June 29, 1943 – During WWII General Eisenhower Requisitions Ten Portable Coca-Cola Bottling Plants
Bringing a taste of home, I guess.
The Japanese evacuated Kiska. This was made possible by the U.S. Navy being diverted by a radar signal that appeared to be a relief convoy for the island.
The United Kingdom announced that women under the age of 50 were required to register for war work.
Congress passed a bill providing a whopping $20,000,000 for childcare for working mothers. According to Sarah Sundin, 3102 child care centers were established which served, if that is the proper word, 600,000 children.
You can almost hear Bernie Sanders starting to gush about it, retrospectively.
Vice President Henry Wallace made a speech attacking Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones, damaging his credit with President Roosevelt.
I can't find what Wallace said, but Wallace was in the political far left and sometimes suspected of being a Communist. Indeed, The New Republic, which he later served in a senior position in, declared him to be one in an anniversary issue, which is remarkable. He doesn't seem to have really been, but he was so far to the left, it's remarkable that he'd ever been chosen for this position.
Roosevelt would dump him in his next campaign, which perhaps should provide a lesson for Joseph Biden.
Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower requested "three million bottled Coca-Cola (filled) and complete equipment for bottling, washing, capping same quantity twice monthly".
More on that can be read about here:
June 29, 1943 – During WWII General Eisenhower Requisitions Ten Portable Coca-Cola Bottling Plants
The Germans conducted a severe reprisal massacre in Waksmund, Poland, aimed at punishing support for the Polish resistance.
Pope Pius XII released his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi.
Monday at the Bar: The best of both worlds: Rodeo and law live side by side in the life of CNFR competitor
One day, she’ll have a career that will allow her to continue rodeoing, she’ll be able to afford her own nice trailer and nice horses.
And that's because it's honest, and manly, work.
It was Bates v. State Bar of Arizona in which the United States Supreme Court destroyed the professionalism of the legal profession. In that 5 to 4 decision, the Court found that a rule of the Arizona State Bar preventing advertising violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It further held that allowing attorneys to advertise would not harm the legal profession or the administration of justice.
They were wrong.
As was often the case in that era, the majority had its head up its butt. In reality, advertising destroyed decades of work by the early 20th Century American Bar Association and drug the occupation of being a lawyer from that of a learned profession down to a carnival barker.
Recently I watched the Netflix uploaded episodes of the Korean television series The Extraordinary Attorney Woo (이상한 변호사 우영우). In it, every one addressed attorneys by their patronymic and the title "Attorney", even if they were personally familiar with them. So, for example, every time somebody addressed the central protagonist, they did so as "Attorney Woo". That struck me as odd, so I looked it up to see if that was correct, and found a Korean language site entry that stated off with a comment that was something like "unlike the United States, attorneys in Korea are a respected profession".
That struck me, as I hadn't really thought about it like that. When I started off in this line of work, we were still somewhat regarded as respected professionals and its hard to forget that's now in the past.
The decline was in, however, already by that time. When we were admitted to the bar, Federal Judge Court Brimmer gave a speech about civility in litigation. I've heard versions of it many times since. When I first started practicing, advertising was just starting here, and it was the domain of plaintiff's lawyers for the most part. It still is.
Bates got us rolling in this direction, but the flood of 60s and 70s vintage law school graduates did as well. Too many lawyers with too little to do, expanded what could be done in court. Lawyers have backed every bad cause imaginable in the name of social justice. That's drug the profession down.
I think we know that, which is why I think we also go out of our way to associate ourselves with occupations that have real worth. We like conventions featuring the West, both for defense and plaintiffs, rather than sitting in front of our computers in office buildings in Denver and Salt Lake City.
Nobody, that is, wants to go to the "2023 Sitting On Your Ass Asking Insurance Carriers For Money" conference. No, we do not. We want to go instead to the "2023 Blazing Saddles and High Noon Conference".
But what are we really?
It's a real red meat question, but it needs to be asked. To some extent, civil litigation started off as a substitute for private warfare. But now? Many people have asked if this is a virtuous profession, but beyond that is it, well, manly?
Many lawyers aren't men, of course. But if there are occupations that exhibit male virtues and natures, is this one?
Our constant association of ourselves with occupations that do, and the use of language borrowed from fields that are, suggests we don't think so.
Geez Louise, what an absolutely stupid question.
