#"><span style="color: #1255cc;">made</span></a> a year ago were overwrought and that the &#8220;opposite seems to be happening&#8221; because the number of part-time workers had fallen to 27.3 million in February. The addition of 700,000 part-time jobs since then is inconclusive, but the Obama administration’s grim determination to unilaterally <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/obamacare-employer-mandate-108578.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">postpone</span></a> the implementation of the so-called business mandate—twice—in the last year is at least somewhat indicative. So is a 2013 Duke/CFO magazine <a href="http://www.cfosurvey.org/13q4/PressRelease.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">survey</span></a> indicating that 38 percent of the 60 percent of businesses that increased their proportion of part-time workers cited ObamaCare as a reason. And a regularly updated <a href="http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/062414-669013-obamacare-employer-mandate-a-list-of-cuts-to-work-hours-jobs.htm"><span style="color: #1255cc;">chart</span></a> complied by Investors Business Daily shows that 429 mostly public employers have cut hours of employment (when they’re not eliminating jobs outright) below the 30-hour “full time employee” threshold that would subject them to the healthcare mandate.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Human Events staff writer John Hayward has a far more Machiavellian view of the &#8220;Great Leap Forward in the Obamanomics transformation of the American economy into a shrunken, underemployed workforce.” He contends the American left has figured out a way to eliminate the inevitable tension between the Makers and the Takers that thwarts their quest for a social utopia. &#8220;The true Middle Class is defined by its <i>independence,&#8221; </i>he writes<i>.</i> &#8220;Get them hooked on government subsidies, and they lose that independence.  Make enough of them truly <i>dependent </i>on those subsidies for the necessities of life, and their political threat is permanently neutralized.” (Italics in the original.) Part-time jobs and ObamaCare produce such hybrid Maker/Takers who ultimately come to believe that &#8220;prosperity is something the government must seize and redistribute.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One can choose to believe or dismiss Hayward’s assessment, but there is little doubt the economy remains as fragile as ever. Even if one buys into the media-anointed “jobs surge” it is impossible to dismiss the gargantuan number of part-time workers that drove it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And that’s while the stock market remains at or near record highs that may be as <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/07/05/why-the-17000-dow-is-bound-to-crash/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">illusory</span></a> as our so-called economic recovery. “The US middle class and low-income workers are broke,” contends Chadwick Financial Advisors CEO Mike Chadwick. “They are leveraged up to the hilt.” Corporate earnings remain stagnant and sales remain flat. “Corporations are squeezing more out of workers, outsourcing jobs, whatever they can do&#8211;everything except generating additional sales,” says Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&amp;P Capital IQ.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And finally, Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist of the Economic Outlook Group, sees a <a href="http://www.theleafchronicle.com/article/20140706/NEWS01/307060026/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">shift</span></a> in the way employers view employees that may indicate where the full-time vs. part-time jobs picture is <i>really</i> headed. “Companies view labor more as inventory that is to be hired when they need it and let go when they don’t need it,” he said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One hopes for better days ahead. But an economy where more businesses are dying than are being born—and human being are viewed as “inventory”—does not inspire anything resembling enduring confidence.</p>
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		<title>Detroit: How the Left Made Water More Expensive Than Cell Phones</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2014 04:56:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bankrupt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[expensive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[water]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234753</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives' cruel assault on the poor unmasked. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/8734154122_8229fb3d2f_z-629x420.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234754" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/8734154122_8229fb3d2f_z-629x420-450x300.jpg" alt="8734154122_8229fb3d2f_z-629x420" width="290" height="193" /></a>The latest news from Detroit, the poster child for failed progressive policies that have dominated that city for more than a half-century, is not good. In March of 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/detroit-cuts-off-water-to-thousands-of-residents-as-activists-plead-with-un-for-help-with-human-rights-abuse-9556171.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">announced</span></a> it would begin cutting off water service for customers at least 60 days overdue or more than $150 behind in their water bill payments. Activists outraged by the decision have taken their case outside the city—all the way to the United Nations.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The DWSD has targeted 1,500 to 3,000 business and residential customers every week as part of a get-tough approach that would enable them to begin recouping the $118 million owed from delinquent accounts. Accounts that comprise nearly half the city’s total number. As a result, the Department has shut off water service to <a href="http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/detroit-shuts-water-thousands-activists-ask-un-intervene"><span style="color: #1255cc;">more</span></a> than 7,500 properties in the past two months alone.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">&#8220;We really don&#8217;t want to shut off anyone’s water, but it’s really our duty to go after those who don’t pay, because if they don’t pay then our other customers pay for them,&#8221; <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/06/23/nearly-half-of-detroit-water-customers-cant-pay-their-bill/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> DWSD spokeswoman Curtrise Garner. &#8220;That’s not fair to our other customers.” Garner also noted that the city has programs that help those &#8220;totally in need,” but that many of the customers who can afford to pay their bills don’t bother, &#8220;and we know this because, once we shut water off, the next day they are in paying the bill in full. So we do know that that has become a habit as well,” she contended.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s not the only habit of non-payment afflicting Detroit. In 2012, it was revealed that <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130221/METRO01/302210375#ixzz35VEVs5Qi"><span style="color: #1255cc;">almost half</span></a> of the city&#8217;s 305,000 property owners failed to pay their tax bills the previous year.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet the thousands of families who no longer have access to water, along with those who will shortly follow, has generated a backlash by a coalition of leftist organizations striving for <a href="http://www.blueplanetproject.net/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">“water justice,&#8221;</span></a> including the <a href="http://peopleswaterboard.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Detroit People’s Water Board</span></a>, the <a href="http://www.blueplanetproject.net/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Blue Planet Project</span></a>, the <a href="http://mwro.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Michigan Welfare Rights Organization</span></a> and <a href="https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Food &amp; Water Watch</span></a>. They have submitted a <a href="http://www.blueplanetproject.net/index.php/detroit-submission/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">report</span></a> to Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, calling on that organization to intervene. &#8220;What we see is a violation of the human right to water,&#8221; said Meera Karunananthan, an international campaigner with the Blue Planet Project. &#8220;The U.S. has international obligations in terms of people’s right to water, and this is a blatant violation of that right. We’re hoping the U.N. will put pressure on the federal government and the state of Michigan to do something about it.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The groups have framed the argument in typically leftist terms, accusing the DWSD of attempting to rid itself of low-income customers in an effort to spur a private takeover of the utility. DWSD has denied the charge, but city officials are considering at least a partial takeover by private entities as one of a variety of strategies aimed at reducing the $18 billion of debt that has driven Detroit into bankruptcy. The DWSD accounts for $5 billion of that debt, and as of March, 150,806 out of the 323,900 DWSD accounts in the city were <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140322/NEWS01/303220010/Detroit-resume-water-shutoffs-delinquent-customers"><span style="color: #1255cc;">delinquent</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Detroit did attempt to integrate its water system with the water systems in the suburban counties of Oakland, Macomb and Wayne, hoping to <span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140406/NEWS01/304060082/Water-authority-Orr-Kevyn-Detroit-bankruptcy">create</a> </span>a jointly managed regional authority in return for a $47-million-per-year minimum lease payment. But the deal fell through when those counties wanted no part of the DWSD’s debt, its delinquent customers, or an aging infrastructure “with a history of disinvestment,” <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140406/OPINION01/304060057"><span style="color: #1255cc;">according</span></a> to the <i>Detroit Free Press</i>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Despite that disinvestment, Detroit has seen a steady rise in its water bills, including a staggering 119 percent <a href="http://www.mintpressnews.com/groups-appeal-to-un-to-stop-water-cut-offs-in-detroit-and-restore-basic-human-rights/192731/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">increase</span></a> over the last decade. The average water bill is now an outrageous $75 a month, <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/06/23/nearly-half-of-detroit-water-customers-cant-pay-their-bill/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">compared</span></a> to national average of $40. For perspective sake, the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/16/pf/cell-phone-bill.moneymag/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">average</span></a> cell phone bill is $71 per month.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Nonetheless, as recently as last week the Detroit City Council <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140617/NEWS01/306170107/City-Council-water-rate-hike"><span style="color: #1255cc;">approved</span></a> an 8.7 percent increase in DWSD rates expected to add an average of more than $5 per month to the current bills. Council President Brenda Jones cited infrastructure repair as the reason for the hike. “I do realize that in order to get the repairs done to our system, it’s going to take a lot of money to get those repairs because our system is very old,” Jones said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The activists are apoplectic, claiming those affected were given no time to prepare for a shut off and that some accounts were suspended prior to the deadline. &#8220;Sick people are left without running water and running toilets,” <a href="http://ecowatch.com/2014/05/28/water-cut-offs-detroit-violation-human-rights/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">writes</span></a> Blue Planet Project Founder and Food &amp; Water Watch Board Chair Maude Barlow.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook. Is this a small number of victims? No. The water department has decreed that it will turn the water off to all 120,000 residences that owe it money by the end of the summer although it has made no such threat to the many corporations and institutions that are in arrears on their bills as well. How did it come to this?</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, Barlow blames &#8220;decades of market driven neoliberal policy that put business and profit ahead of public good.” A less delusional examination reveals the usual suspects: free-spending, progressive Democrats, allied with labor unions.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Beginning in 1962, Detroit <a href="http://mic.com/articles/20567/america-s-future-looks-too-much-like-detroit"><span style="color: #1255cc;">elected</span></a> an unbroken string of Democratic mayors and other city officials determined to impose a progressive agenda on a city that was once the richest, per capita, in the entire nation. Democrats oversaw the failed the “Model City” program, fashioned after Soviet Union centralized efforts to transform entire urban areas at once. They were in control when the riots of 1967 destroyed black businesses and drove more than 140,000 people from the city. They bestowed outlandish salaries, benefit packages, and highly inefficient work rules on city unions, a move largely responsible for driving the city’s mainstay auto industry to right-to-work states. And they were responsible for a series of corruption scandals, culminating in a <a href="http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/23658979/kwame-kilpatrick-sentenced-to-28-years-in-prison"><span style="color: #1255cc;">28-year prison term</span></a> for former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">All of it led to the <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/DA6TMNC00"><span style="color: #1255cc;">largest</span></a> municipal bankruptcy in the history of the nation, in June of 2013.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And make no mistake: DWSD workers were an integral part of the problem. As recently as 2012, the DWSD employed a full-time <i>horseshoer</i> collecting $56,245 in salary and benefits &#8212; despite the inconvenient reality that the department had no horses. They also had 257 separate job classifications designed to maximize the number of workers required to do even the simplest of tasks &#8212; workers whose average compensation packages <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2013/02/21/detroit-gave-unions-keys-to-the-city-and-now-nothing-is-left/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">came to</span></a> $86,000 in 2013.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">2012 was also the year when an independent <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20120809/NEWS05/308090260/Detroit-water-department-cut-81-workers-under-new-proposal"><span style="color: #1255cc;">report</span></a> concluded that the city could <a href="http://www.mackinac.org/17370"><span style="color: #1255cc;">slash</span></a> the staffing levels at DWSD by 81 percent, due to the reality that it was using twice the number of employees per gallon as cities like Chicago. In response, John Riehl, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 207 that represents many of the DWSD employees, told the <i>Detroit Free Press</i> the department needed more workers.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When the Detroit Board of Water Commissioners approved the cutbacks, 950 DWSD workers went on strike in October 2012, defying a restraining order issued by a federal judge in the process. The strike lasted five days, and Riehl declared it a victory &#8220;because it has set the precedent that unions, the community and the City of Detroit can stand up against the whole array of powers-that-be and win.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In light of Detroit’s eventual bankruptcy, it was a temporary and Pyrrhic victory.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Today, Detroit is a city with an unemployment rate of <a href="http://ycharts.com/indicators/detroit_mi_unemployment_rate"><span style="color: #1255cc;">more</span></a> than 14 percent, and a poverty rate of about 40 percent, courtesy of the very same Democratic social engineering that has driven water to unaffordable levels for many of the city’s poorest residents. Even more telling, given that Detroit’s population is <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884135.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">82.7 percent</span></a> black, this crisis disproportionately afflicts the very same minorities Democrats claim to be protecting and nurturing.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“The case of water cut-offs in the City of Detroit speaks to the deep racial divides and intractable economic and social inequality in access to services within the United States,” claim the activists taking their case to the United Nations. No, it doesn’t. It speaks to 52 years of progressive Democratic policies that have destroyed the city formerly known as the &#8220;arsenal of democracy.” The very same policies these leftist groups would exacerbate in their quixotic quest for UN-sponsored “water justice.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>How America Treats Illegal Aliens vs. Veterans</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michellemalkin/how-america-treats-illegal-aliens-vs-veterans/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-america-treats-illegal-aliens-vs-veterans</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 26 May 2014 04:10:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[benefits]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Aliens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[veterans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226232</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Cutting benefits for our warriors while extending them to non-citizens. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Illegal-Immigrants.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226233 alignleft" alt="Illegal-Immigrants" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Illegal-Immigrants-450x262.jpg" width="315" height="183" /></a>A government that fails to secure its borders is guilty of dereliction of duty. A government that fails to care for our men and women on the frontlines is guilty of malpractice. A government that puts the needs of illegal aliens above U.S. veterans for political gain should be prosecuted for criminal neglect bordering on treason.</p>
<p>Compare, contrast and weep:</p>
<p>In Sacramento, Calif., lawmakers are moving forward with a budget-busting plan to extend government-funded health insurance to at least 1.5 million illegal aliens.</p>
<p>In Los Angeles, federal bureaucrats callously canceled an estimated 40,000 diagnostic tests and treatments for American veterans with cancer and other illnesses to cover up a decade-long backlog.</p>
<p>In New York, doctors report that nearly 40 percent of their patients receiving kidney dialysis are illegal aliens. A survey of nephrologists in 44 states revealed that 65 percent of them treat illegal aliens with kidney disease.</p>
<p>In Memphis, a VA whistleblower reported that his hospital was using contaminated kidney dialysis machines to treat America&#8217;s warriors. The same hospital previously had been investigated for chronic overcrowding at its emergency room, leading to six-hour waits or longer. Another watchdog probe found unconscionable delays in processing lab tests at the center. In addition, three patients died under negligent circumstances, and the hospital failed to enforce accountability measures.</p>
<p>In Arizona, illegal aliens incurred health care costs totaling an estimated $700 million in 2009.</p>
<p>In Phoenix, at least 40 veterans died waiting for VA hospitals and clinics to treat them, while government officials created secret waiting lists to cook the books and deceive the public about deadly treatment delays.</p>
<p>At the University of California at Berkeley, UC President Janet Napolitano (former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security) has offered $5 million in financial aid to illegal alien students. Across the country, 16 states offer in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington.</p>
<p>In addition, the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education, the University of Hawaii Board of Regents and the University of Michigan Board of Regents all approved their own illegal alien tuition benefits.</p>
<p>In 2013, the nation&#8217;s most selective colleges and universities had enrolled just 168 American veterans, down from 232 in 2011. Anti-war activists have waged war on military recruitment offices at elite campuses for years. The huge influx of illegal aliens in state universities is shrinking the number of state-subsidized slots for vets.</p>
<p>In 2013, the Obama Department of Homeland Security released 36,007 known, convicted criminal illegal aliens, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. The catch-and-release beneficiaries include thugs convicted of homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and thousands of drunk or drugged driving crimes.</p>
<p>The same Department of Homeland Security issued a report in 2009 that identified returning combat veterans as worrisome terrorist and criminal threats to America.</p>
<p>In Washington, Big Business and open-borders lobbyists are redoubling efforts to pass another massive illegal alien amnesty to flood the U.S. job market with low-wage labor.</p>
<p>Across the country, men and women in uniform returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan have higher jobless rates than the civilian population. The unemployment rate for new veterans has spiked to its worst levels, nearing 15 percent. For veterans ages 24 and under, the jobless rate is a whopping 29.1 percent, compared to 17.6 percent nationally for the age group.</p>
<p>A Forbes columnist reported last year that an Air Force veteran was told: &#8220;We don&#8217;t hire your kind.&#8221;</p>
<p>And last December, Democrats led the charge to reduce cost-of-living increases in military pensions — while blocking GOP Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions&#8217; efforts to close a $4.2 billion loophole that allows illegal aliens to collect child tax credits from the IRS, even if they pay no taxes. The fraudulent payments to illegal aliens would have offset the cuts to veterans&#8217; benefits.</p>
<p>America: medical and welfare welcome mat to the rest of the world, while leavings its best and bravest veterans to languish in hospital lounges, die waiting for appointments, and compete for jobs and educational opportunities against illegal border-crossers, document fakers, visa violators and deportation evaders. Shame on us.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Why the Left Doesn&#8217;t Care about Bad Economic News</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/why-the-left-doesnt-care-about-bad-economic-news/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-left-doesnt-care-about-bad-economic-news</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2014 04:15:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prosperity]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225462</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Americans' financial losses are the Democratic Party's gain. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unemployment-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225463" alt="unemployment-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/unemployment-1.jpg" width="298" height="197" /></a>This perception is wrong. It is their goals that are irreconcilable. And until conservatives, independents and the Republican Party understand this, it will not be possible to defeat the left.</p>
<p>Take economic indicators. Most conservatives talk and act as if bad economic news disturbs the left as much as it disturbs them. It doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Almost everywhere the left is in control — in California, for example — the economic news is awful. But this has no effect on the ruling Democrats, the Los Angeles Times editorial page, New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman or others on the left.</p>
<p>There is one overriding philosophical reason and one political reason for this. But before I identify them, permit me to note some of the economic facts of life in California.</p>
<p>Unless otherwise noted, the following data have been culled by Chapman University Professor Joel Kotkin, and published in the Wall Street Journal, the Orange County Register and elsewhere. (For the record, Kotkin is a self-described &#8220;Truman Democrat&#8221; who voted for the Democrat governor Jerry Brown of California.)</p>
<p>—In the last 20 years, about 4 million more people have left California than came in from other states. Most of those leaving are young families.</p>
<p>—In the last 15 years, one-third of California&#8217;s industrial employment base has disappeared. That&#8217;s 600,000 jobs that have disappeared.</p>
<p>—California has the 48th-worst business tax climate. (The Tax Foundation)</p>
<p>—California&#8217;s electricity prices are 50 percent higher than the national average.</p>
<p>—Middle-class workers, those who earn more than $48,000, pay a top income tax rate of 9.3 percent. That&#8217;s higher than what millionaires pay in 47 other states.</p>
<p>—California&#8217;s unemployment rate is fourth highest in the nation.</p>
<p>—From 2010-13, California produced fewer than 8,000 jobs, while the country added 510,000.</p>
<p>California faces enormous underfunded public employee pension obligations. (Bloomberg)</p>
<p>—An estimated 25 billion barrels of oil are sitting untapped in the Monterey and Bakersfield shale deposits. California is therefore sending billions of dollars to Texas, Canada and elsewhere to buy natural gas and oil that it could have produced itself.</p>
<p>—Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle, among other major California tech companies, have moved many operations to Salt Lake City.</p>
<p>—Hollywood is doing more and more of its filming in Louisiana, Canada and elsewhere to avoid California taxes.</p>
<p>—Toyota just announced that it is moving its U.S. headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas. This will eliminate 3,000 or more generally high-wage jobs.</p>
<p>—Occidental Petroleum recently announced that it is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Houston.</p>
