labor

For decades, vocational training has been waning.

During the Obama years, critics of the administration pointed to falling labor force participation as the primary “cause” of the falling unemployment rate.

Right parties gained, giving the right bargaining power, though it was no populist revolution such as Trump or Brexit.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its annual report on union membership last week, and the numbers are not favorable for the U.S. labor movement.

The missed payment, due on May 1, was just another scene in the slow-motion train wreck that has been termed “Puerto Rico’s economic crisis,” but to call the territory’s status a “crisis” understates the severity of the problem. Over 12 percent of the workforce in Puerto Rico is unemployed, and one out of every four employed Puerto Ricans works for the government, instead of contributing to the territory’s economy.

The world is threatened with a renewed wave of anti-capitalism and anti-business sentiments and policies. Many who cheered the demise of Soviet communism in the early 1990s, presumed that this meant that, by default, the case for free markets and competitive enterprise had won in the battle of ideas. Over the last twenty-five years it has become clear that the same misguided arguments against free market capitalism constantly reemerge, like an ideological vampire waiting to rise from the intellectual grave and drain market freedom of its lifeblood by more government regulations and controls.

America’s abysmal 0.7% economic growth during the fourth quarter of 2015 meant the annual growth rate was an anemic 2.4% … and average annual growth for the six-year Obama era a pathetic 2.2 percent.

Like it or not, lawmakers’ decisions have a large effect on our everyday lives. From increasing the cost of a car people need to take their children to soccer practice or go to work, to restricting job opportunities using occupational licensing rules (which reduce the supply of providers and raises prices), lawmakers’ actions have a serious and quantifiable effect on how much Americans pay for the things they need and want.

Socialism is a failed ideology. It was the avant-garde approach to how to do government – in the Twentieth Century. The Soviet Union was the flagship petri dish. That conquered, infiltrated or ingratiated themselves with many other nations – to establish them as additional petri dishes (Hello, Cuba). We certainly now have a large enough, long enough sample set – and the results are in. The system is contaminated – Socialism does not work.

As the calendar pages turn from September to October, thoughts shift from summery Independence Day fireworks and Labor Day cookouts to the spooky parade of Halloween trick-or-treaters.

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico owes more than $70 billion—about $19,729.43 per resident—in debt to creditors and investors. First to note the territory’s fiscal problems were the credit rating agencies, which downgraded the territory’s bond status to “speculative,” the first of three steps along the junk-bond path to loan default.

There is little that happens in society in general and the market economy in particular that most on the political “left” do not think needs more government intervention, regulation, and redistribution to make “better.”

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Jesse Hathaway, managing editor of Budget & Tax News speaks with Matt Mayer. Mayer, a Heartland policy advisor, is president of Opportunity Ohio as well as Chief Operating Officer of the Liberty Foundation. Mayer joins Hathaway to help explain the world of prevailing wage and project labor agreements (PLAs).