NO, it isn't.
Well, more accurately, you can probably gain admittance to law school, spend three years in your early old age/late middle age studying the law, and graduate, and then come out unwanted, and for good reason.
I did post a reply:
So many rosy answers to this question.
In reality, practicing law is a hard job and even after you graduate with a law degree, you won’t know how to practice law. It takes a good 5 to 10 years to become competent at it. Most law firms aren’t going to want to invest in somebody whose career will be shortened by mortality if nothing else.
Added to that, as a lawyer who is now the age that you are asking about, I’ve watched plenty of lawyers of excellent skills whose abilities dropped off like a rock when they hit their 60s. Some became almost painful to watch, and they’d practiced for years.
Finally, there are a limited number of jobs in the field, and positions in law school. By age 60, you’ve had your career and the bulk of your life, whatever it may be, and will be taking a spot from somebody who hasn’t and who is trying to build their life. So, is it possible? Sure, it’s possible. Is it likely, probably not, or at least not the way that you imagine it. And while you're working at that, you're taking something from somebody younger.
This brings up two things.
Time really does advance well beyond our ability to appreciate it. I'm 60, and as a mule auction this past weekend doped slapped me into admitting, I've shot my bolt, career wise. In my 20s I still could have learned to ride like those guys, maybe in my 30s. In my 60s? No way.
I've posted on this before, but at some point you are just committed, one way or another. Life may allow second chances, but it doesn't hold back the hands of the clock. If you are a 60-year-old lawyer with 30 years of experience, that's what you are. If you are a 60-year-old lawyer with 30 years of experience who wishes that he could be on horseback every day, well too @#$#@#$ bad for you. You aren't, and you aren't going to be.
If you are a 60-year-old middle management white collar worker who has watched a pile of legal dramas over the past 40 years and wished you had become a lawyer, well, wake up. You aren't going to be one and the profession doesn't want you.
Law school at 60? Get real. Your mind isn't what it once was. Your body isn't either. A big problem in the law right now is that older lawyers don't realize this and keep on keeping on.
Payroll taxes were passed by Congress for the second time in U.S. history, the first time having been in 1913. Automatic withholding was a feature of the tax.
Sarah Sundin, on her blog, notes:
Today in World War II History—June 9, 1943: Future president George H.W. Bush is commissioned as an ensign in the US Naval Reserves, age 18; he’ll become the youngest US naval aviator in history.
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She also noted that the Navy declared Los Angeles off limits, helping to bring the Zoot Suit Riots to an end.
The Battle of Porta ended with the Italian Army burning down a series of Greek villages.
That's how old I am today.
Americans like to debate at what age you are "old", with that benchmark, and the one for middle age, moving over the years to some extent. Some go so far as to claim that the term doesn't mean anything.
It does, as you really do become older and then old, at some point.
The United Nations categorizes "older" as commencing at age 60, something, given their mission, that would encompass the totality of the human race. Some polling you'll see suggests that Americans regard it actually starting at 59 or 57. Pew, the respected polling and data institution, noted the following:
These generation gaps in perception also extend to the most basic question of all about old age: When does it begin? Survey respondents ages 18 to 29 believe that the average person becomes old at age 60. Middle-aged respondents put the threshold closer to 70, and respondents ages 65 and above say that the average person does not become old until turning 74.
Interesting.
It is not like flipping a switch, and it doesn't really happen to all people at the exact same time. I'm often reminded of this when I observe people I've known for many years. Men in particular, I used to think, aged at a much different rate than women. I knew a few of my contemporaries who were getting pretty old by the time they were in their 30s, and I know a few men in their 70s who are in fantastic shape and appear much younger than they really are. I recall thinking, back when I was in my late 20s, that my father was getting older, but wasn't old, right up until the time he died at age 62.
Having said that, I’m often now shocked, I hate to admit, by the appearance of women my own age, again that I knew when they were young. It's not like I know every girl I went to high school with, but I know a few of them, and some of them have held up much better than others. In that category, some of my close relatives have really held up well.
Up until recently, I could say that I've held up well, but this past year has been really rough health wise. First there was colon surgery in October, followed by a prolonged medical addressing of a thyroid nodule which was feared, at first, to be aggressive cancer. Working that out is still ongoing, but that now appears much less likely, meaning that only half the thyroid will need to be removed.