<p>—Until relatively recently, half of the country&#8217;s top 10 energy firms — ARCO, Getty Oil, Union Oil, Occidental and Chevron — were based in California. Today, only Chevron remains, and it is gradually relocating in Houston. (Reuters)</p>
<p>—Houston has added nine million square feet of new office space. Los Angeles has added one million.</p>
<p>—Tesla will likely locate its proposed $5 billion battery factory, which would employ upward of 6,500 people, in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas. According to greentechmedia.com, California &#8220;didn&#8217;t make the short list because of the potential for regulatory and environmental delays.&#8221;</p>
<p>—California&#8217;s Monterey Shale offers a potential employment bonanza for workers needing access to entry-level jobs in the high-paying energy sector. But California&#8217;s green lobby is striving to deny them that opportunity. (John Husing, chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, Los Angeles Daily News)</p>
<p>Now back to our riddle. Why do these state-crushing economic statistics — nearly every one of which is the result of left-wing policies — have no effect on California&#8217;s Democrats, the Los Angeles Times editorial page, New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman or almost anyone else on the left?</p>
<p>The answer is that they don&#8217;t care. Yes, of course, as individuals with a heart, most people, right and left, care about people losing their jobs. But in terms of what matters to the left and the policies they pursue, they don&#8217;t care. The left and the political party it controls do not care if their policies force to companies to leave the state (or the country). They don&#8217;t care about the coming high inflation caused by Quantitative Easing (printing money) — Krugman calls it The Inflation Obsession — or the job-depressing effects of high taxes, or energy prices that hurt the middle class, or compelling businesses to leave.</p>
<p>They don&#8217;t care because the left is not interested in prosperity; the left is interested in inequality and in the environment. Furthermore, the worse the economic situation, the more voters are likely to vote Democrat. The worse the economic situation, the greater the number of people receiving government assistance; the greater the number of people receiving government assistance, the greater the number of people who will vote Democrat.</p>
<p>Therefore, both philosophically and politically, the left has no reason to be troubled by bad economic news. And it isn&#8217;t. It is troubled by inequality and carbon emissions.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:51:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The minimum wage hike mess and the poor workers who will have to live with it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219354" alt="1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg" width="320" height="215" /></a>The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations.</span></p>
<p>The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don&#8217;t know what working for a living entails and don&#8217;t even understand the concept.</p>
<p>The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, have a plan to wipe out another 500,000 jobs. Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it&#8217;s 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 percent mark.</p>
<p>A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can&#8217;t just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren&#8217;t making enough money, just raise their salaries.</p>
<p>The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn&#8217;t true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn&#8217;t take much to push them out from full-time to part-time and from part-time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.</p>
<p>Purge six figures worth of workers and suddenly income inequality becomes an even bigger problem that the Harvard and Yale Friends of the Working Class can use to run for reelection. It doesn&#8217;t occur to them that the living standard of the poor is not defined by an infographic comparing their income to Bill Gates&#8217; spectacles budget or George Soros&#8217; villain lair complete with lasers and piranhas.</p>
<p>It isn&#8217;t even defined by their salary, but by the buying power of that salary.</p>
<p>A salary is just a number. It was once possible to buy a meal for a dime and a politician for a hundred dollars. Today dinner with a politician will cost you that hundred and the politician may cost you a hundred thousand.</p>
<p>The businesses that minimum wage workers depend on are peopled with other minimum wage workers. Even assuming that the pay hike would be employment neutral, which it most certainly is not, it would rebalance once the businesses they patronize pass on the pay hike as a price hike. And then before you know it everyone is making more money that still buys about the same amount that their old paychecks did.</p>
<p>Income inequality is class warfare, a subject of interest to Marxist professors, but of very little relevance to the price of a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef.</p>
<p>The prices of basic staples have risen sharply under the Friend of the Working Class in Washington. While he dines on faux Wagyu beef at White House dinners, the working class victims of his class warfare are standing in Aisle 9 trying to assemble a puzzle that consists of their upcoming paycheck, a Payday loan and a grocery list.</p>
<p>The woman weighting a can of beans in one hand and her pocketbook in the other trying to decide what she can afford to take home doesn&#8217;t need income equality with a Harvard Law prof. What she needs is a living standard that will allow her to afford what working Americans used to be able to afford. A minimum wage hike is a blunt instrument that looks good until it puts her out of a job or until she comes back to Aisle 9 and sees that the price hikes match her new paycheck.</p>
<p>Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but progressives never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven&#8217;t already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.</p>
<p>In the Venezuelan Aisle 9, mobs are fighting over powdered milk in government stores in a country that has 85 percent of the oil reserves in the region. Everyone is entitled to powdered milk and other price controlled staples. But being entitled to something doesn&#8217;t mean that you can get it. Not until the government seizes control of the entire production process of powdered milk and when that is done, then no one will ever drink powdered milk again.</p>
<p>The path to Venezuela&#8217;s Aisle 9 is surprisingly similar to America&#8217;s Aisle 9. Governments can raise wages or lower food prices, but they can&#8217;t enforce the availability of food or jobs and they can&#8217;t control how the working class will work around the consequences of foodless government supermarkets and minimum wage jobs that have been priced out of the marketplace.</p>
<p>Venezuela&#8217;s Friend of the Working Class, Hugo Chavez, kicked the golden bucket with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars. The Friends of the Working Class are also doing comfortably well in D.C. where it pays to be an expert on poverty and an advocate for helping the working class by adding 12 million illegal aliens to the job market with illegal alien amnesty, shutting down jobs with environmental regulations and freeing the people still working from that dreaded &#8220;job lock.&#8221;</p>
<p>For the Washington Friends of the Working Class drifting from one cocktail party and fundraising dinner to another, the minimum wage hike is their latest gimmick for winning in 2016. They are as ignorant of the lives of the waiters who bring them their Wagyu beef and the vagaries of a working class budget as they are of Ancient Sanskrit or the geography of the moon.</p>
<p>In Aisle 9, things are simple and inflexible, but in politics and academia everything is subjective.</p>
<p>Weighing a can of food in your hands that you need but cannot afford wonderfully focuses the mind on the real, but at the cocktail parties of the Friends of the Working Class, everything is wonderfully unreal. There are no hard facts, only ideas and slogans.</p>
<p>Like The Great Gatsby&#8217;s Tom and Daisy, the progressive law professors and community organizers inhabit a &#8220;vast carelessness&#8221; of conferences and cocktail parties from which they emerge to carelessly smash things up before retreating back into it with no real awareness of what they have done and a certainty that the people on Aisle 9 whose lives they have smashed up ought to be grateful to them.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Refuting Robert Reich</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=refuting-robert-reich</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:55:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Seven tired left-wing arguments and why they fail. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-218824" alt="6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi-279x350.jpg" width="279" height="350" /></a>Former Clinton Labor Secretary and lifelong leftist Robert Reich has just released a new <a href="http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvzUvV5CD1y">video</a> for MoveOn.org, <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">alleging that there is a &#8220;war&#8221; being waged on the poor and working families. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; Reich begins, never bothering to explain who &#8220;they&#8221; are. His rant connects &#8220;seven dots&#8221; that point to a conspiracy of class oppressors who are &#8220;sinking&#8221; the poor with their opposition to big-government dependency programs, such as Food Stamps and long-term unemployment benefits. And once &#8220;they&#8221; get their way, &#8220;you&#8217;ll do exactly as they tell you,&#8221; Reich says. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich&#8217;s seven spurious claims, as over-worn and tired as they are, deserve to be responded to individually. It should be no surprise that each of Reich&#8217;s proposed &#8220;solutions&#8221; does its own damage to the poor, while offering little in the way of genuine social improvement.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>1.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The framing of this issue is dishonest at best. On first inspection, someone unfamiliar with the recent history of unemployment compensation extensions on Capitol Hill might sympathize with the idea of extending benefits for those out of work for &#8220;more than six months.&#8221; Six months, after all, is not an unimaginable amount of time to be chronically unemployed in the Obama economy. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The problem is, the recent benefit extension fight in Congress was not targeted just at workers who find themselves still treading water after six or seven months. Combined with state emergency benefits that usually last 26 weeks, federal add-ons initiated after the 2008 recession </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">raised that total to 73 weeks, meaning people were eligible to collect benefits for almost a year and half. This was an unprecedented extension of the unemployment compensation program, and many Americans justifiably question the wisdom of such exceedingly long durations of unemployment benefits. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One reason for this skepticism has to do with the indisputable capacity of benefit extensions to exacerbate long-term unemployment. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/05/unemployment-insurance-extensions-competitive-enterprise-institute-editorials-debates/4330603/">Analyses</a> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded that such extensions over the past five years have kept more than 600,000 out of the labor force by paying people not to work. Those claims were echoed in a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ideas.repec.org/e/pmu176.html">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of recently unemployed people in New Jersey commissioned by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Andreas Mueller of the University of Stockholm. They discovered that after a burst of initial activity, people slack off on their job search and wait for something to happen. Moreover, it is likely more workers have been drawn into the mire of unemployment due to the benefit extensions: Another <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368047/study-extending-unemployment-benefits-increased-unemployment-more-3-percentage-points">study</a> from the NBER concluded that unemployment benefit extensions have increased overall unemployment by over 3 percent. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Workers are not benefited by being encouraged to remain unemployed for such long periods of time. Long-term unemployment dulls skill sets and makes workers less attractive to potential employers. The longer workers are enticed to stay unemployed, prolong the job hunt, or even dismiss jobs with lower pay, the weaker their resumes become when they inevitably reenter the job market. </span></span></p>
<p>Leaving this aside, if Reich&#8217;s &#8220;they&#8221; bogeymen are meant to refer to Republican congressional leadership, his claim that &#8220;they are against&#8221; the benefits extension is also untrue. Republicans have approved renewal of the extension numerous times. This year, Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, requested that the renewal of the extension be <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303595404579321010229177576">offset</a> elsewhere in the budget and accompanied by job-creations measures, which Democrats refused. If Democrats had conceded to these commonsense compromises, it is more than likely unemployment insurance extension would have been approved for 2014.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>2.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to raise the minimum wage.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A 2007 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=961374">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">100 studies</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the effects of raising the minimum wage was conducted David Neumark and William Wascher at the National Bureau of Economic Research. It revealed that a &#8220;sizable majority&#8221; of those studies, including those with the &#8220;most credible evidence,&#8221; concluded that raising the minimum wage produced &#8220;negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries.&#8221; Even more tellingly, &#8220;the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ibtimes.com/most-benefits-minimum-wage-increase-would-not-go-poor-households-1541342">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 5 percent of hourly U.S. workers made the federal minimum wage or less in 2012. Among those earning it, 63 percent were second- or third-wage earners from households with incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more. Only 11.3 percent of workers who would experience the increase live in households officially designated as poor. As the BLS survey also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, most minimum wage earners are young, part-time workers with an average family income of $53,000 per year. If Reich wishes to help teenage, middle class burger-flippers he might have a point. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>3.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending Medicaid benefits.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, the disaster known as ObamaCare is doing precisely this. More than </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/factcheck-obamacare-and-the-state-of-the-union/">double</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the number of people who have signed up for healthcare via the exchanges have enrolled in Medicaid. Since Medicaid is government-subsidized insurance, it is paid for by a combination of funds from state and federal budgets. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prior</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to its expansion under ObamaCare, Medicaid had already become the largest line item in a typical state&#8217;s budget, exceeding such items as public safety, infrastructure, roads and, since 2009, education spending for kindergarten-through-12th-grade.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet there is a far bigger problem. Since Medicaid payments are 61 percent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/11/physicians-hesitant-medicaid-patients.html">less</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that what private insurance pays, an increasing number of doctors </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/26/doctor-wont-see-analysts-warn-obamacare-plans-could-resemble-medicaid/">refuse</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to accept new Medicaid patients. &#8220;About half of the physicians in many communities refuse to take Medicaid patients because the payment system is just too low,&#8221; reports James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Many doctors are still willing to take a certain percentage of such patients in order to fulfill a moral obligation, but they are not willing to put themselves out of business to do so. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, many Americans enrolled in Medicaid are going to discover a reality that invariably eludes people like Robert Reich: &#8220;extending Medicaid benefits&#8221; isn&#8217;t remotely the same thing as getting actual healthcare. The end result will be rationing and denial of care for the millions of poor sold empty promises.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>4.</strong> <em>&#8220;They want to cut food stamps.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As with much of the progressive lexicon, &#8220;cut&#8221; is a euphemism. In reality, food stamp usage has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">exploded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, with a record-setting one-in-five American households on the program in 2013, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Furthermore, the cost of the program has increased a whopping 164 percent over the last decade, and 36.8 percent since the Obama administration assumed control in 2009. Thus a program that cost the nation $58.2 billion in 2009 cost $79.6 billion last year. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The latest Farm Bill under which the food stamp program operates does cut food stamp spending, but those cuts </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latinpost.com/articles/7126/20140211/president-obama-signs-farm-bill-what-will-the-cut-to-food-stamps-mean-for-you.htm">amount</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $800 million per year, or approximately one percent of the overall total &#8212; a total that has grown exponentially, even as America remains saddled with a national debt of more than $17 trillion, along with unfunded liabilities that exceed $85 trillion. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>5.</strong> <em>&#8220;They refuse to invest in education and job training.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality the federal government alone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/">has</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies, according to the the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). These programs </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/17/senator-questions-18b-spent-on-job-training-as-study-suggest-rampant-waste/">cost</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the taxpayer $18 billion per year, and a 2011 report by the same GAO concluded that some of them are riddled with mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. The report further noted that since 2004, only 5 of the 47 agencies involved kept tabs on whether participants had actually secure jobs. &#8220;Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,&#8221; the GAO concluded.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for education, the federal government </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-federal-budget">spent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $138 billion in FY2013. In both real dollars and as a percentage of GDP, the United States </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/">outspent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> most of the world&#8217;s developed nations in education. When one factors in vocational training and college as well, the United States outspends all of them. Yet if bang for the buck counts, America comes up woefully short, routinely scoring well below other nations on international exams. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But this is only part of the story. Every one of America&#8217;s true educational wastelands &#8212; namely, most of our major inner cities where graduation rates hover around 60 percent or less, where budgets are routinely on the verge of bankruptcy or already there, and where teachers unions fight tooth and nail for the miserable status quo &#8212; are Democrat </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/atrocity/">strongholds</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. If Reich were truly interested in helping the poor and working class Americans he professes to care so deeply about, he&#8217;d be far more interested in challenging that status quo, which revolves around the unholy alliance of education unions and a Democratic Party beholden to their campaign contributions and marching orders.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>6.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to rebuild America&#8217;s crumbling infrastructure.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich has an exceedingly short memory. The American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, more familiarly known as the stimulus bill, was supposed to target the lion&#8217;s share of its $787 billion appropriation (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://useconomy.about.com/od/candidatesandtheeconomy/a/Obama_Stimulus.htm">increased</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $840 billion in 2012) on &#8220;shovel-ready jobs.&#8221; One year later, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17obama-t.html?_r=3&amp;ref=magazine&amp;pagewanted=all%22">admitted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> “there&#8217;s no such thing.&#8221; To be fair to Reich, infrastructure spending has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/24/u-s-infrastructure-spending-has-plummeted-since-2008/">taken</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a nosedive since its peak before the recession began, but it&#8217;s not because the state and local governments that provide the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-cant-we-just-leave-infrastructure-spending-to-the-states/2012/03/21/gIQAjpYBSS_blog.html">vast majority</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of infrastructure spending don&#8217;t want to spend the money. It&#8217;s because they </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">can&#8217;t</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> afford to do so.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even in the midst of such cuts, America </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/04/01/infrastructure-gap-look-at-the-facts-we-spend-more-than-europe/">spends</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> more on infrastructure than the progressive stronghold known as the European Union, at 3.3 percent of our GDP from 2006-2011, compared to only 3.1 percent for the EU. The clamor for increased spending is all about doing it with more borrowed money, with the American Society of Civil Engineers (hardly a neutral entity) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/">calling</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for a $3.6 trillion &#8220;investment&#8221; between now and 2020. Congress&#8217;s most recently passed budget </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://news.agc.org/2014/01/18/congress-passes-spending-bill-to-fund-government-in-2014-2/">allocates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $108 billion for federal construction accounts.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The only way we will likely see more infrastructure spending is with a growing economy. Obama could contribute to that growth if he would approve the Keystone pipeline, among other things. Perhaps he could explain why he won&#8217;t to Robert Reich.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>7.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re out to bust unions.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unions are doing a good job of busting themselves. Nothing speaks louder to this reality than the debacle Big Labor perpetrated in Wisconsin, where their thug-like tactics were rejected by both Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the voters themselves. As a result of Walker&#8217;s triumph, a projected $3 billion-plus deficit </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/hey-who-wants-to-talk-about-wisconsins-economic-miracle/?singlepage=true">turned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> into a projected $300,000 surplus in 2011. Much of it was accomplished by getting government union members to pay for a portion of their own healthcare and pensions and eliminating automatic pay and benefit increases that are strangling states like New York, Illinois and California.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the national level, a recent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mackinac.org/19051">study</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the Mackinac Center reveals that right-to-work states have seen greater improvements in employment rates, income, and population growth than non-right-to-work states over the last 60 years. Critics attempt to obscure this reality by pointing to the fact that states with right-to-work laws have lower per capita incomes. Yet they </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/18222">fail</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to factor in the cost of living, which is far more expensive in states where union monopolies push government budgets, and the taxes that pay for them, ever higher. When cost of living is factored in,  people in right-to-work states have 4.1 percent higher per-capita personal incomes than those in non-right-to-work states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, in cities that have gone bankrupt, such as Stockton, and Detroit, the primary drivers of that bankruptcy were out-of-control legacy costs for government union workers. Of Detroit&#8217;s $12 billion in outstanding debt, $9.2 billion of it is comprised of health and pension benefits owed to retired workers. When the city filed for bankruptcy, it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/24/detriot-mess-why-future-stalled-in-motor-city/">had</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 different public employee unions, and a worker at the Water and Sewer Department who collected $56,000 in pay and benefits for his job as a horse-shoer despite the department having no horses. Detroit also has three retired municipal workers collecting a pension for every two that are still working.