Tom Croft, executive director of the Steel Valley Authority, says state funding to help save manufacturing jobs works out to a cost of $750 per job saved vs. the $25,000 he conservatively estimates a jobless person costs taxpayers in employment taxes, lost taxes and other costs.
Here is Tom Croft’s economic proposition in a nutshell: It costs the government considerably more to lose a job than it costs to save a job.
Mr. Croft, 59, is the executive director of the Steel Valley Authority, an organization founded in the 1980s to resuscitate the region’s crumbling manufacturing industry. After several high-profile rescue attempts, including the failed effort to resurrect LTV’s South Side Works, Mr. Croft started focusing on small and midsize companies where jobs were in jeopardy.
By Dave Johnson Beaver County Blue
via Campaign for America’s Future
Nov 11, 2010
Businesses do not create jobs. In fact, the way our economy is structured the incentive is for businesses to get rid of as many jobs as they can.
Demand Creates Jobs
A job is created when demand for goods or services is greater than the existing ability to provide them. When there is a demand, people will see the need and fill it. Either someone will start filling the demand alone, or form a new business to fill it or an existing provider of the good or service will add employees as needed. (Actually a job can be created by a business, a government, a non-profit organization or just a person doing the job, depending on the nature of the good or service that is required.)
Soon-to-be GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the same day when the actual U.S. Secretary of State met with Netanyahu — and vowed that he and his GOP colleagues would protect and defend Israeli interests against his own Government. According to a statement proudly issued by Cantor’s own office:
Regarding the midterms, Cantor may have given Netanyahu some reason to stand firm against the American administration.
“Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington,” the readout continued. “He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.”
Leave aside the absurdity of believing that Israel needs to be protected from the extremely deferential and devoted Obama administration. So extraordinary is Cantor’s pledge that even the Jewish Telegraph Agency‘s Ron Kampeas — himself a reflexive American defender of most things Israel — was astonished, and wrote:
I can’t remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president. Certainly, in statements on one specific issue or another — building in Jerusalem, or somesuch — lawmakers have taken the sides of other nations. But to have-a-face to face and say, in general, we will take your side against the White House — that sounds to me extraordinary. Continue reading Republican Leader Pledges Allegiance to Israeli Interests against the United States Government→
Jeremy Grantham manages one of the largest asset funds in the world. He has been a consistent critic of the bubble economics of the Federal Reserve and the big banks. In a recent interview on MSNBC he called for direct government hiring of the unemployed. Below are some key excerpts from his interview.
The kind of people who were building the extra million houses in— in ’05, ’06 and ’07. And find— and find jobs for them. We have an infrastructure that is decades behind schedule.
Congressman Jason Altmire addressed a meeting organized by the Pennsylvania Alliance of Retired Americans to celebrate the birthday of Social Security on September 1, 2010 at the Community College of Beaver County. The purpose of the meeting was to ask Altmire to pledge to defend social security against any proposed cuts from the Deficit Commission. Altmire refused to make such a pledge.
The corporate Democrats, including Blue Dog Altmire, are trying to conflate the issue of the deficit with social security. They are blowing up a small problem with social security into a paper tiger to cover their plan to steal the Social Security Trust funds to finance the deficit caused by the tax cuts for the wealthy, the wars, and the bank bailout.
The Social Security Trust Fund has a $2 trillion surplus that will grow over the next few years due to interest payments even though the recession has caused a drop in tax revenues. The surplus is designed to cover the retiring baby boomer generation. The little problem is that in 35 years this surplus will be all paid out and the fund will only be able to pay 80% of the planned distributions. The solution to this problem is simple. Raise the cap on income subject to the social security tax. Of course the financial elite oppose paying their fair share of taxes.
In any case this Social Security future shortfall is not a problem that needs to be solved right now. And it is not a problem that has any relationship whatsoever with the deficit. Social security is funded by a direct tax. The money in the trust fund is lent to the government by buying special social security bonds. The US government must pay these bonds just like all the other bonds that it has sold around the world.
In this video ( that unfortunately has poor sound quality) I queried Congressman Altmire on this point. My question, which is cut off at the beginning, was: “Regardless of the deficit, do you have any concern and do you have any plans to address the expected shortfall in social security payments 35 years from now.” The purpose of this question is to show that Altmire’s plan to, as he says “consider the whole recommendation of the deficit commission” is part of the corporate elite’s agenda to confuse social security with the deficit.
In his answers Altmire conflates the issue of social security with the issue of the deficit. By default he admits that he has no actual concern about social security and no plans to address any future problems of social security. His concern and his plan is how to safely steal our money to pay for the deficit created by the bankers. This depends on confusing the public and twisting the arms of all the politicians to sign on to the scam.
A big thank you to PDA Vice President, retired IBEW member, and South Heights Councilman Robert Schmetzer for recording and publishing this video document.
Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.
My misgivings increased as we got a better feel for the views of the commission’s co-chairmen. It soon became clear that Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chairman, had a very Republican-sounding small-government agenda. Meanwhile, Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman, revealed the kind of honest broker he is by sending an abusive e-mail to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League in which he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.”
We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.
Businesses Do Not Create Jobs
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 