All of that has reminded me of Jesus' address to Peter:
Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.
John, Chapter 21.
Peter, by the way, was between age 64 and 68 when he was martyred. St. Paul was over 60, it's worth noting, when he met the same fate.
It's been rough in other ways as well. One thing is that, in spite of what people like to claim, your fate is really fixed by age 60. You aren't going to leave your job as an accountant and become an Army paratrooper.1 If you are a paratrooper, you're going to retire now, as 60 is the military's retirement cutoff age. If you've spent decades in the Army, and retire at 60 (most servicemen retire before that), you aren't going on, probably, to a career you don't have any strong connection with.
In my case, as I started to type out here the other day and then did not, as it didn't read the way I really wanted it to, I can now look back on a long career, over 30 years, and largely regard it as a failure, even though almost everyone I know would regard it as a success. I won't get over that. I'd always hoped to make the judiciary, but I'm not going to, and there's no longer even any point in trying. I'm reminded of this failure every time I appear in front of one of the new judges and see how incredibly young they now are, and also when I listen to suggestions that the retirement age for judges be raised up to the absurdly high 75.
At age 60, if I were to go to work for the state (which I'm also not going to), I couldn't really ever make the "Rule of 85" for retirement. As a lifelong private practice attorney, I'm now actually at the age where most lawyers look at their career, and their income, and decide they can't retire, some retreating into their office personality as the last version of themselves and nothing else. I'm not going to become a member of the legislature, something probably most young lawyers toy with the idea of. I'm not going to become a game warden, something I pondered when young.2 I'm way past the point where most similar Federal occupations are age restricted, and for good reason.
This is, work wise, pretty much it.
I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!
Hyman Roth, to Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, Part II ,
I'm also never going to own my own ranch, which was a decades long career goal. I have acquired a fair number of cattle, but my operation is always going to be ancillary to my in laws at this point. When I was first married my wife and I tried to find our own place, with she being much less optimistic about it than I. There were times, when the land cost less, that we could almost make, almost, a small place. We never quite did, and now, we're not going to.
Indeed, thinking back to St. Peter, I'm now at the age of "you can't", with some of the "can'ts" being medical. I could when I was younger, but now I can't, or shouldn't. Others are familial. "You can't" is something I hear a lot, pertaining to a lot of things, ranging from what we might broadly call home economics, in the true economic sense, to short term and long term plans, to even acquisitions that to most people wouldn't be much, but in my circumstances, in the views of others, are. Some are professional, as ironically it's really at some point in your 50s or very early 60s where you are by default fully professionally engaged, with that taking precedence over everything else, including time for anything else.
One of the most frustrating things about reaching this age, however, is seeing that you probably will never see how some things turn out, and you don't seem to have the ability to influence them. I'm not, in this instance, referring to something like the Hyman Roth character again, in which he hopes to see the results of his criminal enterprise flourish but fears he won't live long enough to. Indeed, I find myself curiously detached from concerns of this type that some people have. I've noticed, for instance, the deep concern some aging lawyers have about their "legacy" in the law, which often translates to being remembered as a lawyer or their firm's carrying on. I don't have those concerns, and indeed, taking the long view of things, I think it's really vanity to suppose that either of those wishes might be realized by anyone.
No, what I mean is that by this age there are those you know very closely, and you have reason to fear for their own long term fate, but you really don't have much you can do about it. People who seem to be stuck in place, for instance, seem beyond the helping hand, and more than that, they don't really want, it seems, to be offered a hand. People who have walked up to the church door but who won't go in as it means giving up grudges, burdens or hatreds, can't be coaxed in, even it means their soul is imperiled. It recalls the last final lines of A River Runs Through It. .
I remember the last sermon I ever heard my father give, not long before his own death:
Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives, look upon a loved one in need and ask the same question: We are willing Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true that we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give, or more often than not, that part we have to give… is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us… But we can still love them… We can love—completely—even without complete understanding….
I guess that's about right.
Footnotes:
1. Or, I might note, a Ukrainian Legionnaire. You are too old to join.
Interestingly, I recently saw an article by a well known, I guess, newspaper reporter who attempted to join the U.S. Army in his upper 40s. He apparently didn't know that you are well past the eligible age of enlistment at that point. He was arguing that there should be some sort of special unit made for people like himself, or like he imagined himself, well-educated individuals in their upper 40s. Why should there be if you can recruit people in their 20s?