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to Heritage Foundation&#8217;s chief economist Stephen Moore, more than 60 American cities may be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2014/02/us-is-going-bankrupt-one-city-at-time.html">facing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the same fate as the Motor City. “Keep an eye on ‘too big to fail’ cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York,” he warns.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Moore goes on to cite the progressive ideology in general championed by Reich and others as the primary impetus for such failure. “For at least the last 20 years major U.S. cities have been playgrounds for left-wing experiments—high taxes on the rich; sanctuaries for illegal immigrants; super-minimum wage rules; strict gun-control laws; regulations and paperwork that makes it onerous to open a business or develop on your own property; crony capitalism with contracts going to political donors and friends; and failing schools ruled by teacher unions, with little competition or productivity.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Robert Reich had any intellectual honesty, he would answer his question, &#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; by examining who really benefits from</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> large swathes of the population kept mired in poverty and being sucked into the mentality of dependency. It is no accident that every major American city </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/">besieged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by poverty, crime, economic disfunction and failing schools is a Democratic stronghold. </span>Reich&#8217;s proposals offer more of the same. They merely reassert a long-held belief by the American left that success is measured by how many people they get <i>on</i> government programs, not <i>off</i> government programs. Americas would do well to &#8220;connect the dots&#8221; regarding the utter bankruptcy of such ideology.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Economic Destruction Exposed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/obamacares-economic-destruction-exposed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-economic-destruction-exposed</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Feb 2014 05:50:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2 million]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[congressional budget office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The numbers are in. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/RT_obamacare_pamphlet_jef_130703_16x9_608.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218024" alt="RT_obamacare_pamphlet_jef_130703_16x9_608" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/RT_obamacare_pamphlet_jef_130703_16x9_608-450x311.jpg" width="270" height="187" /></a>A new government study projects that Obamacare will kill 2 million full-time American jobs in 2017, confirming the approaching economic devastation about which the budget-busting program&#8217;s critics have warned for years.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The study came as Obama administration allies unveiled plans to saturate the airwaves with animal videos in a bid to dupe young women into signing up for the failing government program.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As the government report shows, contrary to the promises of President Obama, the Obamacare law will boot people out of their health care plans, encourage idleness, drive wages down, increase the government&#8217;s tax take, and fail to put a dent in the number of Americans without health insurance coverage.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, it&#8217;s Wednesday at the White House.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The job destruction caused by Obamacare will climb to 2.5 million in 2024, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/45010-Outlook2014.pdf">according to</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> &#8220;The Budget and Outlook: 2014 to 2024,&#8221; a new publication of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan research arm of the U.S. Congress. &#8220;The decline in full time-equivalent employment stemming from the [Affordable Care Act] will consist of some people not being employed at all and other people working fewer hours&#8230;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Both of those job loss figures are substantially higher than the comparatively modest estimate of 800,000 jobs lost that CBO </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49273.html">provided</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in 2011.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Affordable Care Act&#8217;s &#8220;largest impact on labor markets will probably occur after 2016, once its major provisions have taken full effect and overall economic output nears its maximum sustainable level,&#8221; says the new report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hours worked will fall by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent from 2017 to 2024 largely because some workers will opt to escape new taxes while others won&#8217;t need to work as much because they will receive subsidies from taxpayers. Lower-wage workers will be hit hardest. In the same seven-year period aggregate compensation (wages, salaries, and fringe benefits) will fall 1 percent compared to what it would have been otherwise, according to the report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These trends &#8220;are likely to continue after 2024 (the end of the current 10-year budget window),&#8221; the report indicated.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But that&#8217;s just part of the misery President Obama&#8217;s signature legislative accomplishment </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/04/5-devastating-obamacare-facts-from-cbos-latest-economic-report/">will inflict</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on Americans in coming years.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obamacare will cause paychecks to shrink.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2018, the ACA begins to impose an excise tax on some of the more expensive health insurance plans. Workers will pay that tax in the form of reduced after-tax compensation. When some employers limit their exposure to the excise tax by switching to cheaper plans, employees&#8217; wages will rise but the extra compensation will be subject to income and payroll taxes, making workers&#8217; tax payments higher than they would have been had Obamacare not been enacted.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Americans will continue being unceremoniously booted from their employer-sponsored health insurance plans, despite President Obama&#8217;s frequently repeated promise that Americans would be able to keep their health care plans. And as a result of the law, CBO and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) project that &#8220;between 6 million and 7 million fewer people will have employment-based insurance coverage each year from 2016 through 2024 than would be the case in the absence of the ACA.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Under Obamacare, the number of uninsured people in the U.S., which Obama himself set at 30 million in September 2009, will grow. In 2024 there will be 31 million non-elderly U.S. residents without health insurance, according to CBO and the JCT.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, just in time for Valentine&#8217;s Day, Obama administration allies are hoping to invigorate the moribund enrollment process by having cute, fuzzy singing animals convince women to sign up for the failing government program.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This animal abuse </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/04/new-obamacare-ads-use-cute-animals-to-attract-women/">consists of</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> ads on television and in other media that are sponsored by </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7805">Enroll America</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and the Ad Council, two left-wing pressure groups.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Enroll America is a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/the-obamacare-navigators-nightmare/">corrupt</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 501c3 nonprofit </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.groupsnoop.org/Enroll+America">that is funded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?fndid=5211&amp;category=79">Robert Wood Johnson Foundation</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, H&amp;R Block, and companies that stand to profit from Obamacare, according to groupsnoop, a research website operated by the National Center for Public Policy Research. The Ad Council is an ongoing left-wing brainwashing exercise </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.adcouncil.org/Working-With-Us/Partners/Media-Companies">funded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by a cabal of media outlets.</span></p>
<p>As the Daily Caller <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/02/04/new-obamacare-ads-use-cute-animals-to-attract-women/">reports</a></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;With the March 31 deadline to enroll fast approaching, Enroll America reports that many women in the 18 to 34 age group remain unaware about the new coverage options. According to the organization’s research, 81 percent of uninsured people are not aware that the deadline to enroll is March 31, and 69 percent do not know about the availability of federal assistance for lower income people. The ads will be offered in English and Spanish to target Hispanic women as well and feature a menagerie of house pets singing about enrolling for [Obamacare] &#8216;today!&#8217;&#8221;</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No one seems to know how many people have actually successfully enrolled in Obamacare-compliant health care plans. This seems especially true even at the highest levels of the federal government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/29/the-problem-with-obamacares-9-million-enrollment-n.aspx">fudged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Obamacare exchange enrollment statistics. &#8220;More than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage &#8212; 9 million,&#8221; he said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As Brian Orelli of the Motley Fool </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/29/the-problem-with-obamacares-9-million-enrollment-n.aspx">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, Obama&#8217;s 9-million figure might be &#8220;technically true&#8221; but it is essentially useless. &#8220;About 3 million Americans have signed up for private insurance on the federal or state exchanges, and around 6 million are now eligible for Medicaid,&#8221; Orelli writes, accepting government-provided figures as gospel.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the 9-million number &#8220;doesn&#8217;t tell us what we need to know to figure out whether Obamacare is viable,&#8221; he adds. It is unclear how many of these alleged 9 million people are newly covered.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">McKinsey &amp; Co. reported last month that just 11 percent of people who signed up on the exchanges were previously uninsured. &#8220;It&#8217;s not an official number, but even if it&#8217;s in the ballpark, most people were just switching insurance,&#8221; Orelli writes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other research suggests that well under a million people have actually enrolled in Obamacare through the exchanges &#8212; meaning they signed up and they paid their premiums.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcannon/2013/12/30/what-surge-obamacare-enrollments-remain-dangerously-below-60-percent-of-target/">concluded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> at the end of December that the Obama administration had fallen far short of its enrollment targets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The administration wanted to enroll 3.3 million paying customers by the end of 2013 which would constitute 47 percent of the way toward its goal of enrolling 7 million paying customers by March 31. In fact there are only 2 million &#8220;sign-ups,&#8221; according to Cannon, and these sign-ups &#8220;are not paying customers yet, though the administration would like to give the impression that they are &#8216;enrollees.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Anecdotal evidence suggests that only between 5 and 15 percent of the sign-ups &#8220;have actually paid their first premium and are in fact enrolled,&#8221; notes Cannon.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Only the government can get away with this. If Amazon.com counted everything sitting in their customers’ shopping carts as &#8216;sales,&#8217; they would probably find themselves under indictment and the subject of shareholder lawsuits. I’m guessing President Obama would be outraged.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course Obama would be. But he&#8217;s an imperial president and the nation&#8217;s number one media celebrity, so the rules about accountability don&#8217;t apply to him, especially when it comes to his signature monstrosity.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Amnesty: A Disaster for the American Worker</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-a-disaster-for-the-american-worker/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-a-disaster-for-the-american-worker</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-a-disaster-for-the-american-worker/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:45:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wages]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217509</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The threat of the immigration reform push underway in Congress. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/open-borders.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217510" alt="open-borders" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/open-borders-450x345.jpg" width="315" height="241" /></a>Ninety two million Americans have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537585/More-Americans-not-working-92-million-people-workforce.html">left</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the workforce. Another 50 million live </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/7/obamas-rhetoric-on-fighting-poverty-doesnt-match-h/?page=all">below</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the poverty line. </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">One-in-five</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> American households are on food stamps. Household income is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/politics/us-median-income-rises-but-is-still-6-below-its-2007-peak.html?_r=0">down</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 4.4 percent since the so-called recovery began in 2009. Only 74,000 jobs were </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2014/0110/Just-74-000-jobs-created-in-December-far-below-forecasts.-What-happened">created</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last month, and America remains mired in the weakest economic recovery </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2014/0110/Just-74-000-jobs-created-in-December-far-below-forecasts.-What-happened">since</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the Great Depression. The bipartisan &#8220;solution&#8221; for these problems steadily gaining steam in Washington? Comprehensive immigration reform that will heighten the competition for jobs between newly legalized immigrants and Americans workers struggling to find employment.</span></p>
<p>Make no mistake: Americans are struggling to find employment. Even Gene Sperling, Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, <a href="http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/05/gene-sperling-on-state-of-the-union-white-house-extends-unemployment-insurance/">admitted</a> as much, conceding that there are &#8220;three people looking for every job.&#8221; Despite that reality, one of the proposals contained in the Senate immigration bill <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/immigration-bill-2013-senate-passes-93530.html">passed</a> last June would <a href="http://cis.org/gang-of-eight-bill-doubles-temporary-worker-flow">double</a> the number of guest workers admitted to the United States on an annual basis. That increase is four times larger than the one contained in the 2007 Bush-Kennedy proposal.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">America currently </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/jun/20/marco-rubio/marco-rubio-says-us-admits-1-million-immigrants-ye/">admits</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> one million legal immigrants per year, far more than any other nation in the world. Yet when one combines the aforementioned guest workers with illegal aliens who would be granted work permits and permanent residency, the bill supported by the Senate Democrats and Obama would </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2014/01/09/is-2014-year-for-immigration-reform-republicans-chamber-commerce-spar/">triple</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that number to 3 million immigrants per year, and 30 million mostly lower-skill immigrants coming to America over the next decade. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sixteen conservative House members sent a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/367945/house-conservatives-make-populist-case-against-immigration-reform-andrew-stiles">letter</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the president illuminating the consequences. “The White House has entertained a parade of high-powered business executives to discuss immigration policy, all while shutting out the concerns of everyday wage-earners who overwhelmingly oppose these measures,” it states. &#8220;So-called comprehensive immigration reform may be a good deal for big businesses who want to reduce labor costs, and it may be a good deal for progressive labor unions seeking new workers from abroad, but it&#8217;s an awful deal for U.S. workers &#8211; including African-American and Hispanic communities enduring chronically high unemployment.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The letter is spot on. The current official </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://voxxi.com/2014/01/10/latino-unemployment-rate-8-3-percent/">unemployment rate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for Hispanics is 8.3 percent, well above the national average of 6.7 percent. And just like the average unemployment rate is completely misleading because it doesn&#8217;t include the millions who have left the labor force, so it goes for Hispanics whose workforce participation rate shrank by 261,000 in December. For black Americans, the stats are even worse. Their official </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm">unemployment</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> rate is 11.9 percent, and their labor force participation rate of 65.6 percent is the lowest ever recorded.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unemployment is only half the equation. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), wages would also be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44346-Immigration.pdf">negatively</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> affected &#8212; for an entire decade. &#8220;Average wages would be slightly lower than under current law through 2024, primarily because the amount of capital available to workers would not increase as rapidly as the number of workers and because the new workers would be less skilled and have lower wages, on average, than the labor force under current law,&#8221; the CBO writes. The CBO further notes the Senate proposal would &#8220;slightly raise the unemployment rate through 2020.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet it is the other part of the letter that is likely to resonate with ordinary Americans. Average Americans </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">were</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> shut out of the process of immigration reform while organizations like Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, United Technologies, American Express, Procter &amp; Gamble, T-Mobile, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Cigna and Texas Instruments all </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2013/10/07/business-pushes-immigration-reform-even-as-it-lays-off-american-workers-n1719123/page/full">petitioned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Congress to increase the number of immigrant workers. Mirian Graddick-Weir, Merck Executive Vice President for Human Resources, sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), insisting more foreign workers were necessary to &#8220;address the reality that there is a global war for talent&#8221; and to &#8220;align our nation&#8217;s immigration policies with its workforce needs at all skill levels to ensure U.S. global competitiveness.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2013, Merck laid off 16,000 workers. The other companies mentioned above have also laid off thousands of workers over the last few years. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Chamber or Commerce (COC) is an equally hypocritical organization. Despite their purported alliance with Republicans, they also support comprehensive immigration reform. &#8220;We&#8217;re determined to make 2014 the year that immigration reform is finally enacted,&#8221; said COC president Tom Donohue. Toward that end, the COC has targeted the one stumbling block to that reform, namely conservative House members. As conservative columnist Michelle Malkin </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2014/01/24/the-us-chamber-of-commerce-versus-america-n1783823">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the COC will spend &#8220;$50 million subsidizing the Republican incumbency protection racket and attacking anti-establishment conservatives.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Donahue laid out the COC&#8217;s agenda for the 2014 election campaign. “In 2014, the chamber will work to protect and expand a pro-business majority in the House and advance our position and our influence in the Senate,” he said in his annual State of American Business speech in Washington. “The business community understands what’s at stake.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So does Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who is leading the charge against comprehensive immigration reform. &#8220;Senate Democrats, the Gang of Eight and the White House have all apparently decided that large corporations should be able to tailor the nation&#8217;s immigration policy to suit their own financial interests,&#8221; he said in a statement released last October. &#8220;Now it falls on the shoulders of House Republicans to do the right thing and to defend the legitimate interests of American workers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cis.org/immigrant-gains-native-losses-in-the-job-market-2000-to-2013">illuminates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the immigration trends, both legal and illegal, that have</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> already</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> adversely affected those interests. Their analysis of government data shows that over the last 13 years, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of the net gain in employment has gone to legal and illegal immigrants. During that timeframe, which was also a period of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.dhs.gov/yearbook-immigration-statistics-2012-legal-permanent-residents">record immigration</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the net number of jobs held by U.S.-born Americans declined by 1.3 million, while the number of jobs held by both legal and illegal immigrants increased by 5.3 million. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The report undermines several other shibboleths promoted by the pro-reform advocates, especially the notion that immigration reform is necessary to fill the jobs &#8220;Americans refuse to do.&#8221; CIS reveals that out of the 472 civilian occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, only six occupations are majority immigrant, both legal and illegal. Those six occupations account for only one percent of the total American workforce. &#8220;Given the employment situation in the country, the dramatic increases in legal immigration contemplated by the Gang of Eight immigration bill seem out of touch with the realities of the U.S. labor market,&#8221; the report concludes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately those with vested interests, including Democrats, who envision a plethora of new voters giving them a permanent majority, labor unions who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/why-labor-has-learned-to-love-immigration-reform-20130131">envision</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> millions of new dues-paying members, and establishment Republicans, more than willing to kowtow to their big business campaign donors eager for cheap labor, couldn&#8217;t care less. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of the three entities, the GOP establishment truly stands out. It is not often that a political party mired in minority status since 2006 is given a gift as large as ObamaCare to run against in 2014. It is truly remarkable that they would even consider alienating their core constituency in return for….what? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Certainly not the allegiance of Hispanics. In every presidential election since 1980, Hispanics have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cis.org/mortensen/hispanics-were-democrats-long-illegal-immigration-became-issue">favored</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Democrats over Republicans by an average margin of 64-31 percent. That included the 1988 election, which followed the granting of unambiguous amnesty to 2.7 million illegals, courtesy of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Despite a blowout win for George G.W. Bush, he received only 30 percent of the Hispanic vote, even as loser Michael Dukakis garnered 69 percent. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thus one is left to conclude the establishment wing of the GOP is doing nothing more than serving interests of their big business campaign donors. Townhall&#8217;s John Hawkins </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/01/28/why-proamnesty-republicans-are-so-desperate-to-pass-immigration-reform-this-year-n1785691/page/2">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the dynamic:</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;There are a lot of businesses out there that want an endless supply of cheap labor, which would be fine, except that they want everyone else to pay for it. An illegal alien with no car insurance, no health insurance, who claims he has 14 kids so he can get an earned income tax credit can work cheaper than a law abiding American. So, when the illegal crashes his car, you pay for it. When he gets sick, you pay for it. Your taxes put his kids through school. Your taxes pay the bills if he goes to jail. Your tax dollars go into his pocket when he cheats on his taxes &#8212; meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce crowd makes so much money off of these illegals that they can afford to donate some of it to politicians like John Boehner, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham and John McCain in order to get them to keep the gravy train going.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That gravy train is utterly antithetical to the interests of the average American worker, and the conservative members of the GOP know it. “Job number one for Congress should be to reduce the unemployment rolls, get families and communities out of poverty and government dependency, rebuild our deteriorating communities and collapsing middle class, and increase wages for American citizens,” the above letter concludes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, the signs remain ominous. GOP leaders will soon release their so-called &#8220;statement of principals&#8221; regarding comprehensive immigration reform. As Sen. Sessions </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/26/sessions-immigration-reform-obama-gop-column/4917095/">explains</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, they mirror many of the central elements of President Obama&#8217;s plan, allowing millions of illegals to gain work permits and permanently increasing the flow of foreign workers into America. And while pro-immigration advocates ramble on about the supposed economic benefits that will accrue as a result, a fundamental economic law is being calculatingly ignored in the process: more of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">anything</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, including millions of additional workers, makes the individual value of that thing (worker) worth less. Combine that economic fundamental with the current, largely jobless, recovery that already has three people competing for every one job, and it&#8217;s a formula for disaster for the American worker.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;The choice is clear,&#8221; writes Sessions. &#8220;Either the GOP can help the White House deliver a crushing hammer blow to the middle class&#8211;or it can stand alone as the one party defending the legitimate interests of American workers.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It could be clearer than that. A day after the president has made populist </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">rhetoric</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the central part of his agenda, the GOP has an opportunity to seize the high ground on populist </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">reality</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. It may be the last chance they get for a long time.</span></p>