2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law. There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.
Statutorily, the current law provides:
9-3-607. Age of retirement.
(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).
(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.
(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.
(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs.
Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness. But what about mental fitness? As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking. We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70. Would 60 make more sense? And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?
The Times:
Brexit is about to give us a problem with this, though. Karl Marx was right: wages won’t rise when there’s spare labour available, his “reserve army” of the unemployed. The capitalist doesn’t have to increase pay to gain more workers if there’s a squad of the starving eager to labour for a crust. But if there are no unemployed, labour must be tempted away from other employers, and one’s own workers have to be pampered so they do not leave. When capitalists compete for the labour they profit from, wages rise.
Britain’s reserve army of workers now resides in Wroclaw, Vilnius, Brno, the cities of eastern Europe. The Polish plumbers of lore did flood in and when the work dried up they ebbed away again. The net effect of Brexit will be that British wages rise as the labour force shrinks and employers have to compete for the sweat of hand and brow.
In spite of what economists like Robert Reich like to admit, and pundit Chuck Todd freely does without realizing what he's saying, is that the old "Americans won't do that job", or in this case, the British, simply isn't true. Britain's reserve army of workers was in Poland, and the U.S. all over the globe but particularly in Central America. COVID dried that supply up, and US wages rose.
Some, at least, of what we are seeing in terms of inflation, while inflationary, is actually caused by wages adjusting to their natural level. Economist always like to maintain this isn't true, but the actual experiment on it shows it is, in fact.
Back when I was in high school, I briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist.
I was never very serious about it, it was only one of the possibilities I was considering. In junior high and my first year or so of high school, I was fairly certain that I'd pursue a career as an Army officer, but already by that time that desire was wearing off. I liked writing and still do, so it seemed like a possibility. I also liked photography, and still do, and it seemed like a career where you could combine both, although in that era press photographers were usually just that, photographers.
I took my high school's journalism class as a result and was on the school newspaper. Doing that, I shot hundreds of photographs of our high school athletes, as well as some really interesting events. I did learn how to write in the journalist's style, which involves summarizing the story in the first paragraph figuring that some people will read no more than that, summarizing it again in the last paragraph, and filling in the story in between. Good news stories still read that way, although I've noticed in recent years that is observed less and less.
During that year or so I had the occasion to tour the local paper, and the class had a senior, a young woman, who actually already worked there as a reporter.
That paper was no small affair. The paper was a regional one, as well as the city paper, and it's building just off of downtown, still there was very large. That large structure, with a massive open news floor and a big printing room, was at least the fourth locality it had occupied, outgrowing the prior three. It would outgrow that one was well and build an absolutely massive structure just outside of town.
Last year, it sold it.
Now, the paper is headquartered in what was once a bar/restaurant downtown. Much, much smaller. It doesn't have presses anymore, it prints the paper in another state. Far from having a large staff of reporters with dedicated beats, it's down to one or two writers who are always "cubs", just starting out. It doesn't print newspapers at all on two days a week, right now, but relies on an electronic edition that mimics the appearance of a newspaper on your computer.
You can't pick up and thumb through a pdf.
This past week, it announced that it was going to quit printing a Sunday edition and quit physical home delivery for the three issues per week it will still print. Those will be mailed from the printing location in another state.
It's dying.
It's not surprising really, but it is sad.
At one time, it was a real force to be reckoned with, and people frankly feared it. Everyone subscribed to it. I know one family that sued it for liable due to what they regarded as inaccurate reporting on them.
Newspapers reformed themselves after the introduction of radio. That's something that tends not to be very well known about them. Before radio, many newspapers tended to be some species of scandal rag and they were usually heavily partisan in their reporting. You can think of them, basically, the way people think of Fox News today. As radio cut into their readership, papers consolidated and adopted a new ethic that they reported objectively.
They frankly never really achieved full objectivity, as that may not be possible. But they did strive for it. The introduction of television reinforced this. Newspapers became the place where you could, hopefully, get complete objective news and, hopefully, in depth news on various topics. Even smaller newspapers had dedicated reporters per topic, larger ones very much so. The local paper had local reporters that reported per topic assignment. A big paper, like the Rocky Mountain News, had very specified reporters. The Rocky Mountain News, for instance, had a religion reporter whose beat was just that topic. A surprising number of local papers sent reporters to South Vietnam during the Vietnam War just to report on the war.