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		<title>Food Stamp Explosion</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/food-stamp-explosion/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=food-stamp-explosion</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/food-stamp-explosion/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:25:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217102</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What it says about the fraudulent economic "recovery." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/food-stamps.gi_.top_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217118" alt="food-stamps.gi.top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/food-stamps.gi_.top_.jpg" width="266" height="176" /></a>Another dose of reality has trumped the Obama administration&#8217;s economic happy talk. According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm">data</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), one-in-five Americans were on the food stamp program in 2013. A staggering 23,052,388 households needed supplemental food assistance in FY2013, an increase of 722,675 households compared to FY2012. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The cost of the program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">reached</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an all-time high. For fiscal year 2013, the SNAP program cost American taxpayers $79.6 billion. That represents a 36.8 percent increase in expenditures over the last five years. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And it&#8217;s not just households that have seen a huge jump in the SNAP participation rate. The monthly average for individual users of the program has also increased dramatically, as an additional 1,027,012 participants pushed the total number of individual users from 46,609,072 to 47,636,084 over the same time period. Since 2009, the number of individuals using the SNAP program has increased by 42.2 percent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obviously the global financial crisis of 2007 contributed to the increased number of people who lost their jobs and/or savings, and were forced to turn to supplemental assistance as a result. But the biggest bump in both the number of households and individuals on the program occurred between FY2009 and FY2010, when America was ostensibly in the beginning of the so-called recovery. Furthermore, the next three years saw a steady increase in usage as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The increase leads to one of two conclusions. Either the number of people gaming the system is getting out of hand, or the economy isn&#8217;t in recovery for a vast number of Americans.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Certainly a certain percentage of fraud exists. In Florida&#8217;s Palm Beach County, warrants were issued in December for 60 people suspected of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/two-year-investigation-leads-to-60-arrests-on-publ/ncMBm/">cheating</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the system out of $2.8 million. The scheme involved a market that allowed SNAP users to illegally swipe their cards for cash. In return, the market got a 50 percent kickback for lying to state and federal authorities and saying that that groceries were purchased. In two Louisiana counties, a failure at Xerox Corp., temporarily taking down the electronic benefit transfer system, resulted in an unknown number of customers </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://theadvocate.com/home/7320109-125/state-taxpayers-dont-have-to">stripping</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> bare the shelves of two Wal-Mart stores and making purchases well beyond their EBT card limits.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://farmfutures.com/story-senator-wants-food-stamp-purchases-require-photo-id-0-107630">introduced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a bill, the &#8220;Food Stamp Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act&#8221; that would require SNAP users to show a photo ID when using their benefit cards. &#8220;Using a photo ID is standard in many day to day transactions, and most of those are not exclusively paid for by the taxpayer dollars,&#8221; Vitter said. &#8220;Food Stamps have more than doubled in cost since 2008 and continue to grow in an unsustainable way, and the events in Louisiana unfortunately highlight the fraud surrounding the taxpayer-funded program.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Naturally those on the left </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/16/david-vitter-food-stamps_n_4610560.html">resisted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the idea. &#8220;Many poor people do not have photo IDs, and it costs money they do not have to get them,&#8221; said Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs. &#8220;Senator Vitter&#8217;s proposal will be especially tough on elderly and poor people who do not have the documents needed to get their photo ID, and who will struggle even to get to the necessary offices. They will wind up going without food.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A recent inspector general audit estimated that $222 million per year could be saved by cracking down on fraud. The audit found some of the more obvious scams, such as recipients using “erroneous” Social Security numbers, or receiving duplicate benefits in the same state. Others fraudsters were getting benefits from more than one state at the same time, or using a dead person’s Social Security number to collect benefits. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet if that number is accurate, fraud is not a large problem, since it comprises only .28 percent of the $79 billion spent on the program. That is not to say cheating shouldn&#8217;t be addressed. But it leads one to believe that a non-recovering economy is the more likely culprit.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, there is far more evidence to support that scenario. Despite the president touting an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent, a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-10/people-not-labor-force-soar-record-918-million-participation-rate-plunges-1978-level">record-shattering</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 91.8 million Americans are no longer in the workforce, and the labor participation rate has reached its lowest level since 1978. That lack of labor force participation includes a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://weaselzippers.us/americans-not-in-labor-force-at-all-time-high-91-8-million/">record number</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of women (55 million), and the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-participation-rate-under-obama-hits-rock-bottom-lowest-level-ever-recorded/">lowest</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> workforce participation rate for black Americans </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">ever recorded</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The population of the United State is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://weaselzippers.us/americans-not-in-labor-force-at-all-time-high-91-8-million/">approximately</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 317 million. Thus, more than a few Americans might be wondering how we have an unemployment rate of only 6.7 percent when almost 92 million people no longer participate in the workforce. Surely some have retired and some are not eligible to work, but what about the rest?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.emarotta.com/should-we-wallow-in-the-rising-stock-market/">memo</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> sent out to his clients, Wall Street advisor David John Marotta contends that the government&#8217;s statistics are </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/wall-street-advisor-actual-unemployment-is-37.2-misery-index-worst-in-40-years/article/2542604">fraudulent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. &#8220;Unemployment in its truest definition, meaning the portion of people who do not have any job, is 37.2%,&#8221; he contends. &#8220;This number obviously includes some people who are not or never plan to seek employment. But it does describe how many people are not able to, do not want to or cannot find a way to work. Policies that remove the barriers to employment, thus decreasing this number, are obviously beneficial.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He also explains the essence of the co-called &#8220;jobless recovery,&#8221; where Wall Street flirts with record highs, even as </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/07/28/americans-poverty-no-work/2594203/">four-out-of-five</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> American adults endure unemployment, near-poverty or reliance on welfare programs for some portion of their lives. &#8220;Given current government policies, it is specifically by avoiding U.S. workers that companies are keeping their profits strong,” he explains. “Obamacare punishes large companies for each full-time worker and provides strong incentives for small businesses to stay below 50 full-time-equivalent employees. Automation and outsourcing are making U.S. companies more profitable at the expense of U.S. employment.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">He further contends the government is manipulating the data used to calculate inflation, which is also being exacerbated by the Federal Reserve&#8217;s continuing bond purchases that devalue our currency. This combination of unemployment stats and inflation rate is known as the &#8220;misery index,&#8221; and Marotta believes it should be nearly double what the government officially says it is.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Marotta is not the only one accusing the government of fudging statistics for political benefit. The House Oversight Committee has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/01/20/commerce-muscles-in-on-congress-hearing/">begun</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an investigation into allegations unearthed by the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">NY Post’s</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> John Crudele. He contends a “knowledgeable source” told him the Census Bureau, which compiles the data used by the Labor Department to calculate the monthly unemployment rate, was manipulating that data in the months leading up to the 2012 election. The focus of the investigation is the period between August and September of that year, when the unemployment rate dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Census Bureau is controlled by the Commerce Department. And in a familiar refrain, some Committee members assert that Commerce is stonewalling the probe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Whatever the real statistics are, they are not the only indication that all is not well. CNBC </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101353168">reports</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that the nation is facing a &#8220;tsunami&#8221; of retail store closings. They include Sears, which will close its flagship store in Chicago, adding it to the list of 300 closures the chain has made since 2010. J.C. Penny&#8217;s and Macy&#8217;s have also announced multiple store closings. Target will eliminate 475 jobs worldwide, and not refill 700 positions&#8211;assuming they can weather the massive data breach that </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/01/target-data-breach-info-begins-popping-up-but-source-still-hard-to-track-99508.html">affected</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 110 million credit card users shopping at their stores.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last year, retail jobs </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/lower-paying-industries-led-2013-us-job-gains-21491763">accounted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for the second-highest number of employees in the nation, after government jobs and those in the professional services industry. Thus, large numbers of store closings do not bode well for that sector this year. Yet even more telling, lower-paying jobs in general accounted for most of the nation&#8217;s job creation last year &#8212; with the largest percentage increase occurring in the temporary help industry.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Americans have noticed. A Fox News </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/interactive/2014/01/22/fox-news-poll-voters-say-us-still-in-recession-glad-know-snowden-secrets/">poll</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> published yesterday reveals that 74 percent of the public believes the nation is still in recession. Furthermore, they&#8217;re apparently not buying the administration&#8217;s populist solutions for fixing it. When asked what the most important economic issue facing the country was, 40 percent said jobs and unemployment, followed by government spending at 36 percent. Only 12 percent said income inequality, and only 6 percent thought taxes were the nation’s most pressing economic problem.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And then there is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla known as ObamaCare. On Tuesday, Target </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/target-to-drop-health-insurance-for-part-time-workers.html">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it would no longer offer health insurance to its part-time employees beginning April 1. Ironically, this announcement was made the same day the Associated Press (AP) ran a story </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.denverpost.com/obamacare/ci_24956054/law-affects-those-insurance-thru-work-too">contending</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that ObamaCare “isn&#8217;t expected to prompt sudden, radical changes for workers.&#8221; It further contended that &#8220;anecdotes of companies cutting employees&#8217; hours aren&#8217;t showing up in official U.S. employment numbers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Note the word &#8220;official.&#8221; Last month, a paltry 74,000 jobs were created, even as 347,000 Americans left the workforce. That means for every jobs created, almost five Americans stopped looking for work. As far as the Obama administration and its media allies like the AP are concerned, the former number is &#8220;official.&#8221; The latter number is unofficial&#8211;or perhaps &#8220;anecdotal.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One suspects the more than 47 million Americans on food stamps, along with every other American enduring the slowest &#8220;recovery&#8221; since WWII have little interest in statistics. They want jobs, and dubious government employment numbers and empty rhetoric, courtesy of the president and his party, are not viable substitutes.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Long-Term Unemployment Crisis</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-long-term-unemployment-crisis/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-long-term-unemployment-crisis</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 05:30:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[December]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[promise zone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Cruz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215161</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[America, the Promise Zone. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/101119_unemployment_coping_ap_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215165" alt="Economy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/101119_unemployment_coping_ap_605.jpg" width="309" height="227" /></a>Last Friday, yet another one of those &#8220;unexpected&#8221; developments that baffle economic &#8220;experts,&#8221; reared its ugly head. Job creation <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/10/Over-Half-Jobs-Added-in-December-Were-Temporary">plummeted</a> in December, with only 74,000 Americans gaining employment, matching the weakest gain since January 2011. The experts expected 193,000 jobs to be created, and while many of them were baffled by this number, Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, was refreshingly honest. &#8220;We&#8217;re going to have a long-term unemployment crisis for a long time,&#8221; she warned.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, lackluster job creation is only part of the picture. The <i>quality</i> of the jobs is another factor adding to the bleakness, in that 40,000 of the total created were <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/10/Over-Half-Jobs-Added-in-December-Were-Temporary">temporary employment</a>.  Combined with retail and wholesale trade, these sectors added 100,000 jobs to the economy, meaning other sectors, such as construction, lost jobs.</p>
<p>The fragile nature of temporary employment speaks for itself. Retail and wholesale trade employment isn&#8217;t much better, as those jobs tend to be low paying. And many of those retail jobs many be unsustainable as well, now the the busiest shopping days of the year are behind us.</p>
<p>What lies in front of us is daunting. Despite the dismal jobs total, the unemployment rate dropped from 7 percent to 6.7 percent. Yet the true nature of that seeming paradox is no longer lost on the public, as more and more Americans are becoming aware that such a statistic represents the reality that millions of Americans have either retired, or simply given up looking for a job. As a result, they are no longer counted as &#8220;unemployed.&#8221; If those &#8220;missing&#8221; Americans were part of the equation, the unemployment <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/us-jobs-report-december-2013-unemployment-rate-drops-67-nonfarm-payrolls-big-miss-wont-affect-fed">rate</a> would be 10.2 percent.</p>
<p>The December numbers were especially brutal: a staggering 347,000 Americans <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/10/US-Lost-2-Million-Workers-in-2013">dropped</a> out of the labor force, raising the annual total to 535,000, and lowering the overall labor participation rate from 63 percent to 62.8 percent. That number represents a new 35-year low, hitting a level not seen since 1978.</p>
<p>It also represents almost <i>92 million</i> Americans who are not working.</p>
<p>Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) put the numbers in the proper perspective. &#8220;In December, the economy added only 74,000 jobs – not nearly enough to keep up with population growth –and 347,000 left the workforce,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;That means for every one job added, nearly 5 people left the workforce entirely. There are now nearly 92 million Americans outside the workforce, resulting in the lowest participation rate in 36 years. The President’s immigration plan will only make things dramatically worse – and no amount of ‘promise zones’ will be a sufficient remedy for the millions of displaced workers.</p>
<p>The &#8220;Promise Zones&#8221; to which Sessions refers is the latest big-government &#8220;solution&#8221; to our economic malaise, courtesy of a president and a Democrat Party that apparently know no other kind, despite five years of failure. Last Thursday, President Obama <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/us/politics/obama-announces-promise-zones-in-5-stricken-areas.html?hpw&amp;rref=politics&amp;_r=0">promised</a> to help five struggling communities&#8211;San Antonio, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Southeastern Kentucky and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma&#8211;cut through the &#8220;red tape&#8221; of federal agencies in order to gain access to existing government resources. We will help them succeed,” Mr. Obama said. “Not with a handout, but as partners with them, every step of the way. And we’re going to make sure it works.”</p>
<p>Apparently the president and his supporters miss the real meaning behind the words &#8220;red tape.&#8221; They are a euphemism for the bureaucratic inertia and indifference that invariably attends bloated and inefficient government. In this particular case, that inertia and indifference seemingly extends to the president himself, whose original promise to &#8220;partner with 20 of the hardest-hit towns in America to get these communities back on their feet,” was made during his State of the Union address&#8211;last February.</p>
<p>Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/ted-cruz-blames-economic-inequality-on-president-obama/article/2541934">cut through</a> the banality. &#8220;All of America needs to be a real &#8216;Promise Zone&#8217;&#8211;with reduced barriers to small businesses creating private-sector jobs&#8211;and we should start by repealing every word of Obamacare, building the Keystone pipeline, abolishing the IRS and rolling back abusive regulations,” he said. Cruz also mocked the president&#8217;s latest obsession with inequality. &#8220;It&#8217;s altogether fitting that President Obama is today talking about income inequality, because income inequality has increased dramatically as a direct result of his economic policies,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>That income inequality is best represented by a Wall Street stock market hitting record highs, even as Main Street median incomes have <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/us/politics/us-median-income-rises-but-is-still-6-below-its-2007-peak.html">declined</a> 4.4 percent since the so-called recovery began in 2009. A great deal of that disparity was engendered by the Federal Reserve&#8217;s unconscionable determination to continue pursuing Quantitative Easing (QE) and its Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP), a &#8220;two-fer&#8221; Keynesian economic effort aimed at &#8220;jumpstarting&#8221; the economy. What it really did was bail out Wall Street banks and rich investors at the expense of ordinary Americans, who can&#8217;t even sniff a decent return on their hard-earned savings.</p>
<p>And now the latest jobs report has put the Fed in a bind. Last June, outgoing Fed chairman Ben Bernanke <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/19/news/economy/federal-reserve-stimulus/">promised</a> that QE would end if unemployment fell to 7 percent by mid-2014, and that a 6.5 percent unemployment rate was &#8220;milestone&#8221; number at which ZIRP will be jettisoned, and interest rates will be allowed to rise. Last month the Fed reduced its bond-buying spree from $85 billion per month to $75 billion, based on an &#8220;improving&#8221; economy. Incoming chairwoman Janet Yellen was expected to continue a reduction in bond buying. Yet as the <i>New York Post&#8217;s</i> John Crudele <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/01/10/lousy-jobs-puts-yellen-in-bind-taper-or-no-taper/">explains</a>, last Friday&#8217;s jobs report &#8220;blew up in the Fed’s face.&#8221; He further notes that if February&#8217;s jobs report is equally dismal, the Fed&#8217;s bond buying will once again increase. Thus, we will continue debasing our currency in the hopes that something remarkably akin to a Soviet-like Five Year Plan will eventually work&#8211;give or take 92 million Americans.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the excuse-makers were out in force. The government cited &#8220;unusually cold weather in parts of the country,&#8221; a theme <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-streets-take-on-december-jobs-report-2014-1">echoed</a> by many economists, despite the reality that the so-called &#8220;polar vortex&#8221; hit in January. Federal government job cuts of 98,000 workers&#8211;over the last <i>three years</i>&#8211;were also blamed for there slowdown. Others suggested it was <a href="http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/job-gains-hit-three-year-low-anomaly-or-alarming-new-trend.html/?a=viewall">nothing more</a> than an anomaly. I wouldn’t pay any attention at all to these numbers,&#8221; said Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. &#8220;They’re not consistent with anything. We’re going to get the benchmark revisions, and they’re going to be all revised up and revised away.”</p>
<p>Zandi also <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/moodys-economist-to-chuck-todd-i-just-dont-believe-terrible-december-jobs-report/">blamed</a> the declining workforce participation rate “in large part” on baby boomer generation retirements. The Department of Labor apparently disagrees. &#8220;Declining labor force participation rates of young people are pushing down the overall participation rate,&#8221; it <a href="http://www.thewire.com/business/2014/01/curious-case-americas-shrinking-labor-force-participation-rate/356889/">contends</a>.</p>
<p>Even worse than the excuses were the &#8220;solutions.&#8221; Aside from the aforementioned Promise Zones, Democrats contend that extending unemployment benefits <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/01/11/white-house-report-proves-white-house-is-wrong-on-extended-unemployment-compensation/">creates</a> jobs. Thus the press is on to extend them at least another three months, for the 1.3 million Americans who lost them on December 31. Democrats insist on doing so despite ample <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/05/unemployment-insurance-extensions-competitive-enterprise-institute-editorials-debates/4330603/">evidence</a> that extending jobless benefits hurts jobs creation. The just-expired law had <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/10/us-unemployment-benefits-extension-hits-snag-in-senate/">provided</a> Americans with 47 weeks of federal benefits in addition to state benefits that run as long as 26 weeks. Apparently any hesitation to extend benefits beyond a total of 73 weeks indicates a lack of compassion. However, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the National Bureau of Economic Research, it indicates that people tend to get aboard a &#8220;gravy train.&#8221;</p>
<p>More to the point, it is indicative of Democrats trying to have it both ways: either the economy is getting better or it isn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Another indicator that it isn&#8217;t, and one of the more pernicious efforts at advancing a solution comes courtesy of the Business Roundtable and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez. The Roundtable<a href="http://businessroundtable.org/media/blog/we-have-to-do-more-than-mind-the-gap"> cites</a> a lack of workforce preparedness, resulting in a &#8220;skills gap&#8221; as one of the chief impediments to job creation. Thus they have joined Perez in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/10/Obama-Labor-Sec-Pushes-Amnesty-After-Jobs-Report-Sessions-Will-Displace-More-American-Workers">promoting</a> comprehensive immigration reform as the answer to America&#8217;s job woes.</p>
<p><i>Americans&#8217;</i> job woes? The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation have already <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/18/CBO-Immigration-bill-would-drive-down-American-workers-wages">concluded</a> that immigration reform would <i>depress</i> wages and make it <i>more</i> difficult for Americans to find jobs. Jeff Sessions had some choice words for the advocates of reform. &#8220;America is not an oligarchy,&#8221; he declared. &#8220;House Republicans need to tell the President firmly: we work for the American people. We reject any immigration plan that puts special interests before working Americans. We are going to defend the working people of this country. A small group of CEOs does not get to set immigration policy for our country. We will not enrich the political class at the expense of the middle class.&#8221;</p>
<p>Last Friday&#8217;s jobs report, coupled with Republicans’ apparent desire to <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/john-boehner-eric-cantor-republicans-law/2014/01/08/id/545986">continue</a> pursuing immigration reform suggests otherwise. &#8220;There are days I&#8217;m numb,&#8221; said Jamie May, a former senior manager for a corporate housing company. May once commanded a six-figure salary, but is now willing to take a job in the $30K-$40K range, following three layoffs. &#8220;The mental toll &#8212; the depression &#8212; the feeling of being unworthy and unwanted, after being highly successful. I just want a job,&#8221; she added.</p>
<p>So do millions of other Americans, all of whom are being held hostage to Promise Zones, Federal Reserve machinations, unemployment benefit extensions and comprehensive immigration reform. One wonders when their patience will run out.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Attack on Workers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/obamas-attack-on-low-income-workers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-attack-on-low-income-workers</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2014 05:19:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[employment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214733</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's pivot to raising the minimum wage -- and destroying jobs for the marginalized. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2055669-300x202.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214737" alt="2055669-300x202" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2055669-300x202.jpg" width="270" height="182" /></a>Democrats and President Obama aim to make raising the minimum wage and focusing on growing inequality their main agenda for the 2014 mid-term election campaign. The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/us/politics/democrats-turn-to-minimum-wage-as-2014-strategy.html?partner=rss&amp;emc=rss&amp;_r=3&amp;">strategy</a> behind the effort is two-fold: make Republicans defend their opposition to a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/business/on-registers-other-side-little-money-to-spend.html">policy</a> favored by a majority of the public, and increase the turnout of youth and minority voters who lean Democrat, but typically stay way from mid-term elections. Unfortunately, the effort amounts to little more than feel-good populism supported by a host of dubious actors, even as it masks the true nature of the problem.</p>
<p>The dubious actors have familiar names. They include ACORN, the community organizer group that was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/17/congress-votes-strip-acorn-federal-funding/">defunded</a> by Congress in 2009, following a tax fraud scandal, Industrial Areas Foundation, which was <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/minimum-wage-politics-democratic-party-101764.html#.Usr9M_YjH1y">founded</a> by radical strategist Saul Alinsky, labor unions such as the SEIU, and other progressive entities like Americans United for Change and the National Employment Law Project. “It puts Republicans on the wrong side of an important value issue when it comes to fairness,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s senior adviser. “You can make a very strong case that this will be a helpful issue for Democrats in 2014. But the goal here is to actually get it done. That’s why the president put it on the agenda.”</p>
<p>The agenda consists of Democrats in Congress and the president getting behind an initiative that raises the minimum wage from the current $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour by 2015, and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/23/raise-minimum-wage_n_4493673.html">indexes</a> it to inflation. The president is also planning to make a series of speeches on the issue across the nation timed to coincide with minimum wage votes in Congress, undoubtedly led by the Democratically-controlled Senate. In addition, Democrats and their supporters aim to put minimum wage increases on the ballot in several states, including Arkansas, Alaska and South Dakota and New Mexico. The win-win scenario they envision is rousing their base, and just as importantly, shifting the conversation away from the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare, especially in those states where Democratic candidates for office will undoubtedly be put on the defensive because of it. “The more Republicans obsess on repealing the Affordable Care Act and the more we focus on rebuilding the middle class with a minimum-wage increase, the more voters will support our candidates,” said Representative Steve Israel (D-NY), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.</p>
<p>That may be wishful thinking. While it remains difficult at the present time to determine how much ObamaCare will impact lower-income, or minimum wage voters, Americans who shopped for insurance in the individual market will endure premium <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/11/04/49-state-analysis-obamacare-to-increase-individual-market-premiums-by-avg-of-41-subsidies-flow-to-elderly/">hikes</a> in 41 states and the District of Columbia. Those hikes are approximately 41 percent in the average state. Moreover, the brunt of them will be borne by the healthy, young male voters that comprise a substantial part of the aforementioned youth vote Democrats see as critical to their success. That would be the same youth vote whose currently <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-04/youth-break-with-president-on-obamacare-support-in-poll.html">cratering</a> support for Obama (and likely other Democrats by extension) is tied directly to the healthcare bill.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the individual insurance market is only part of the equation. Despite Obama&#8217;s unconstitutional delay of the business mandate until after the 2014 election, Americans who get their insurance through their employers will likely get their notification of policy cancellations prior to it, since insurance companies must have time to prepare. According to the the administration&#8217;s calculations&#8211;made in 2010&#8211;as many as 100 million Americans will lose policies provided by small and large businesses. Thus, despite Democrats&#8217; best efforts, it remains to be seen whether the American voter is more attuned to rewarding Democrats for their efforts on the minimum wage and income inequality front, or hammering them for a healthcare bill whose premium hikes could more than offset <i>any</i> wage increases, minimum or otherwise.</p>
<p>The Heritage Foundation <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/11/impact-of-obamacare-and-minimum-wage-hike-on-workers-and-jobs">illuminates</a> this particular reality with regard to employers. Despite the president&#8217;s desire to raise the minimum wage to over $10 per hour for workers, they note that the federal government has already raised the cost of hiring those workers to that level. If the president pushes through his raise to $10.10?  &#8220;Coupled with the employer penalty and existing taxes, this would raise the minimum cost of hiring a full-time worker to $12.71 per hour. Employers would respond by eliminating jobs and cutting workers to part-time status, making it significantly more difficult for unskilled workers to get ahead,&#8221; concludes authors James Sherk and Patrick Tyrrell.</p>
<p>The American left remains undaunted by such realities. Their arguments revolve around the idea of what a &#8220;living wage,&#8221; should be, and they have successfully pushed that initiative for decades in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Their attitude is <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2013/09/17/minimum-wage-madness-part-ii-n1701833/page/full">informed</a> by what they believe a worker needs or “deserves” to make, irrespective of a worker&#8217;s skill level, experience or productivity. They cite a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/02/1010-minimum-wage_n_4532723.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003">study</a> by University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube, who claims that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour could help to raise 4.6 million Americans above the poverty line directly, and thin the ranks of the nation&#8217;s poor by 6.8 million, over the long term longer-term effects.</p>
<p>Yet even Dube himself was forced to concede that raising the minimum wage wouldn&#8217;t be nearly as effective as policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps and others aimed at reducing the unemployment rate among those referred to as &#8220;high-risk&#8221; groups of Americans. “We have to remember that many families in poverty have very little or no connection to the labor market, so of course we can’t expect a wage-based policy like a minimum wage increase to have a very large effect on the poverty,” he noted. “But nonetheless, we find it has a moderate-sized impact.”</p>
<p>It is precisely those people who have very little or no connection to the labor market that may never develop one. Since about 60 percent of Americans living in poverty don&#8217;t work at all, raising the minimum wage will make it <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamdunkelberg/2012/12/31/why-raising-the-minimum-wage-kills-jobs/">harder</a> for them to find employment. Even when minimum wages are raised, less than 15 percent of the overall increase will go to people below the poverty line, and less than 33 percent of those receiving minimum wage are families below the poverty line. A majority of families are above the poverty line, meaning a so-called anti-poverty program is largely missing its mark. In fact, <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents">data</a> from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau show that most minimum wage workers are overwhelmingly young and part-time, and that their average family income is over $53,00 per year.</p>
<p>Moreover, only <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/19/who-makes-minimum-wage/">2.9 percent</a> of American workers earn minimum wage. That number is considerably lower than the 4.7 percent of minimum wage workers tallied in 1979, when the BLS began a regular study of minimum wage workers.</p>
<p>And despite Dube&#8217;s contentions, when Congress raised the minimum wage 10.6 percent in July of 2009, the ensuing six months saw 600,000 teenagers lose their jobs. The reason for this is simple common sense. Money spent on any wage increase either comes out of the employer&#8217;s pocket, that of his customer, or an employee who must be terminated to maintain the status quo. As Forbes Magazine&#8217;s William Dunkelberg <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/williamdunkelberg/2012/12/31/why-raising-the-minimum-wage-kills-jobs/">explains,</a> poorly done studies by agenda-driven research groups can&#8217;t obscure basic economics. &#8220;The Law of Demand always works: the higher the price of anything, the less that will be taken, and this includes labor,&#8221; he writes.</p>
<p>If that were not the case, then why wouldn&#8217;t the American left advocate for a minimum wage of $50 per hour, or $100 per hour? Because even they know prices would have to rise commensurately to make such a scheme viable.  Even if one talks about the smaller increments Democrats champion, only the numbers change, not the reasoning. That so many Americans fail to grasp this is a testament to the reality that populist rhetoric is no match for basic economics&#8211;which brings us to the other part of the left&#8217;s agenda, bemoaning income inequality. A single <a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/kevinglass/2014/01/04/5-ways-the-liberal-obsession-with-income-inequality-hurts-the-poor-n1771728/page/full">paragraph</a> by Townhall columnist John Hawkins destroys the credibility of those whose central argument revolves around the &#8220;zero sum&#8221; idea that the rich are richer, because the poor are poorer:</p>
<blockquote><p>Getting beyond [capitalist policies], shouldn&#8217;t there be massive income inequality between someone with rare skills who works 70 hours a week and an unskilled part time worker? Most people say &#8220;yes&#8221; and even liberals who talk obsessively about income inequality behave as if there should be a difference. Do you see Michael Moore, Barack Obama, or Al Gore refusing to work for more than $20 an hour because they want to show solidarity with poor workers? No, they believe they deserve their money, but those &#8220;other people&#8221; should have more of their money taken away for the common good. If a CEO should have his pay limited, why shouldn&#8217;t Michael Moore make $20 an hour? If Barack Obama thinks fast food workers are so vitally important to the economy, why doesn&#8217;t he reduce his salary to the point where he only makes as much as they do? If Al Gore really believes in fighting for income inequality, why doesn&#8217;t he refuse to make more than the guy who spends 8 hours a day saying, &#8220;Welcome to Wal-Mart?&#8217;&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The answer to Hawkins&#8217; question is simple. Progressivism is about talking the talk of &#8220;compassion,&#8221; not walking the walk. There has never been a society in the history of the world where wealth redistribution has obviated the need for a cabal of wealthy elitists and their (often bloodthirsty) enforcers who must ensure the so-called equality of the masses, even as they enrich themselves in the process. Despite all protests to the contrary “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs&#8221; is, and alway has been, for the little people.</p>
<p>The Obama administration and Democrats might have an iota of credibility regarding income inequality were it not for their embrace of the Federal Reserve&#8217;s Quantitative Easing (QE) and Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP). QE has been described by one of its <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579183680751473884">implementers</a> as the &#8220;greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time,&#8221; and ZIRP has decimated the ability of Main Street Americans to earn a decent return on their savings. The inability to get decent returns, even as prices for items such as food and fuel increase, amounts to a de facto tax on those who can least afford it.</p>
<p>Nothing fuels the so-called income gap more than this atrocity. Yet Democrats and their Keynesian economic allies remain wedded to this &#8220;New Normal&#8221; of the weakest recovery since WWII, and 75 percent of all new jobs created in 2013 being part-time and low wage. Add the continuous binge of government spending and <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/03/happy-new-year-feds-list-141-new-regulations-in-only-3-days/">regulations</a> to the mix and it become obvious that Democrats exacerbate every problem with wages and income inequality they are ostensibly trying to correct. If voters still buy into the Democrats’ redistributionist economic agenda next November, even as they are expected to forget ObamaCare&#8211;which is nothing less than the ultimate realization of it&#8211;they deserve everything they get.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Charles Payne: America&#8217;s Lost Generation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/charles-payne-americas-lost-generation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=charles-payne-americas-lost-generation</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Nov 2013 04:23:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Charles Payne]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[generation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hopeless]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211214</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new era of hopelessness for the country's youth -- and how conservatives can turn the tide.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: Below is the video and transcript of Fox Business Network personality Charles Payne&#8217;s speech at the Freedom Center&#8217;s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event took place November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/79863216" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/79863216">Charles Payne</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Payne: </strong>A few months ago, when we were talking about coming down here and doing this, it was the day after President Obama had given some speech or something.  And it was pretty obvious to me that he was trying to incite violence.  Or, you know, trying to get some sort of protest in the streets, and he wants the kids to go out there.</p>
<p>So I wanted to talk about that as a topic.  But the more I thought about it, and the more I&#8217;ve been focused on this, I think that what we have, of course, is an imperial President.  And these desires that he has for like this youth violence &#8212; but it&#8217;s actually backfiring.  And in the process of backfiring, we&#8217;re actually helping to create what I think is the most unprepared generation of young people in this country.</p>
<p>And I think this is probably one of the more critical topics, economic and social topics, of the nation right now.  And I think it&#8217;s an amazing area where conservatives can make a huge impact.</p>
<p>You got to remember, President Obama came into office, he was hailed at the uniter, right?  Half black, half white, tremendous education.  He&#8217;s going to propel the nation further.  You know, take the word from the Founding Fathers, the Abraham Lincolns of the world, the Martin Luther Kings of the world; and take it to another level.</p>
<p>But instead, they made a decision early on &#8211; he certainly did, early in office &#8212; to deflect any sort of criticism, any sort of blame, any sort of failure by playing the blame game.  And that right there, guys, for me, was the first red flag.  Early on, the blame-Bush stuff &#8212; that the President was going to take a more cowardly approach, rather than a President approach.  And I think any hopes that we had of him being the uniter were quickly snuffed out.</p>
<p>But more importantly, they made the political decision to sort of slice and dice the country into what I&#8217;m calling buckets of victims.  Keep them angry, keep them mostly in fear; and then paint President Obama as somehow the outside defender.</p>
<p>You know, he talks a lot, the President, about &#8212; when he talks, he talks as if he&#8217;s not even part of the problem, right?  He&#8217;ll talk about Washington.  He&#8217;ll talk about government.  Sometimes I think he lives in South Dakota, you know.  So I&#8217;m like &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know you are [this cond] of this will, right?  But I got to tell you something.  If it was about winning elections, then certainly the strategy has worked out for him.  But if it was about keeping America the greatest country on the [nation], well, it&#8217;s failed miserably.</p>
<p>And I also think that it&#8217;s probably the most despicable form of government this nation has ever seen.  It&#8217;s a deliberate effort to make people feel small, hated, afraid, intimidated, and have hopelessness.  That bucket approach was applied to women, seniors, blacks, Hispanics, and young people.  And now they&#8217;re even making it what I call a thimble of smaller buckets, right?</p>
<p>I just recently read how the Texas voting law discriminates against transgender women.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The worst thing that happened to Native Americans is that Washington Redskins logo.</p>
<p>And I don&#8217;t know if you guys listened yesterday when the President was talking, or rambling, or whatever the heck he was doing &#8211; he certainly wasn&#8217;t apologizing &#8211; when he said &#8212; because disabled people are Americans, too.  And I said, what the &#8212; who said they weren&#8217;t?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s it.  He&#8217;s got to create more victims, more buckets of victims, more people &#8212; the rest of them don&#8217;t like you, but I got your back, I&#8217;m going to protect you.  That&#8217;s what he&#8217;s got to do.</p>
<p>And let me tell you, this thing is going to go on and on and on.  There&#8217;s a real serious program right now, a plan that&#8217;s been &#8212; they&#8217;ve been working on this for 10 years, to get felons the right to vote while incarcerated.  I&#8217;m going to tell you right now, I think the GOP is sleeping big time on this.  There are two states that allow it.  I think they&#8217;re Maine and Vermont or something.</p>
<p>And part of the campaign is &#8212; well, why do the whitest states in America let their felons vote, and nobody else does?  I&#8217;m going to tell you right now &#8212; be aware that these felons &#8212; they could end up being millions of voters long before immigration reform kicks in.</p>
<p>But they&#8217;re just another bucket of victims.  How the heck did felons become victims?</p>
<p>But the bottom line for all of these campaigns is that the people who are being told that they&#8217;re victims &#8212; they have to be belittled, and they have to be told that they have a lesser standing in this country.  And it&#8217;s a message that&#8217;s repeated over and over again by the President, his minions, and his allies.</p>
<p>You know, about a week ago I was reading an article.  And it said it&#8217;s a great year for black actors in Hollywood.  And I was like, what the heck are they talking about?  Because I got to be honest with you &#8212; I&#8217;m tired of movies about slaves and butlers.  Okay?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just &#8212; come on, every time?  How about the black guy in a romantic comedy?  You know what I mean?  How about the black guy that breaks up Spectre and saves the planet?  I mean, every time I go to the movie, it&#8217;s got to be a slave or a butler?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s the thing &#8212; what they always want to do is they want to pound the most miserable moments of the nation&#8217;s history, instead of celebrating the evolution of America.  Because one thing that this country&#8217;s always done is kept its promise to try to become a more perfect union.</p>