That's all long past. For quite some time, reporters have become generalists by default, and as a rule, they can't be expected to have an in-depth understanding of any one topic. For that reason, they are frequently inaccurate, even on a national level. Just today, for example, I read a national story which repeatedly referred to Communion Hosts as "wafers". That's not the right term. Reporters on crime blindly accept the "mass shooting" and "high powered rifle" lines without having any idea what they mean. Print reporters repeat in some instances, depending upon individual reporters, hearsay as fact, in part because they likely don't have the time to really investigate everything personally.
Because we now get green reporters, the obvious fact that the local paper is dying is all the sadder. At one time green reporters could at least hope to move up the ranks in their local papers, maybe becoming editors or columnists if they stayed there, or they could move on, as they often did, to larger papers. They still move on, but papers everywhere are dying. Ironically, the only papers that still do fairly well are the genuine small town papers in small towns. That's good, but that can't be a career boosting job for those who enter it.
And with the death of the paper the objectivity that they brought in, back in their golden era, which I'd place from the 1930s through 1990 or so, is dying with them. People are going to electronic news, which so far hasn't shown that same dedication, although recently some online start-ups actually do. Television news has become hopelessly shallow, fully dedicated to the "if it bleeds it leads" type of thinking, or fully partisan, telling people what they want to hear. Really good reporting, and not all of it was really good, was pretty informative, which raised the level of the national intellect. People might have hated reporters, and they often did, but they read what was being reported about Richard Nixon and Watergate or what was revealed in the Pentagon Papers and had a better understanding of it in spite of themselves. That helped result in Republicans themselves operating to bring Richard Nixon down and society at large bringing an end to the Vietnam War.
Now, in contrast, we have electronic propaganda organs on the net that feed people exactly what they want to hear, and that often is the same thing that comes out of the back end of a cow.
Not overnight, of course. This has been going on for decades, and indeed in some ways it started with the first radio broadcasts. But radio was easier to adjust to. The internet, not so much.
The death of a career, an institution, and unfortunately, also our wider understanding.
Sic transit.
Oh, crap. Why not just raise it to 167?
Or better yet, why not just have a special bill that Boomer get to run absolutely everything for a good decade after they're all dead.
Is there literally nothing whatsoever the Boomer generation won't get out of the way on?
The simple reason being, economist grasp almost nothing about the economy and how it actually works, on a more existential level.
Including, even why the economy exists.
And politicians, speaking about the economy, don't look at the whole, but the part, as the whole isn't very satisfactory in a right/left construct.
Indeed, left wing politicians would be horrified by a real deep reform of the economy in ways that would actually work, as would right wing politicians.
Witness the latest by economist Robert Reich:
Indeed, let's break them down and look at the uncomfortable truth.
The economic goal should be more jobs at higher wages. Right?
Let's start there. That seems reasonable enough, so I'll basically concede it. But perhaps a better position would be to state that the economic goal would be more worthwhile jobs that allow for individual family independence, at middle class reasonable wages.
Because, what's an economy for? To serve people.
It isn't really "more decent jobs at higher wages". Indeed, it would really be all jobs at family supporting wages. That's not really the same thing.
I don't know that Reich would disagree with that, but it's important to keep it in overall mind. Economist tend to think that all jobs are super nifty, not matter what they are, as long as 100% of everyone who can work is working, and for good wages.
Actual people, however, don't think that way. They want decent jobs worth doing to support themselves, and their families if they have one, and most people do.
The irony here is that the left and the right have come around to the same position on this, over the year. It's a very Soviet, warehouse the children you unfortunately had so that everyone can work, until they are old, of course, as the Boomer run the economy and it's okay if they retire.
We continue.
Yet the Fed, corporate economists, and the GOP have turned the goal upside down — into fewer jobs and lower wages. Otherwise, they say, we’ll face more inflation.
Bob can't quite seem to grasp that unless an overheated economy is slowed down, wages erode. And the Fed, etc., isn't trying to depress wages. Inflation itself erodes wages. They're trying to slow inflation in the only method known to work.
He knows that, but he has a pet thesis that is, as he would put it:
Rubbish.
And here, several paragraphs later, is the thesis.