<p>But Hollywood &#8212; well, you know their role is to create and perpetuate all kinds of negative images.  They want to paint a negative America &#8212; greed, God, GOP &#8212; obviously those are favorite targets.</p>
<p>So all in all, I find it so ironic that the candidate that surged to victory on a so-called hope-and-change platform has created so much hopelessness in this country.</p>
<p>And the thing is, the problem isn&#8217;t &#8212; it&#8217;s not a political problem.  It&#8217;s a major economic problem.  It&#8217;s going to have significant consequences.  Because no matter what, economic success in any nation is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  People have to buy into the system.</p>
<p>When you hear Ben Bernanke talk, his frustration is that the virtuous cycle hasn&#8217;t kicked in; that they pumped all this money out, and people aren&#8217;t out there spending.  You know credit card debt has gone down three months in a row?  Main Street&#8217;s not taking the bait.  They&#8217;re not buying houses.  They&#8217;re not buying anything.  They&#8217;re not starting businesses.  It&#8217;s not monetary policy; it&#8217;s fiscal policies, the rhetoric from the White House.</p>
<p>So, when David talks about the next 10 years, or the Democratic demise, there&#8217;s a lot of truth to that.  But the question is &#8212; how far does the country have to fall apart while this is happening?</p>
<p>So I want to focus on the younger people.  Because the idea that we would completely demoralize them, or the President has, with all these negative comments, rhetoric &#8212; it has serious negative or major negative implications for our future as a nation.  The most recent consumer confidence rating, just to give you an example, for November was the lowest one since December of 2011.  We actually have been in freefall mode in this country since July.</p>
<p>That October jobs number, 200,000 jobs created in the month of October &#8212; it was better than the White House anticipated.  In fact, it was kind of funny.  Because the White House and all their lackeys in the media kept trying to brace the country for this real bad jobs report because of the government shutdown.  I mean, they just were getting us ready for it.  You know, that jobs report is going to be awful.  Those Republicans shut down the government.</p>
<p>Well, came in a lot better than expected.  Not a great number, but a lot better than we were warned.  In fact, all the economic data that came out since that jobs report beat consensus.  So really, what it underscored was that less government is fantastic for the economy.  All right?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>So nobody should run away from the government shutdown.  The market was up, more jobs were created, manufacturing improved, private hiring improved.  And no one should run away from the fact that the government was shut down.  In fact, Wall Street did not care about that at all.</p>
<p>The debt ceiling thing was a little bit of a different story.  But don&#8217;t let them try to make that a bad thing, because it&#8217;s got to happen again.  Somehow, we&#8217;ve got to get rid of 800,000 nonessential workers.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Somehow.  So that the private sector can kick in.</p>
<p>But anyway, the bottom line is that the report, particularly that jobs report, served as another SOS for our economy.  Not in the labor force.  For the month of October, that number swelled by 900,000.  91.5 million Americans not in the labor force.  Participation rate was down 0.4 percent.  The number was 62.8.  That was the lowest participation rate.  I mean, this is people just saying &#8212; I want to participate in the system.  I want to go out and find a job.  Even if I can&#8217;t get one, I want to be involved.  Maybe someone will call me.  I&#8217;ll leave some resumes out.  These are people who&#8217;ve rejected the whole thing.</p>
<p>The lowest number since 1978.  And I want you to know, in 1978, it was the highest number.  So in other words, we were always going like this.  And now we&#8217;re going like this.  It was the highest number.</p>
<p>People working part time for economic reasons &#8212; up 100,000, to 8.1 million.  People working part time for non-economic reasons &#8212; this is an interesting thing &#8212; 18.8 million.  These aren&#8217;t all people who just, you know, want to work half a day and pick up the kids at school.  It&#8217;s a different phenomenon.  And a lot of it gets back to the young adults, young teens.</p>
<p>In fact, with this report, the teens &#8212; 16- to 19-year-old whites had a participation rate in the job market of less than 37 percent.  3.7 million had a job.  That is so far from the high point.  You go back to August of 1978 &#8212; 63 percent of white teens were in the job market; almost eight million of them were working.</p>
<p>Now, there&#8217;s a few more kids in school.  But this points to people at a very young age giving up on the system.  The black teenage job participation rate is just 27 percent.</p>
<p>So the most divisive President in history has succeeded in creating the kind of climate that is an economic and rhetorical tinderbox.  He&#8217;s created this sort of tinderbox because with these kind of numbers, there should be violence, there should be revolt.</p>
<p>The problem, though, is that the President, hoping that this tinderbox will result in an Arab spring sort of thing, where you physically went out there and revolted against everything that had been American pillars, that essentially created our success and separated us from the world &#8212; well, it&#8217;s backfired big time.</p>
<p>Because this tinderbox has a limp wicket.  It&#8217;s been dampened by too much of that never-ending message of hopelessness, and too much comfort to drown out and mitigate the misery of young adults.  In other words, the White House has laid it on too thick.</p>
<p>Consequently, that army of would-be riders &#8212; well, they&#8217;re kind of chilling out, waiting for the next Xbox.  They figured out how to game the system, or they&#8217;re just going to sit in their parents&#8217; basement brooding.</p>
<p>You see, our imperial President and his progressive agenda sold young Americans by beating down their dreams.  He replaced it with the villain around every corner and a greater sense of entitlement.  But however, you can ride it out.  Because, guess what?  Quote the government &#8212; we got your back.</p>
<p>So from what I&#8217;m seeing from a social-economic point of view is a lost generation.  They&#8217;re not eager to attack the world; they&#8217;re not eager to attack anything.  They will revolt on social media and the local park.  But I&#8217;ve broken them down to what I&#8217;m calling three categories &#8212; eunuchs, malcontents and the withdrawn.</p>
<p>Now, the eunuchs aren&#8217;t your traditional eunuchs who are castrated, you know, so that they lose their sex drive; in the process, of course, becoming stronger and great personal body guards with little temptation.  Our eunuchs have been castrated at the soul.  They&#8217;ve been cut off from traditional roles of young men as risk-takers, family-creators and future leaders.  Big, strong men around this country &#8212; they sit on porches, in stoops.  They stand on street corners all day long, collecting taxpayer benefits.</p>
<p>Hey, anyone here ever heard of the crazy check?  Well, it&#8217;s not the subject line in Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s paycheck, okay?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You do know about the Social Security Disability Fund.  The thing has gone bonkers.  I&#8217;m talking about surging by millions and millions and millions of people in the last five years.  It&#8217;s created an amazing pool that subsidizes these young men, these young eunuchs, to chill out.  There are 8.8 million adults on the program right now.  They&#8217;re paying out $150 billion a year, and it&#8217;s going to go bankrupt by 2016.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the interesting fact about this.  The medical eligibility standards have gotten so lax that it&#8217;s responsible for 45 percent of the surge in men on this program.  And by the same token, the benefits have gotten even more lavish and more generous.  That&#8217;s how come this thing is on a precipice.  I mean, $150 billion.</p>
<p>You got to understand, in 1961, the top driver for people on Social Security Disability was heart disease.  Of all the people on that program, 26 percent had heart disease.  That&#8217;s down to 11 percent.  You know, older people, heart disease, Social Security Disability.</p>
<p>In 2011, the number-one driver was back pain.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Thirty-four percent had back pain, up from just eight percent in 1961.  Mental illness, or the crazy check &#8212; 19 percent.</p>
<p>So you walk into the office, and you&#8217;re 27 years old.  And you&#8217;re strong, and you&#8217;re robust.  And you say &#8212; oh, my back.  They start writing you a check.  Or you say &#8212; I just can&#8217;t take it.  This economy is so tough, and I can&#8217;t think straight.  They cut you a check.</p>
<p>So now these modern-day eunuchs are being paid billions, billions of dollars not to work.  Then on top of it, they brag about it.  They&#8217;re proud of it.  And I&#8217;m going to tell you right now &#8212; woe to the mailman that shows up on the first of the month without somebody&#8217;s crazy check.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They will long for the good old days when all they had to worry about was a loose Doberman Pincher here and there, I could tell you that much right now.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Now, recently, my mother was staying with us.  And we &#8212; talking about her childhood.  She grew up in Alabama, and she talked about, you know, how hard it was for them.  And they used to go back to school in November, because they had to make sure all the crops, you know, had been harvested.</p>
<p>And by the way, that&#8217;s where the summer vacation came from.  So this whole movement to make summer less onerous and &#8212; oh, why should kids read on vacation?  Man, there was never supposed to be a vacation, unless you were pulling up crops somewhere, you know.</p>
<p>Anyway, she talked about that, and how even after working on their family farm, she was trying to earn money here and there.  She had &#8212; there was a neighboring farm that was much bigger than theirs.  And she would go there, and she would pick cotton.  And they had a program called 2-and-100.  So you get $2 for every 100 pounds of cotton you pick.  Can you imagine?  Two bucks for every 100 pounds of cotton.  She told me she never really got to 100 pounds.  She even threw a few rocks in the bag and couldn&#8217;t get there.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The thing is, though, recently, the Obama Administration issued 18,000 checks for $50,000 apiece to make amends for past discrimination against black farmers.  I&#8217;m sure some of you heard about this; they write about it a lot on Breitbart.  But there&#8217;s one part of the program that hasn&#8217;t been talked about or written about.</p>
<p>Now, to qualify for this money, you didn&#8217;t have to be a farmer.  You didn&#8217;t have to grow up on a farm.  All you had to do was walk into the office and say &#8212; you know, I was thinking about being a farmer, but the discrimination&#8217;s &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Yeah.  So as it turns out, those same guys getting those crazy checks &#8212; they&#8217;re raking in the dough from those farm checks.  Most of them never been on a farm.  Ninety-nine percent of them probably never considered farming.</p>
<p>And the real sad irony of this [thing], guys &#8212; people like my mother, so many others who really did deal with harsher parts of our history &#8212; they didn&#8217;t get a nickel.  They were shut out, because they didn&#8217;t know how to play the game.</p>
<p>Now, she&#8217;s okay with it.  But the fact of the matter is, who wouldn&#8217;t want a $50,000 check from the government?  By the way, they also paid a tax on it.  Yeah.</p>
<p>I could tell you right now, though, the money is ripping communities apart.  You know, you can imagine &#8212; you did work the farm, you did run into this.  And then some kid turns a corner in a new car and never went on a farm?  I mean, just &#8212; again, though, it&#8217;s part of the fore-planning by this administration that&#8217;s just hell-bent on one thing &#8212; getting money into pockets of people that deserve it the least.</p>
<p>Course, these young people are bragging that Obama came through.  They continue to get to lounge around.  But again, you know, when I see this stuff, I feel like you guys don&#8217;t know that, in some ways, you&#8217;re killing yourself.  You&#8217;ll never understand the luxury of going out and experiencing the world, and you&#8217;ll never leave a mark that says I was here and that I actually matter beyond getting handouts.</p>
<p>Now, while this is going on, we&#8217;ve got almost three million Gulf War II veterans.  The 18-to-24 group has a 20 percent-plus unemployment rate, well above the average for that same age bracket.  Of course, they serve the nation with the ultimate sacrifice.  They can&#8217;t find jobs.  And of course, we&#8217;re spending all this money paying other kids to just chill out.</p>
<p>In the meantime, that modern-day eunuch, who&#8217;s lazy and soft &#8212; they&#8217;re that way about everything except when it comes to hurting themselves and hurting others.  You know, in addition to selling their soul for entitlements, they&#8217;ve lost track of the value of life.</p>
<p>We know about the violence, particularly in places like Chicago, but it&#8217;s all over.  The Left blames guns as it spreads its own brand of hatred.  And that hatred and anger that the Left spreads is actually what&#8217;s rotting the core of these kids who are pulling the trigger.  Or, at least, helping to.</p>
<p>But their excuses serve a dual purpose &#8212; the redistribution of accountability from the people who actually pull the trigger and from these same people who are fanning these flames of belittlement and shame.</p>
<p>Then there are the malcontents, exemplified by those young kids who formed the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Now, my office is just one block away from there.  And I spent a lot of time there, particularly early on in the movement; took my family down a couple of times.</p>
<p>And you know, I watched it initially.  I wanted to understand what the beef was with these kids.  And it was a curious thing, and it had some genuine parts to it.  But later on, it morphed into something else.</p>
<p>What I did see early on, though, was I saw a bunch of kids who were going to NYU or Columbia, and they had concerns that good jobs weren&#8217;t going to be there for them.  And they were already making up all kinds of excuses that maybe they couldn&#8217;t live up to lofty goals early on in life.  Because, you know, hey, the crooks on Wall Street &#8212; well, they provided the perfect villain.  But the fact of the matter is there was real contempt there by a bunch of spoiled brats who have been told all their life there was going to be a red carpet for them.  And some of them said &#8212; wow, maybe it won&#8217;t be.</p>
<p>Of course, President Obama &#8212; he had hoped to push these kids into some sort of a violent mob.  But he misjudged the difference between real desperation &#8212; that is, the Arab kids in the totalitarian societies &#8212; and then these rich kids who grew up on Park Avenue.</p>
<p>So instead of giving Wall Street the bum&#8217;s rush, most of these kids just hung out in the park, smoked weed, and had sex in these makeshift tents.  There was no leadership at the beginning of this, which kind of gave it that truer grassroots feeling.  But it did invite the troublemakers.  And sooner &#8212; you know, the unions got there, and the anarchists got there.  And they sort of usurped the whole thing.  And they tried to push that same old tired agenda that America has rejected over and over again.</p>
<p>But I will say it takes a lot &#8212; even if you&#8217;re a smart kid, it takes a lot to be extraordinary.  You still have to study.  You still have to work hard.  You still have to cultivate your intelligence.  And when these kids do that, they want some sort of feeling that they&#8217;re going to be rewarded.</p>
<p>You know, these kids haven&#8217;t been told that.  They were told &#8212; and by the way, they were told you weren&#8217;t going to be rewarded, but it&#8217;s not your fault.  Or there will be some bumps in the road.</p>
<p>The interesting thing, I guess of course, is that these malcontents, these young adult malcontents &#8212; their lives have been a relative cakewalk, right, compared to their parents and their grandparents.  For them, the molehill is the mountain.  The idea of starting out, getting out of college and actually having to drive a cab, rather than having a $90,000-a-year job waiting for them, in their minds, is just completely unfair.  President Obama &#8212; he exploited this, he tried to expand that fear.</p>
<p>Now, there is a part of this for parents.  Listen, you know what, we&#8217;ve coddled the kids a lot.  I know I feel like I&#8217;ve kind of done that myself.  But think about this, guys &#8212; the highest office in the land used to call young men and women to arms to defend this nation, to defend the world.  Not to be attackers on the foundation of this country.  Not to be an attacker on the notion of God, capitalism, individual freedoms.</p>
<p>So we do have a country where there&#8217;s a sense of entitlement.  That includes your right to wait for the right job before you leave the house.  A lot of it begins in school with the right not to lose, always to get a trophy, and to be graded on a curve.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not a new concept.  FDR had his four freedoms, including the freedom from want, in one of his State of the Union addresses.  But it is something that&#8217;s becoming bigger and bigger.</p>
<p>Now, those are the malcontents.  You also have what I call the withdrawn.  Now, these are the kids that won&#8217;t leave the basement at all.  Forget about going to the park to protest; they just don&#8217;t want to leave the house.</p>
<p>And when the President of the United States actually brags about young adults being able to chill out on their parents&#8217; healthcare until their 26, he&#8217;s inviting them to stay in that basement.  And more and more are actually heeding the call.</p>
<p>Now, over the last few years, I became very interested in Japan.  Because in so many ways, we&#8217;re sort of following a path that Japan has already been on.  And they have a phenomenon over there called the grass-eaters.  That&#8217;s what they call young men there, 16 to 30 years old, the grass-eaters.  Now, the reason I&#8217;m interested in this is because these young men see no reason to follow the paths of their parents.  They don&#8217;t see the benefits of working 100 hours a week, commuting four hours a day.  They just don&#8217;t see it.</p>
<p>And you know, it&#8217;s so funny, because a four-hour commute to me is like &#8212; it is scary.  But I don&#8217;t know if you ever tried to go from New Jersey to New York when it rains.  Anybody from New Jersey here?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I mean, that&#8217;s a heck of a commute right there, huh?  What happens in New Jersey when it rains?  We can&#8217;t drive, I don&#8217;t know.  In Japan, they&#8217;ve broken down these young grass-eaters and what they call adult parasites into two groups &#8212; the free part-time workers and the withdrawn.  And they think up to 50 percent of the 16- to 30-year-olds fit into one of these two categories.</p>
<p>For those who watched the recent elections over in Japan, this guy Abe?  The reason he was elected was because they think he can bring back the Samurai spirit.  The voters there, many of them, are ready to become warriors again, or at least have someone kick them in the backside.</p>
<p>That next 10 years that David talked about &#8212; Japan has done this already.  They&#8217;ve done it for 20 years.  I hope we don&#8217;t have to wait 20 years before we need a leader that can kick us in the backside and we vote for one.  But that&#8217;s exactly what&#8217;s happening over in Japan right now.</p>
<p>In the meantime, the free part-time worker &#8212; I talked about people working in this country part time because they want to.  These kids do that.  They work just enough to buy cigarettes, maybe download a few songs.  You know, they have small social circles; they don&#8217;t hang out much.  But that&#8217;s what they do.  They&#8217;re called free part-time workers.</p>
<p>And then, of course, they&#8217;re the withdrawn.  These are young men who sleep in the day while their parents are at work, and they play video games all night long.  They never &#8212; they try to never bump into their parents.  They have poor social skills.  And for the most part, a lot of them have lost complete touch with reality.</p>
<p>You know the video games &#8212; it&#8217;s so funny, because we worry about the violent video games.  But the real phenomenon with the video games probably &#8212; and one thing that they&#8217;ve learned over there, because there&#8217;s been a gigantic spike in violent crime &#8212; isn&#8217;t that they play the violent games.  It&#8217;s what they call RPG.  The role-playing games, when you become the characters in the game, you know.</p>
<p>In this new Grand Theft Auto, you can become three of the characters.  You can be them.  And you lose complete attachment to reality.  It&#8217;s even more dangerous than the violent part of these games.</p>
<p>So in America, the economic impact of young men sitting in their childhood bedroom playing video games &#8212; we haven&#8217;t been able to quantify it just yet.  But we know that it can&#8217;t help.</p>
<p>And we do know that there are some startling facts out there.  Marriage rate has tumbled completely.  Fertility, birth rates &#8212; all-time low.  Young couples, when they do get together, they skip the idea of buying a house with the white picket fence.  Instead, they get in the small apartment, which they actually overpay for.</p>
<p>And the amount of depression and self-loathing among these young people is absolutely amazing.  A week ago, there was this young man who was, by the way, like the coolest dude in high school when he was in high school.  But he didn&#8217;t go to college and became one of these withdrawn.</p>
<p>He went to a shopping mall in New Jersey, kind of hoping that he would be shot and killed.  He had a rifle with him.  Turns out he had &#8212; he killed himself.  Now, there&#8217;s a report that says he was a heavy user of molly, which is a pure form of ecstasy.</p>
<p>By the way, this molly &#8212; it&#8217;s interesting, because the general media is just learning about it.  But it&#8217;s been laced in rap records and other kind of music for a few years.  Earlier this summer, three kids died at the Electric Zoo Festival because of molly.</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s the interesting thing.  That mall that this kid went into &#8212; we actually had brunch there two days earlier.  Not only that; this kid lived in our town.</p>
<p>So when I read that, you know, I wasn&#8217;t surprised.  Because a couple years ago, my wife, my son and I &#8212; we were in our family room, watching a movie.  And all of a sudden &#8212; our family room is connected to the deck.  So we have the glass doors, and we have &#8212; you know, you pull the drapes to cut the glare.  And we&#8217;re watching a movie.  All of a sudden, bam! What the &#8211;?  This loud bang right on the door, the glass door.</p>
<p>So I get up, and I slowly pull the drape away.  And there&#8217;s this kid looking me right in the face with this most amazing combination of fear, desperation &#8212; we were looking eye-to-eye.  I didn&#8217;t know what to do.  We called the police, and we kind of waited.  We went downstairs, because he went off the deck, and he was in the back yard.  Mostly bobbing around, you know, just sort of moving around, bobbing around.  He would sit down every now and then.</p>
<p>Finally, one cop car showed up.  Then another showed up.  And then more and more showed up.  Eventually, there were like eight or nine cop cars.  And they&#8217;re running back and forth from the back yard to the cop cars frantically.  And we couldn&#8217;t figure out what happened.</p>
<p>So we kind of made our way to the back yard, and the kid was under a bush.  And they were performing medical treatment on this kid.  He died in our back yard.</p>
<p>We live in one of the wealthier counties in the country, and our street is the wealthiest street in our town.  So you know, you would think that this isn&#8217;t supposed to happen.  But it&#8217;s part of the cold reality of America these days, that this is a white kid from the suburbs who died from a drug overdose.</p>
<p>His mother eventually came to the house.  I wasn&#8217;t there.  She visited with my wife.  And she called her son a gentle giant.  Said he just got hooked on drugs.  That day, he was supposed to go into a rehab.</p>
<p>You know, the thing is, guys, there&#8217;s so many things that we can be worried about in this country.  So far, economically has been the DNA of our country, right?  The determination, the capitalist spirit, the entrepreneurial spirit that&#8217;s always helped to separate us.  The notion that anyone could be rich, anyone can succeed &#8212; despite all the rhetoric and all the negativity, that still continues to linger, and it&#8217;s what keeps us afloat.  It&#8217;s the reason we aren&#8217;t in a Great Depression right now.</p>
<p>But we know millions of people are unemployed.  Millions of people have dropped out of the job market.  There&#8217;s been an amazing war against success, against achievement, against trying to be extraordinary.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s the taxes, the regulations, the determination to remake America into something, I guess, that enlightened thinkers from Voltaire to Thomas More and Barack Obama think is a paradise, a utopia that goes against nature in general.  Because almost all areas of nature, you see competition.  There&#8217;s always an alpha male, there&#8217;s always a winner; there&#8217;s always a loser.  Particularly in the nature of men.  Competition, the need to succeed, comes naturally to us.  It comes naturally to living species.</p>
<p>You know, it&#8217;s a singular goal to win and perpetuate, right?  You keep the species going.  In this case, we want to keep the greatness of America going.  Only those that see unfairness in winners and losers are really gaining the upper hand, right?  And they are doing things about it.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve got the Obamacare thing.  We&#8217;ve got the mounting losses of personal freedom.  There&#8217;s so many other areas also of concern and danger for this country.  And of course, the circumstances of young Americans &#8212; that cannot be ignored.  I actually think that the social-economic issue at this moment, social-economic issue that cuts across all boundaries &#8212; no color, no religion, no regional area of the country &#8212; is truly a crisis that cuts across everything, is what&#8217;s happening with our young Americans, particularly young men in America.</p>
<p>And I really believe that anyone who can articulate this danger and solutions to not only win the future &#8212; they can save this country and maybe win a few elections along the process.  Reviving our young people has to be a top priority.</p>
<p>Earlier, I talked about Japan.  I used to live in Japan.  Part of my childhood, I was an army brat.  So we lived in Japan.  And I remember a lot of things about Japan &#8212; how little things were.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>That always stuck with me, right?  Trucks with three wheels.  You know, like golly, this place is little.  I felt like I was in the land of Lilliputians.  I was in fourth grade.  But there&#8217;s some things that really stuck out to me.  And they had this candy called Seymour&#8217;s.  That was &#8212; oh, man, I loved those Seymour&#8217;s.  I&#8217;m glad I never found out what they were made out of, but I loved them.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then, there was Suicide Cliff.  You know, during the end of World War II, when it became clear that Japan was going to lose, the emperor ordered all the schoolchildren to learn how to fight the enemy.  So on the island of Okinawa, even students in deaf and blind schools had to learn how to fight the enemy.</p>
<p>So in January of 1945, the Battle of Okinawa began.  It was really fierce, close combat.  So Japanese soldiers fought hard; they retreated into caves and other things.  All this time, they were getting these schoolchildren prepared to fight as well.</p>
<p>When it was all over, 120,000 of the 300,000 people that lived in Okinawa died.  Many of them died by suicide.  You got to see &#8212; even as these kids were being prepared to fight, they were also being told these stories of American soldiers who were going &#8220;Jap hunting,&#8221; or raping little girls.</p>
<p>So we went to one memorial.  It was the site of an all-girls&#8217; school that hundreds of girls jumped off the cliffs.  And it was one of these things where you look over the edge, and you could just imagine all that shredded flesh, and all these young girls tumbling, crashing into the ocean.</p>
<p>Now, there&#8217;s some controversy now in the history books over whether they voluntarily took their own lives, or if it was a consequence of what they call shudan jiketsu, which is compulsory mass suicide.  The one thing is for sure though, that Japan went down a dangerous path of destruction at the whims of an emperor.  His imperial aims were so desperate that he tried to turn children into soldiers.  In the process, he sucked all the life out of them, anyway.</p>
<p>So we know the ill-fated war.  We know that they demonized the enemy.</p>
<p>America right now is sliding down its own form of form of Suicide Cliff.  Our spirit is under assault by an imperial leader who&#8217;s willing to get anything he wants by any means necessary.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m going to tell you right now, I don&#8217;t have the answers, all the answers; I have some suggestions.  But I think a serious, long campaign that includes real human contact with young people is the key to restoring confidence and belief.</p>
<p>So I could tell you right now, I don&#8217;t care if someone is in that eunuch category, that malcontent category, that withdrawn category; there&#8217;s still something inside of them that can be reached, that actually wants to be reached.  And these kids know, and they&#8217;re learning, the election was won on a lie.  They know about the targeting of the IRS.  They know about the NSA snooping.  They also know that somehow they&#8217;re expected to pay for Obamacare, even though that&#8217;s the demographic with the least amount of money in this country.</p>
<p>They know America is great.  They also inherently know right from wrong, despite all the campaigns from the Left that tries to excuse them when they make mistakes that they should not be making.</p>
<p>I think young Americans &#8212; at this point, they need someone to sort of tie it all together, so show them love, show them the right game plan; also let them know that hope &#8212; when hope is your battle cry, it&#8217;s ridiculous.  And it&#8217;s irrelevant, when you have a real, real game plan; when you have a real belief system.  When you understand how great you are to begin with.  Hope is when you&#8217;re in the corner, when the odds are against you.  The odds are not against America.  They&#8217;re not against young people.</p>
<p>We need someone to save America and these young people right now from shudan jiketsu.  I happen to think that those people are going to be at this conference this weekend.  I think we got to get it together, figure out how to articulate that message, and drive it home.</p>
<p>Thanks for having me.  God bless, and God bless America.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Senator Sessions Throws Down the Gauntlet</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/senator-sessions-throws-down-the-gauntlet/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=senator-sessions-throws-down-the-gauntlet</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2013 04:46:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208546</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["This is a defining moment for the House Republicans." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/jeff-sessions.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-208548" alt="jeff-sessions" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/jeff-sessions.jpg" width="280" height="236" /></a>A statement from Senator Sessions:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>The President said he has not heard any good reason to oppose the Senate bill. Clearly, he has not listened to the ICE and USCIS officers warning that the bill would permanently undermine enforcement. Here are three more reasons: the Senate bill will lower wages, increase unemployment, and reduce per-capita GNP. All of these statements are confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office. Under current law, we will provide approximately 10 million grants of permanent residency (green cards) over the next decade. Under the Senate bill, that number will triple to more than 30 million. Further, the Senate bill would double the number of guest workers at a time when a record 90 million Americans are outside the work force. We need to get Americans off of unemployment, off of welfare, and back into the labor force — but the ‘reforms’ proposed by the Senate would put even more Americans out of work.</em></p>
<p><em>Many of the same CEOs demanding that Congress increase guest workers are laying off thousands of American workers.  This is a defining moment for the House Republicans. They must decide who they represent: certain activist CEOs lobbying Congress, or the national interest and the millions of Americans struggling to get by in this low job, low wage economy.<br />
</em></p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<blockquote><p><em> </em></p></blockquote>
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		<title>Destroying Household Jobs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/destroying-household-jobs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=destroying-household-jobs</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/destroying-household-jobs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[extension]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-skill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[worker]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206010</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's latest attack on the poor through wage-control regulations. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206011" alt="National-Unemployment-Rat-007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg" width="270" height="218" /></a>Despite evidence from around the world that minimum wage laws can price low-skilled workers out of jobs, the U.S. Department of Labor is planning to extend minimum wage coverage to domestic workers, such as maids or those who drop in from time to time to do a few household chores for the sick and the elderly.</p>
<p>This coverage is scheduled to begin in January 2015 — that is, after the 2014 elections and nearly two years before the 2016 elections. Politicians show a lot of cleverness in protecting their own interests, even if they show very little wisdom as far as serving the public interest.</p>
<p>If making household workers subject to the minimum wage law is expected to produce good results, why not let those good results begin early, so that voters will know about them before the next election?</p>
<p>But, if this new extension of the minimum wage law opens a whole new can of worms — as is more likely — politicians who support this extension want to insulate themselves from a voter backlash. Hence artfully choosing January 2015 as the effective date, to minimize the political risks to themselves.</p>
<p>The reason this particular extension of the minimum wage law is likely to open a can of worms is that both household workers and those who employ them will face more complications than employers and employees in industry or commerce.</p>
<p>First of all, ill or elderly individuals who need someone to help them from time to time are not like employers who have a business that regularly hires people and may have a personnel department to handle all the paperwork and keep up with all the legal requirements when government bureaucrats are involved.</p>
<p>Often the very reason for hiring part-time household workers is that some ill or elderly individuals have limited energy or capacity for handling things that were easy to handle when they were younger or in better health. Bureaucratic paperwork and legal technicalities are the last thing they need to have to add to their existing problems.</p>
<p>The people being hired to do household chores also have special problems.</p>
<p>Often such people have limited education, and may also have limited knowledge of the English language.</p>
<p>Why make it harder for ill or elderly people to get some much-needed help in their homes, and harder for low-skilled people to get some much-needed jobs?</p>
<p>Despite all the talk about how we need more people with high-tech skills, there is also a need for people who can help clean a home or carry groceries or do other things that need doing, and which do not require years of schooling. As the elderly become an ever growing proportion of the population, there will be a growing demand for such people.</p>
<p>More precisely, there would be more jobs for such people if the government did not step in to complicate the hiring process and price potential workers out of jobs, with minimum wages set by third parties who do not, and cannot, know what the economic realities are for either the ill and the elderly or for those whom the ill and the elderly wish to hire.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws in general are usually set with no real knowledge of the economic realities and alternatives for either employers or employees. Third parties are simply enabled to indulge themselves by imagining what is &#8220;fair&#8221; — and pay no price for being wrong about the actual economic consequences.</p>
<p>That is why countries with minimum wage laws usually have much higher rates of unemployment than those few places where there have been no minimum wage laws, such as Switzerland or Singapore — or the United States, before the first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1931.</p>
<p>Government interventions in labor markets have already created needless complications, and not just by minimum wage laws. The welfare state has already taken out of the labor market millions of people who could perform work that would be well within the capacity of inexperienced young people or people with limited education.</p>
<p>With welfare, such people can stay home, watch television, do drugs or whatever — or else they can hang out in the streets, often confirming the old adage that the devil finds work for idle hands.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Minimum Wage Madness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/minimum-wage-madness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=minimum-wage-madness</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Sep 2013 04:20:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Labor Unions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-wage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=204450</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The surest way to harm low-wage and minority workers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/minimum_wage_onpage.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-204454" alt="minimum_wage_onpage" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/minimum_wage_onpage-450x302.jpg" width="189" height="127" /></a>A survey of American economists found that 90 percent of them regarded minimum wage laws as increasing the rate of unemployment among low-skilled workers. Inexperience is often the problem. Only about 2 percent of Americans over the age of 24 earned the minimum wage.</p>
<p>Advocates of minimum wage laws usually base their support of such laws on their estimate of how much a worker &#8220;needs&#8221; in order to have &#8220;a living wage&#8221; — or on some other criterion that pays little or no attention to the worker&#8217;s skill level, experience or general productivity. So it is hardly surprising that minimum wage laws set wages that price many a young worker out of a job.</p>
<p>What is surprising is that, despite an accumulation of evidence over the years of the devastating effects of minimum wage laws on black teenage unemployment rates, members of the Congressional Black Caucus continue to vote for such laws.</p>
<p>Once, years ago, during a confidential discussion with a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, I asked how they could possibly vote for minimum wage laws.</p>
<p>The answer I got was that members of the Black Caucus were part of a political coalition and, as such, they were expected to vote for things that other members of that coalition wanted, such as minimum wage laws, in order that other members of the coalition would vote for things that the Black Caucus wanted.</p>
<p>When I asked what could the black members of Congress possibly get in return for supporting minimum wage laws that would be worth sacrificing whole generations of young blacks to huge rates of unemployment, the discussion quickly ended. I may have been vehement when I asked that question.</p>
<p>The same question could be asked of black public officials in general, including Barack Obama, who have taken the side of the teachers&#8217; unions, who oppose vouchers or charter schools that allow black parents (among others) to take their children out of failing public schools.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.</p>
<p>In 1925, a minimum wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.</p>
<p>A well regarded Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia&#8217;s minimum wage law as a means to &#8220;protect the white Australian&#8217;s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese&#8221; who were willing to work for less.</p>
<p>In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.</p>
<p>Some supporters of the first federal minimum wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and under-bid construction companies using unionized white labor.</p>
<p>These supporters of minimum wage laws understood long ago something that today&#8217;s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through.</p>
<p>People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum wage rate.</p>
<p>Labor unions have been supporters of minimum wage laws in countries around the world, since these laws price non-union workers out of jobs, leaving more jobs for union members.</p>
<p>People who are content to advocate policies that sound good, whether for political reasons or just to feel good about themselves, often do not bother to think through the consequences beforehand or to check the results afterwards.</p>
<p>If they thought things through, how could they have imagined that having large numbers of idle teenage boys hanging out on the streets together would be good for any community — especially in places where most of these youngsters were raised by single mothers, another unintended consequence, in this case, of well-meaning welfare policies?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Economic Stagnation Named &#8216;Recovery&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/the-economic-stagnation-named-recovery/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-economic-stagnation-named-recovery</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:39:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203437</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Explaining the newest "drop" in unemployment.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/unemployment-economy.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203438" alt="CUNY Big Apple Job Fair at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City for all CUNY Students and Alumni on Friday, March 20, 2009." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/unemployment-economy.jpg" width="299" height="223" /></a>While most of America remained focused on the Obama administration&#8217;s machinations regarding Syria, another set of underwhelming economic statistics were released Friday. Those stats reinforced the ongoing reality that America remains <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary/item/15614-obamanomics-to-blame-for-worst-recession-since-the-great-depression">mired</a> in the worst recovery since the Great Depression</p>
<p>Once again, the 169,000 jobs created in the month of August was &#8220;unexpected,&#8221; trailing the median number of 180,000 jobs forecast by 96 economists <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-06/payrolls-in-u-s-rose-less-than-forecast-jobless-rate-at-7-3-.html">surveyed</a> by Bloomberg News. The unemployment rate dipped from 7.4 percent to 7.3 percent, but also once again, it was due to the reality that the workforce participation rate dropped from 63.4 percent in July to 63.2 percent in August. This represents the <a href="http://fox4kc.com/2013/09/06/labor-participation-at-lowest-rate-since-1978/">lowest rate</a> since 1978, and while some of it is attributable to retiring Baby Boomers, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, painted the gloomy &#8212; but realistic &#8212; picture. “We know there’s a lot of hardworking people that want to be productive, we just don’t have work for them to do,” she said.</p>
<p>That is an understatement. Currently, 90.5 million Americans considered job-eligible don&#8217;t work and aren&#8217;t considered part of the workforce. Those under the age of 16, as well as non-civilians, such as those in the military or prison, are excluded from the total. In addition, many people are retired or in school. Nonetheless, at least 40 million have given up looking for work for a variety of reasons. Schierholz notes the workforce participation rate would be going down regardless, due to retiring Baby Boomers. But she believes that two-thirds to three-quarters of the decline since the beginning of recession is due to a bad job market. “We’re operating way below potential,” she concludes.</p>
<p>That is also an understatement. Last February, a <a href="http://ht.ly/i6hbj">presentation</a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco revealed that while the vast majority of jobs lost during the recession were of the middle class variety, since 2010 they have been replaced by low-wage occupations paying less than $13.83 per hour. Forty percent of those replacement jobs have been in the food services, retail, and employment services (such as sales clerks and office workers) sectors of the economy. Furthermore, median incomes in the United States have <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/blog/morning-edition/2013/08/americans-buying-power-declining.html">fallen</a> 4.4 percent, since the beginning of the <i>recovery</i> in 2009.</p>
<p>In addition to the mediocre job numbers for August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), as is often the case, <a href="http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2013/09/07/everything-you-need-to-now-about-the-jobs-report-n1693723">revised</a> the jobs numbers for previous months. For the second consecutive month, the original estimates were lowered. July&#8217;s jobs number was revised downward by 58,000 from 162,000 jobs created to only 104,000, while June was lowered in from 188,000, and down to 172,000. The BLS methodology, based on the number of jobs they believe &#8212; but can&#8217;t prove &#8212; are being created, is the reason these revisions must be made. Thus it stands to reason that the August number will also be revised in the future, due to the reality that the BLS <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/09/07/1619391/">added</a> 90,000 &#8220;theoretical&#8221; jobs to its total in August.</p>
<p>This puts the three-month average at 148,000 jobs. Yet even at August&#8217;s rate of 169,000 jobs created, it would take the nation another 9 years and 10 months to reach pre-Great Recession employment levels &#8212; if there are no additional recessions in the interim. Thus, when Obama economic advisor Jason Furman <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/09/06/employment-situation-august">touts</a> the success of this administration in creating jobs, it must be remembered the nation needs almost another decade to get back to where we were five years ago.</p>
<p>Such happy talk also ignores the reality of this &#8220;recovery&#8221; in comparison to every other that has occurred since the Great Depression. According to the records <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/06/02/economically-could-obama-be-americas-worst-president/">kept</a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, in the 10 recessions prior to this one, it took an average of 25 months to completely recover all the jobs lost from the peak employment that occurs just before a recession begins. Yet<i> </i>by April 2013, <i>64 months</i> after the prior jobs peak in January 2008, the records revealed that the nation was still down more than 2 percent, or 2.6 million jobs from its 2008 peak. By comparison, 64 months after the 1981 recession, engendered by President Reagan&#8217;s monetary policies needed to stop the inflationary spiral of the Carter years, job growth was 9.5 percent higher that it was at the beginning of the recession, or 10 million jobs higher.</p>
<p>The <i>Wall Street Journal&#8217;s</i> Stephen Moore <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323324904579042830303535934.html">reveals</a> the bitter irony of Obama&#8217;s economic approach in comparison to Reagan&#8217;s and its effect on Obama&#8217;s core constituency. After noting that Obama&#8217;s reelection was largely engendered by five demographic groups&#8211;young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics&#8211;he explains that those groups &#8220;have suffered the steepest economic declines.&#8221;</p>
<p>Moore, who cites numbers taken from the Census Bureau&#8217;s Current Population Survey and analyzed by Sentier research, reveals that households headed by single women, with and without children present, experienced a 7 percent decline in their income. Those under age 25 lost 9.6 percent, black American and Hispanic heads-of-households lost 10.9 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively, and workers with a high-school diploma or less lost about about 8 percent of their income.</p>
<p>The same groups bore a far higher brunt of unemployment than the national average as well, with black Americans at 12.6 percent, Hispanics at 9.4 percent, those with less than a high-school diploma at 11 percent, and teens at a whopping 23.7 percent.</p>
<p>By comparison, beginning with the Reagan economic boom in 1981 and running through 2008, black women had the largest income <i>gains</i> at 81 percent, followed by white women at 67 percent, black men at 31 percent, and white men at 8 percent. &#8220;What all of this means,&#8221; writes Moore, &#8220;is that the stimulus-led economic revival that began officially in June 2009&#8211;Vice President Joe Biden&#8217;s famous &#8216;summer of recovery’&#8211;has only resulted in lower incomes for at least half of Americans, the very ones who were instrumental in electing Mr. Obama twice.&#8221;</p>
<p>Nor is it likely to get any better. The sobering reality is that we are rapidly <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/25/a_nation_of_part-timers_119356.html">becoming</a> a nation of part-time workers. According to the Labor Department&#8217;s household survey, almost three-quarters of the new jobs created this year have been part-time.</p>
<p>The likely culprit? Obamacare. And despite evidence <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/07/31/who-can-deny-it-obamacare-is-accelerating-u-s-towards-a-part-time-nation/">presented</a> by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) that workers losing hours due to the healthcare law is &#8220;anecdotal,&#8221; there is a mountain of such anecdotal evidence offered by employers in the restaurant and fast-food businesses who have moved their workers to a 29-hour work week to avoid the Obamacare mandate, several colleges that now rely on part-time instructors, and state and local governments who have reduced employee hours as well. This goes a long way towards explaining why the ratio of 4.3 part-time jobs for every full-time job being added to the economy is a historical anomaly.</p>
<p>Thus, it stands to reason that the healthcare bill is at least partially to blame. Even the AFL-CIO, one of the Obama administration’s staunchest supporters, <a href="http://www.pottsmerc.com/article/20130908/OPINION03/130909604/op-ed-workers-will-lose-under-obamacare">believes</a> this to be the case. Its Nevada Chapter released a resolution to that effect. “The unintended consequences of the (Affordable Care Act) will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week, higher taxes, and force union members onto more costly plans&#8211;eventually destroying (union health plans) completely.”</p>
<p>Then there is also the potential impact of so-called comprehensive immigration reform. In June, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/18/CBO-releases-report-on-immigration-bill-s-costs">predicted</a> that the Gang of Eight bill would reduce the federal budget deficit by $875 billion over 20 years. Yet the same report <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/18/CBO-Immigration-bill-would-drive-down-American-workers-wages?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup,+June+19,+2013&amp;utm_campaign=20130619_m116392690_Breitbart+News+Roundup,+June+19,+2013&amp;utm_term=More">predicted</a> that the legislation would also drive down the wages of <i>American</i> workers and make it more difficult for them to find a job. For anyone but the politicians looking for votes, and businesses looking for cheaper labor, that&#8217;s a lousy tradeoff.</p>
<p>Another lousy tradeoff is the distorted relationship between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. The market was actually hoping the economic numbers would be <i>worse</i>, so that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would continue pursuing his money printing program known as &#8220;quantitative easing&#8221; (QE). It is QE that has driven Wall Street to record highs even as million of Americans on Main Street languish in the economic malaise known as the &#8220;new normal.&#8221; This unseemly catering to Wall Street bankers and brokers is something worth remembering the next time the president insists he is a champion of the middle class.</p>
<p>It is a middle class, much like the economy itself that remains mired in stagnation. And unless there is a radical change in the administration&#8217;s economic agenda, stagnation may be the best Americans can hope for.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obamacare May Wipe Out 2% of America&#8217;s Workforce</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamacare-may-wipe-out-2-of-americas-workforce/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-may-wipe-out-2-of-americas-workforce</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2013 14:34:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198981</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[At least the folks on the death panels will still keep their jobs. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/480x360xobamacare-parttime-jobs.png.pagespeed.ic_.m3fk6tRWiy.png"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-198984" alt="480x360xobamacare-parttime-jobs.png.pagespeed.ic.m3fk6tRWiy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/480x360xobamacare-parttime-jobs.png.pagespeed.ic_.m3fk6tRWiy-450x337.png" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p><a href="Jesse Jackson is comparing Florida to Selma and South Africa, based on a single case whose outcome he didn't like.">Look on the bright side</a>. At least the folks on the death panels will still keep their jobs. Until it&#8217;s their turn.</p>
<blockquote><p> Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday’s report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans, however, had a full-time job.</p>
<p>Obamacare will move at least 2.3 million full-time working Americans into part-time work. It will result in millions of Americans losing their healthcare benefits and vacation hours. Obamacare will also force one million Americans to seek welfare.</p>
<p>That means  that at current predictions, likely to change, Obamacare will kill off at least two percent of the US full-time workforce.<br />
(116 million divided by 2.3 million)</p></blockquote>
<p>If this seems rather terrible, it&#8217;s what some of the worst European economies already look like with part time jobs for most younger people and a limited reserve of full time jobs for union members and government employees.</p>
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		<title>Is New York City the Next Detroit?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/is-new-york-city-the-next-detroit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=is-new-york-city-the-next-detroit</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 31 Jul 2013 04:58:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[collapse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gun Laws]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=198661</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the city is headed for collapse.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/New-York-City-Skyline.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198664" alt="New-York-City-Skyline" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/New-York-City-Skyline-450x281.jpg" width="315" height="197" /></a>Shortly, New York may be ruled by a governor who helped cause the financial meltdown, while New York City may have a mayor who was forced to resign from Congress and its comptroller will be a former governor who was forced to resign for transporting a prostitute across state lines. He will be replacing the current comptroller who may go to jail for campaign finance fraud.</p>
<p>All of that sounds like an elaborate setup to a punch line.  And it is.</p>
<p>New York State has the 33<sup>rd</sup> highest unemployment rate in the country. New York City’s unemployment rate is even higher at 8.3%. In June, New York City, with a population of 8 million, added just 3,100 jobs. Most of those jobs were in the city’s tourism trade which bulks up during the summer.</p>
<p>While Bloomberg was playing hooky, using city resources to push gun laws in other states, the specter of Motown was creeping over the Big Apple.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2013/07/25/the_retirement_surprise_in_detroits_bankruptcy_100503.html">New York City comes in</a> second on the list of cities with the largest unfunded pensions. After Detroit.</p>
<p>A New York household is on the hook for $14,302 in unfunded city employee pensions and $22,857 in unfunded city worker health care costs. Since much of the city doesn’t actually pay taxes, that breakdown is mostly fictional.</p>
<p>When City Council Speaker Quinn, the front runner to replace Bloomberg after Weiner’s texting scandal, proposed to hike taxes, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123500384765617949.html">Mayor Bloomberg pointed out</a> that 40,000 people already pay 50% of the taxes.</p>
<p>In one of his strangely lucid moments, Bloomberg said, “If a handful left, any raise would make it revenue neutral.” If even a few of the golden 40,000 subsidizing half of New York City are pushed out by the tax hike, it will offset the extra tax revenue.</p>
<p>It’s peculiar to think of 40,000 people holding up a city of 8 million, but that’s how shaky the Big Apple is. And if a Democrat walks into Gracie Mansion after this election, many of those 40,000 might just hit the road.</p>
<p>Bloomberg has just enough business skills to understand how precarious a position he put the city in. An unpopular cold fish, he bought his way into office by using portions of his own fortune and a much bigger pile of public money.</p>
<p>New York City debt <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/mayor-bloomberg-doubled-new-york-city-debt-to-110-billion/">doubled under Bloomberg</a> to $110 billion. That’s nearly four times Bloomberg’s own net worth. The interest on that debt is at $6 billion. Three years of interest on New York City’s debt equals the debt that drove Detroit into bankruptcy court.</p>
<p>None of the Democratic candidates scurrying to replace Bloomberg has given any serious thought to dealing with these issues. Instead New Yorkers have been treated to a campaign of clowns with each candidate doing his best to embarrass him or herself.</p>
<p>Quinn, the lesbian City Council speaker, who developed a reputation for toadying to Bloomberg, recently <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/one-video-that-captures-the-broken-urban-way-of-life/?utm_source=rss&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=one-video-that-captures-the-broken-urban-way-of-life">turned an intern’s heatstroke fainting spell</a> into a dramatic production worthy of Broadway. Weiner has given the race the worst national profile imaginable. John Liu might go to jail for campaign finance fraud. Bill de Blasio is a left-wing radical whose family life makes Weiner’s seem normal.</p>
<p>Forget about dealing with that $110 billion debt and the mounting billions in interest each year. New Yorkers are being given a choice between a candidate who disgraced himself in public twice and Quinn and de Blasio who want to fill their kitchens with rotting garbage through their support for Bloomberg’s mandatory composting proposal.</p>
<p>Why settle for having candidates who are little better than compost, when the entire city can be turned into a giant compost heap?</p>
<p>“When New York makes composting part of everyday life, every other city will follow through,” Quinn declared. It’s more likely that other cities will follow it into the trash, before they follow it into packing bags full of rotting garbage.</p>
<p>The real action in the race isn’t happening with Weiner’s partners, but as Weiner, Quinn, de Blasio and the rest of the gang of clowns rush to lock down union endorsements. Some of the SEIU unions have split between Quinn and de Blasio. The United Federation of Teachers has backed Bill Thompson, the candidate everyone is ignoring because unlike the rest of them he hasn’t done anything horrible.</p>
<p>The UFT endorsement is highly significant. New York recently put the benefits of retired teachers under a privacy shield. And there’s good reason for that.</p>
<p>&#8220;Bernie Madoff pretended he was getting 8% returns on his clients&#8217; investments—and he&#8217;s in jail for running a Ponzi scheme. But in the public sector that kind of make-believe is common,&#8221; Joel Klein, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704415104576066192958395176.html">the former New York City school chancellor</a>, wrote.</p>
<p>&#8220;The city pension plan offered teachers and administrators guaranteed an 8.25% return, regardless of what the investments actually earned in the market.&#8221;</p>
<p>New York City public employee pensions, <a href="http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/more_pension_perfidy_Gfl4QCHRntoeayJiEUP7gO">the cement shoes around the city</a>, are the real threat to its survival. Union contracts have not been renegotiated in years <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/keller-new-york-is-not-detroit-but.html?pagewanted=all">as unions wait for a friendly Democrat</a> to show up in Gracie Mansion and give away the entire store. If any Democrat wins, whether it’s Quinn, Weiner or Thompson, their payoffs to the unions will doom New York City to end up like Detroit.</p>
<p>The only difference is how long it will take.</p>
<p>With $90 billion in unfunded pensions and more retired city workers, in some branches of public employment, than active workers, the train is heading deep into the tunnel.</p>
<p>New York City’s total liabilities <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/keller-new-york-is-not-detroit-but.html?pagewanted=all">exceed its assets by $125 billion</a>. In a serious city, that would be front page news. Instead the front pages are filled with Weiner and Spitzer’s latest shenanigans or the antics of the lesbian City Council speaker or De Blasio’s ex-lesbian wife. The bread is almost eaten, but the circuses are everywhere.</p>
<p>Bloomberg distracted New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers from the crisis by upselling the urban brand, inviting more of the members of that golden 40,000 to come and live here and pay the bills. Many of his Nanny State gimmicks were a fraud intended to create the impression that all the major problems had been solved and only the minor problems of too much salt and not enough bike lanes remained.</p>
<p>With the scam complete, Bloomberg is hitting the exits and plotting to become a national social reformer. His Democratic replacement will probably fail to keep the charade going.</p>
<p>Taxes will go up, so will crime, as police forces are cut and successful policing tactics are outlawed, more members of the golden 40,000 will flee and the city will sink back into what it was in the pre-Giuliani era. A dangerous unstable place on the road to financial ruin.</p>
<p>By then the name of the mayor will not matter. No more than the name of the mayor of Detroit does. But numbers like $125 billion will be remembered for a very long time.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>US Commission on Civil Rights Member: Illegal Immigration Accounts for 40% of Decline in Black Employment</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/us-commission-on-civil-rights-member-illegal-immigration-accounts-for-40-of-decline-in-black-employment/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=us-commission-on-civil-rights-member-illegal-immigration-accounts-for-40-of-decline-in-black-employment</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2013 00:15:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[amnesty for illegal aliens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united states economy]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[As a result of the growth of undocumented workers, the annual earnings of documented workers — regardless of race – in Georgia in 2007 were $960 lower than in 2000]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/060613-national-unemployment-rate-uchanged-line.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-194389" alt="060613-national-unemployment-rate-uchanged-line" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/060613-national-unemployment-rate-uchanged-line-450x252.jpg" width="450" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>Peter Kirsanow&#8217;s appointment to the US Commission for Civil Rights was fought tooth and nail by Democrats, yet he&#8217;s one of the few members of the commission actually looking out for the interests of the black community <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/node/351845">when it comes to amnesty</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Several weeks ago, my colleagues on the U.S.Commission on Civil Rights, Abigail Thernstrom and Gail Heriot, and I sent a letter to President Obama and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus detailing the commission’s findings on the impact of illegal immigration on low-skilled workers — particularly black males. Evidence adduced before the commission shows that illegal immigrants have displaced large numbers of black workers in industry sectors with historically high concentrations of black employees.</p>
<p>The evidence shows that immigration accounts for 40 percent of the 18-percentage-point decline in black employment rates over the last several decades. That’s hundreds of thousands of blacks thrown out of work, hundreds of thousands who can’t support families without taxpayer assistance.</p>
<p>Of course, the impact isn’t limited to blacks, nor is it limited to employment rates. Illegal immigration also drives down wage rates. For example, an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated that as a result of the growth of undocumented workers, the annual earnings of documented workers — regardless of race – in Georgia in 2007 were $960 lower than in 2000. In the hospitality industry the decline was $1,520.</p>
<p>Why should American workers suffer any decline in wages because of illegal immigration?</p></blockquote>
<p>Because American workers &#8216;work&#8217; for a living. That&#8217;s the problem right there.</p>
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		<title>Amnesty and the Attack on American Workers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/matthew-vadum/amnesty-and-the-attack-on-american-workers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-and-the-attack-on-american-workers</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Jun 2013 04:49:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gang of 8]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Will the conservative House save the day? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ap_schumer_mccain_kb_130401_wg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193694" alt="ap_schumer_mccain_kb_130401_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ap_schumer_mccain_kb_130401_wg-450x316.jpg" width="315" height="221" /></a>The &#8220;dangerous&#8221; immigration bill working its way through the U.S. Senate will devastate America&#8217;s labor marketplace and &#8220;guarantee&#8221; the country will have to grant &#8220;another amnesty&#8221; in the future, says Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama).</p>
<p>&#8220;This legislation is not going to work,&#8221; Sessions <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/17/Sessions-Immigration-BIll-Surrender-to-Illegality-Will-Guarantee-Another-Amnesty">told</a> Breitbart News. He described the measure sponsored by the bipartisan so-called Gang of Eight in the Senate as a &#8220;surrender to illegality that will guarantee we&#8217;ll be back in this position again.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;We have no indication whatsoever that this administration will have renewed [its] commitment to follow whatever law is passed,&#8221; Sessions said. &#8220;This Senate bill is very, very dangerous. It won&#8217;t work, and I hope the American people will dig into it and follow the details of it.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a time of high unemployment, record food-stamp dependency, and economic stagnation, a minimum of 11 million immigrants will immediately be given Social Security cards that will allow them to compete for government and blue collar jobs. The legislation puts &#8220;tremendous pressure&#8221; on the job market and makes it harder for workers to find jobs and leave welfare programs.</p>
<p>Although amnesty remains deeply unpopular among the American public at large, the activist Left wants the estimated 11 million illegal aliens present in the U.S. to be processed because they see them as future Democratic voters. In addition, many labor unions, such as SEIU (which has executives focused solely on immigration issues) see today&#8217;s illegals as future union members. Business lobbies favor amnesty because they crave the cheap, largely unskilled labor.</p>
<p>The Left&#8217;s goal with the current immigration bill, which a Heritage Foundation study found would add $6.3 trillion to the nation&#8217;s budget deficits over the coming 50 years, is the same as with most of its major policy initiatives over the past half century: To destroy the American system.</p>
<p>The radicals&#8217; goal is to use immigration to subvert the American system, just as it has been <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=20777">since the 1960s</a> when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) shepherded reform of that era&#8217;s immigration laws through Congress. The concept is simple: Flood America with people who don&#8217;t share Americans&#8217; traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets, in order to force changes in society.</p>
<p>An added benefit, from the Left&#8217;s perspective, is the proposed mass amnesty would destroy once and for all the Republican Party.</p>
<p>Starry-eyed Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) think that backing the measure will somehow win their party Latino votes. They must hope that if it becomes law the new voters it brings to their party&#8217;s fold will more than offset the all-but-certain exodus of fed-up conservatives the legislation will prompt. Among those disgruntled Republican-leaning voters are the same people whose failure to vote in November helped to deprive GOP candidate Mitt Romney of the presidency.</p>
<p>Democrats, on the other hand, know with much greater certainty that the legislation will secure their party more votes. &#8220;This legislation is all about the Democrats bringing in new voters who will assure them of a permanent leftist majority,&#8221; <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/the-fraud-at-the-heart-of-the-gang-of-8-immigration-proposal.php">writes</a> Paul Mirengoff.</p>
<p>Well-heeled radicals like George Soros are eager to push the national GOP over the cliff. One of the more active progressive groups pushing amnesty, National Immigration Forum, has taken a lot of money from Soros. According to tax records, the group has taken $3,807,152 from Soros&#8217;s Foundation to Promote Open Society since 2009 and $1,650,000 from Soros&#8217;s Open Society Institute since 1999.</p>
<p>On &#8220;Meet the Press&#8221; Sunday, Graham made the nonsensical argument that if the GOP doesn&#8217;t pander to Latinos it will die.</p>
<p>“If we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table and in a reasonable, practical way, it doesn’t matter who you run [for president] in 2016,” he said. “We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party. And the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community, in my view, is pass comprehensive immigration reform. If you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter who we run in my view.”</p>
<p>Of course, the kind of outreach proposed by Graham is pointless.</p>
<p>Immigration is <a href="http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/29/why-immigration-reform-wont-be-enough-for-the-gop-to-win-latino-voters">not an important issue for most Latino voters</a> and Latinos are traditionally staunch, pro-big government Democrats.</p>
<p>&#8220;Anyone who believes that they&#8217;re going to win over the Latino vote is grossly mistaken,&#8221; <a href="http://articles.mcall.com/2013-01-28/news/mc-p-pa-immigration-reform-barletta-20130128_1_illegal-immigrants-immigration-plan-immigration-reform">said</a> Representative Lou Barletta (R-Penn.). &#8220;The majority that are here illegally are low-skilled or may not even have a high school diploma. The Republican Party is not going to compete over who can give more social programs out. They will become Democrats because of the social programs they&#8217;ll depend on.&#8221;</p>
<p>According to Sessions, the legislation provides that an additional 4.5 million illegals will be legalized over the following decade. At that point the nation&#8217;s intake of immigrants will grow by at least 50 percent per year over 10 years for a total of 1.5 million immigrants a year being placed on a path to citizenship, or 15 million more for 10 years.</p>
<p>In addition to these 30 million immigrants placed on a path to citizenship, the measure would also double the quantity of temporary workers who could come and stay in the U.S. for three years, Sessions said. The workers would have the option to &#8220;re-up&#8221; for another three years with their families.</p>
<p>The bill is currently close to 1,100 pages long, reportedly weighing in at 24 pounds. It deals not only with immigration itself, but also with border security, welfare programs, free trade, and a multitude of other issues. Democrats are hoping to force the legislative monstrosity through the Senate before Independence Day.</p>
<p>The foremost champion of the bill, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), has made the laughable claim that the measure contains “the toughest enforcement measures in the history of the United States, potentially in the world.”</p>
<p>Last week the Senate rejected a &#8220;border security first&#8221; amendment to the Gang of Eight legislation. The amendment, offered by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), would have required the Department of Homeland Security to show that the southern border was secure for six months before illegals would be granted legal status.</p>
<p>One of the recently discovered gems <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/351002/gutting-immigration-enforcement-mark-krikorian">buried deep</a> within the legislation is a provision that would create a small business advocates&#8217; office within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The office would have the power to block enforcement actions and revoke penalties slapped on an employer.</p>
<p>Another provision would give the attorney general the ability to provide a taxpayer-funded defense lawyer to illegal aliens facing deportation. Even U.S. citizens are not entitled to free government attorneys in administrative proceedings. (A deportation hearing is an administrative &#8212; not a criminal &#8212; proceeding.)</p>
<p>&#8220;Illegal aliens fighting deportation would be entitled to see all of the documents in their file, including those obtained by ICE from other law-enforcement agencies, which may be sensitive or even classified,&#8221; writes Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. &#8220;The likely result is that other agencies would decline to provide ICE with these documents if they were worried about their release. And, if ICE refused to release any documents, then the alien could not be removed.&#8221;</p>
<p>Incidentally, embattled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) director John Morton said he&#8217;s <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/17/Embattled-ICE-Director-John-Morton-Resigns">quitting</a> at the end of next month.</p>
<p>Morton became infamous in 2010 when he directed law enforcement to stop enforcing immigration laws. ICE&#8217;s union, the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, approved a non-confidence motion against him on a vote of 259 to zero. Morton also released thousands of illegal immigrants from custody, hundreds of whom had violent criminal records.</p>
<p>But amnesty opponents should not lose heart. All is not lost even if the Senate approves the bill.</p>
<p>The measure faces an uncertain future in the House.</p>
<p>“This is President Obama’s number one political agenda item because he knows we will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect. We will perpetually have a progressive, liberal president, probably a Democrat, and we will probably see the House of Representatives go into Democrat hands and the Senate will stay in Democrat hands,” Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said.</p>
<p>An <a href="http://cookpolitical.com/story/5842">analysis</a> by Amy Walter of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report puts the odds of passage in the House somewhere between slim and none.</p>
<p>For House Republicans, &#8220;[T]here is little short-term gain to supporting immigration legislation,&#8221; Walter says. &#8220;It won’t make them any safer in a general election and instead may make them more vulnerable in a primary.&#8221;</p>
<p>GOP operatives&#8217; entreaties to House lawmakers to support the bill out of loyalty to the party are likely to fall on deaf ears. &#8220;Today, with over 40 percent of the GOP conference elected since 2010, the idea of &#8216;taking one for the team&#8217; is likely to fall flat,&#8221; Walter says. &#8220;Most of these members ran to shake up Washington and have pledged to refuse to bow to party bosses.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;[I]t’s going to take more than just talk of being a &#8216;good soldier&#8217; to get House GOPers to go along with comprehensive immigration reform,&#8221; she says.</p>
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