The Fed has raised borrowing costs at 10 consecutive meetings, pushing its benchmark rate to over 5 percent. Yet inflation has barely budged. In April, it dropped to 4.9 percent (year-over-year) from 5 percent in March — according to Wednesday’s Labor Bureau data.
Why are the Fed’s rate hikes having so little effect?
Actually, historically, that's not bad.
An ideal inflation rate would be 0%, or quite frankly slight, perhaps 1% or 2% deflation, to recover some lost ground. 5%, however, is headed in the right direction. 3% for much of my life was regarded as basically no inflation at all, and the extremely low inflationary rates we had until COVID were simply extraordinary.
Oh, COVID, remember that? The thing that closed the ports and kept good from coming in, reminding Americans that we make nothing.
A thing like that could almost have been inflationary.
A think like that may also have served to remind Americans that some of the jobs they had left, pre COVID, were awful. Note the big decrease in long haul truck drivers, employees in an industry that had already seen a massive departure of Americans in favor of foreign nationals, and which is effectively subsidized, as we've noted elsewhere.
It's an awful job. It's almost as if we might want to think about doing this more efficiently.
If only private companies could be induced to ship things by rail. . . .oh wait. . .
Anyhow, raising interest rates hasn't worked as it hasn't been high enough, that's why. 5% is a joke. It ought to be at least 8%.
And, additionally, because this inflationary cycle is global, that's also why.
Because, left wing economist, global food prices and energy prices have risen dramatically as a former far left wing operative, now politicians, and a person with a strange relationship (listening right wing politicians) with Donald J. Trump, has invaded a neighbor resulting in the first peer to peer, large scale, conventional war since the Korean War.
That's a lot of the reason why.
But, left wing economist states:
Because inflation is not being propelled by an overheated economy. It’s being propelled by overheated profits.
Okay, I'm a distributist, and I'd favor addressing this to the element it's the truth, but it's just frankly not very true. One basic fact is that those supposedly profiteering business are taking in money that's worth less every day. No wonder they feel they have to take in more.
But Bob says:
So, what’s causing inflation? Corporations with enough monopoly power to raise their prices and fatten their profits — which the Fed’s rate hikes barely affect.
Okay, well then let's go to a Distributist economy and limit the number of areas business enterprises can operate the corporate business form. That would be extremely deflationary, make for more good jobs at a wider level, and be much more stable. It'd do a whole lot more than raising taxes, as Bob suggest, which would be most likely passed on to everyone else.
Any regular economist in favor of that?
Absolute not, as they're all really just corporate capitalist economist and favor slightly tinkering with the mechanics of things. Basically, the difference between a conservative economist and a liberal economist is the difference motor heads of the 70s exhibited on whether they were Holly Carb or Edlebrock fans.
Big whoop.
But here's another uncomfortable truth. Let's go back to the first item.
The economic goal should be more jobs at higher wages. Right?
Part of the reason that wages rose is that during COVID there was a big decrease in immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States.
For years, economist on the left and right have claimed that immigrants take jobs that Americans won't, never mind that they take what are frankly a lot of middle class jobs in some industries. As they didn't come in, Americans took those jobs, but demanded living wages.
Supposedly, in the economist world, immigration had no impact on inflation, or jobs, and in fact boosted the economy. They may have boosted the economy, but its now conclusively demonstrated that they did so by depressing wages.
And this worked an injustice for the native born, including the native born poor. This was always known at some level as it provided the fuel to the occasional riots and domestic strife at the inner city urban level.
This has also caused liberals like commentator Chuck Todd to directly claim that we're experiencing inflation as we aren't seeing immigrants come in. But what this implicitly admits is that the high American immigration rate operates to keep wages low, and that is what was depressing inflation. Absent the high immigration levels, wages would rise to their natural level.
And that's what they've been doing.
Setting aside Donald Trump's pal, Vlad "if Czar Nikki owned I still do" Putin, part of what is going on is at attempt at wage stabilization, at American living wage levels, something that was frustrated by decades of wage erosion due to immigration.
This slams a post by Robert Reich, who as readers here know I have sort of a love/hate reading relationship with.
Reich's an old liberal in an era in which it seems the ancient hands of the Baby Boom Generation just won't let go of the levers of government, even though they started operating those levers when they were mechanical rather than electronic. Given that, like all people do, they tend to have an understanding of problems based on the world of their youth, rather than reality,
Witness:
