The labor force participation rate is the key to understanding employment under Biden

While fretting over an imminent recession that the media will blame on the Federal Reserve (to let Biden and other big-spending Democrats off the hook for causing the inflation that is leading to the recession), The New York Times claims the current employment numbers show the U.S. economy “is strong.” Well, yes and no: yes, a recession is on the way, and no, the economy is not strong.

Here’s how NYT writer Ben Casselman spins the latest employment numbers to suggest that the economy is not a shambles because of Joe Biden and the two years of Democrat control of Congress:

Most of the recent data suggests that the economy is strong. The job market is, incredibly, better today than it was in February 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic ripped a hole in the global economy. More people are working. They are paid more. The gaps between them—by race, gender, education or income—are smaller.

That is false. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the labor force participation rate is lower than it was in February 2020:

The labor force participation rate, at 62.6 percent, continued to trend up in March. The employment-population ratio edged up over the month to 60.4 percent. These measures remain below their pre-pandemic February 2020 levels (63.3 percent and 61.1 percent, respectively).

Labor force participation, not unemployment, is the important number. The latter measures how many people want to work and cannot find jobs, and the former measures how many people are working, which is the real extent of the “job market” to which the Times refers.

skarnick@heartland.org

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Anti-work, pro-welfare Democrats are in a food-stamp fury over attempts to cut costs

“Cutting SNAP will lead to homelessness, incarceration and death for 38 million Americans,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-Bronx/Yonkers) howled Monday.

Bowman is enraged by a House Republican proposal to encourage some food-stamp recipients to take a job.

Hysteria over food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is obligatory in the Biden era.

Food-stamp outlays have soared in recent years, costing $140 billion in 2022 — more than twice the program’s price in 2019.

Republicans are seeking to curb costs.

The 1996 Clinton welfare-reform legislation limited how long able-bodied adults without dependents can collect food stamps without working.

That provision had broad bipartisan support. But Democrats no longer even pretend to support self-reliance.

The food-stamp work requirement was suspended at the pandemic’s start. The mandate is scheduled to resume this summer, but the Biden administration and congressional Democrats could make any such requirement an illusion.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack justified waiving the SNAP work requirement in 2021: “Groups with typically higher unemployment, including rural Americans, Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and People of Color and those with less than a high-school education would have been disproportionally harmed by this cruel policy.”

Controversy over the work requirement took center stage at a congressional hearing Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) chaired Wednesday. Most of the senators and witnesses opposed reviving the work requirement.

But Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) dissented. “Our workforce participation rate still has not recovered from government shutting down our economy during COVID and President Biden continuing to pay people to watch Netflix long after the pandemic had ended,” he emailed me after the hearing.

Braun pointed out that 18 states — including New York and California — have waivers that exempt any food-stamp recipient from the work requirement.

That covers half the able-bodied adults without kids in the entire country — even though many live in areas with low unemployment and plenty of unfilled jobs.

In addition, states can arbitrarily cancel the work requirement for up to 12% of SNAP recipients who might otherwise have to toil.

States offer employment and training programs to spur food-stamp recipients to transition to jobs.

But the programs are mostly either a joke or a mirage: Only 3% of SNAP recipients who were subject to work requirements participated in 2016.

The biggest surprise at the Senate hearing came from James Whitford, the co-founder and executive director of Watered Gardens Ministries, Missouri’s largest privately funded poverty-fighting organization.

He stated that SNAP is plagued by fraud and recipients admit “how easy and common it is to liquidate these benefits at 50 cents on the dollar.” One alcoholic would stand on a street median holding a sign:“Food Stamps half price.”

Whitford warned that “SNAP benefits are often more hurtful than helpful.” His experience with his ministries vivified how “work awakens worth,” and he derided the “national epidemic of dependency.”

He quoted a woman named Jocelyn he helped become self-reliant: “It was harder for me to give up food stamps than it was for me to give up heroin.”

But for Democrats, dependents are political assets.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) promised at the hearing: “I will be doing everything I can to expand and protect federal nutrition benefits.” Warnock won election to the Senate thanks to his campaign fliers that promised voters more COVID benefits: “Want a $2,000 Check? Vote Warnock.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) declared that SNAP “needs to become a nutrition program.”

When he was mayor of Newark, Booker endorsed ending SNAP payments for sugar-sweetened beverages. Food-stamp recipients are twice as likely to be obese as eligible non-recipients, and they get 12% of their daily calories from such beverages (twice as much as higher-income groups).

But Democrats now oppose any reform that would reduce handouts to any recipient for any reason. (Booker’s office did not respond to repeated emails.)

Instead, they favor creating or expanding programs to “incentivize” healthy eating. Such tinkering will do nothing to counteract giving recipients blank checks to buy any junk food they please.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/19/anti-work-pro-welfare-democrats-are-in-a-food-stamp-fury-over-attempts-to-cut-costs/

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Sanders gets some things right

The Democratic Party has "largely turned its back on the working class," and is "hemorrhaging working-class support," Sen. Bernie Sanders warns in a new book.

I picked up a copy of "It's Ok to Be Angry About Capitalism," with a picture of Sanders on the cover. I was raring to rebut it. Indeed, there turns out to be plenty in there with which to disagree.

The most newsworthy thing about the volume though, may well be the pleasant surprises, the parts in which Sanders accurately diagnoses what he calls a "crisis" facing the Democratic Party.

"The party, in too many cases and in too many places, has lost touch with working Americans. It doesn't know how to speak to them because it doesn't know what is going on with them," Sanders writes.

Sanders notes that Donald Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. He rejects the idea that those votes were all motivated by racism. "Many of those so-called racist Americans voted for Barack Obama, our first Black president, and for 'hope' and 'change' and 'Yes We Can.' And they voted to reelect him. But their lives did not get better," Sanders writes.

He writes that the Democrats "abandoned" working class voters in favor of "wealthy campaign contributors and the 'beautiful people.'" The Democratic National Committee, Sanders says, "spends almost all of its time trying to keep on the right side of the millionaires and billionaires."

Trying to keep on the "right side of the millionaires and billionaires" is not a problem that afflicts Sanders. There is one possible exception: George Soros, who is a big political spender.

Sanders denounces various billionaires by name — Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz, Jeff Bezos, the Walton family. Soros, however, is conspicuously absent from Sanders' target list, perhaps because at least some of his policy goals intersect with those of Sanders' goals.

Sanders' treatment of rich people is where Sandersism falls apart. He acknowledges that "People like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett, the Waltons, the Kochs, and their ilk are usually smart. They tend to work hard and take risks; they're often innovative."

Yet he wants to eliminate them. "Billionaires should not exist," is the title of one chapter of this book.

Sanders faults Republicans for election-season blame-claims. Sanders characterizes those as "immigrants are the problem," "Black people are the problem," "LGBTQ people are the problem," "Muslims are the problem." Sanders' objection, though, isn't the divisive scapegoating.

His complaint, rather, is that the Republicans have simply chosen the wrong goats. Sanders suggests an alternative for the slaughter: "The very rich," Sanders writes, "are the problem."

The case for that is asserted rather than proven. The contradictions are rampant. Sanders correctly credits Trump for having "actually got something right" with Operation Warp Speed, which partnered with the pharmaceutical industry to develop and deploy effective COVID vaccines at a rapid pace.

In the next breath, Sanders denounces Moderna and Pfizer for "making billions in excessive profits." Funny how the vaccines that generate "excessive profits" are developed and deployed faster, and work better, than those generated by profit-free government laboratories.

Sanders complains that wealthy families "do not share their wealth," but that's just inaccurate, both in terms of philanthropy and also in terms of value generated for customers, shareholders, employees, vendors, and other business partners.

Much of the rest of the Sanders book consists of a catalog of terrible policy ideas that have been tried already either here or elsewhere in one form or another and yielded disappointing outcomes — rent control, a top income tax rate of 92 percent, $35 billion a year of spending on "public media."

Sanders goes on and on denouncing "corporate media conglomerates," by which he means "CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and the rest of the corporate media." Disparaging Disney, he sounds much like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who also uses the "corporate media" phrase as a kind of insult.

The Sanders book is published by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, which is itself controlled by Bertelsmann and its German family proprietors led by Liz Mohn. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates Mohn as being worth about $6.2 billion.

Sanders could have sought to publish his book by means of the U.S. Government Publishing Office or by some independent or nonprofit press. Yet when it comes to actually getting something done, like selling books, there's something, somehow about the profit motive and private ownership that tends to work better than anything else.

One might fault Mohn for helping fuel, in Sanders, an anticapitalist messenger who will ultimately destroy the system in which she prospers. At times Sanders claims confidently that things are heading in that direction: "The future of this country is with our ideas."

He's more believable when he talks about how Democrats have lost touch with working Americans. Now there's a message that will help Bertelsmann sell some books. It may have some truth to it, too, not only as it applies to the Democratic National Committee but also as it applies to a certain independent socialist from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.

https://www.newsmax.com/ira-stoll/democrats-working-class-voters/2023/04/19/id/1116755/

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America First Legal files civil rights complaint against Anheuser-Busch’s racial and gender hiring quotas

America First Legal Foundation on April 17 filed a civil rights complaint against Anheuser-Busch at the Missouri branch of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex, blasting the company’s racial and gender hiring quotas, stating “Anheuser-Busch is knowingly, intentionally, and unlawfully discriminating based on race, color, national origin, and sex with respect to employment and job training opportunities.”

The complaint comes on the heels of Anheuser-Busch’s controversial marketing campaign by transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney that has resulted in new scrutiny and boycotts of the 171-year-old beer manufacturer.

The America First Legal letter pointed to the Anheuser-Busch 2023 Leadership Accelerator Program, which according to the company’s job listing is a “formal mentorship, executive interaction, and leadership development curriculum for those who identify with historically underrepresented groups as they join our organization in a full-time capacity. We encourage candidates who identify as Black, Latinx, and Native American to apply, as well as those who identify with a historically underrepresented group.”

America First Legal’s letter by attorney Nicholas Barry alleged, “it is a fast-track program to executive leadership positions at Anheuser-Busch and it is limited to candidates based on race. The proforma Equal Opportunity Employer language at the end of the posting does mask the company’s discriminatory intent and purpose.”

America First Legal also pointed to the company’s 2022 Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report that outlines racial and gender hiring quotas: “22% women in overall workforce; 35% women in salaried workforce; 28% women in top five leadership levels; 14% women in top three leadership level; 5 out of 15 Board members are women…”

And it is pushing to “drive results” in the company’s 2022 corporate annual report, stating, “while the representation of women in the [Senior Leadership Team] SLT and the senior leadership level directly below the SLT remained constant compared to last reporting year, the overall representation of women in top leadership positions in our company grew by 2 percentage points compared to the last reporting year.”

As America First Legal noted, “Anheuser-Busch’s Annual Report has a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion section almost entirely dedicated to the growth of only women in the workforce.”

The problem is that diversity racial and gender hiring quotas like these appear to run afoul of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on employment discrimination on the basis of race or sex: “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer… to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or … to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

However, thanks to the 1979 ruling by the Supreme Court ruling Steelworkers v. Weber which ruled that employment policies that racial preferences on the basis of race and sex in favor of women and minorities, which plaintiffs argued was reverse discrimination, were not a violation of the Civil Rights Act, in effect legalizing employment discrimination against whites and males. This was a sharp departure from more racially neutral interpretations of the Civil Rights Act by federal courts that preceded the decision.

Then Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who would go on to become the Court’s 16th Chief Justice in 1986, in his dissenting opinion, compared the Court’s rewriting of the Civil Rights Act to the totalitarian regime portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984, writing that law was written plainly, “Taken in its normal meaning, and as understood by all Members of Congress who spoke to the issue during the legislative debates, this language prohibits a covered employer from considering race when making an employment decision, whether the race be black or white.”

Rehnquist blasted the majority of the court, adding, “the Court behaves much like the Orwellian speaker earlier described, as if it had been handed a note indicating that Title VII would lead to a result unacceptable to the Court if interpreted here as it was in our prior decisions. … Now we are told that the legislative history of Title VII shows that employers are free to discriminate on the basis of race: an employer may, in the Court’s words, ‘trammel the interests of the white employees’ in favor of black employees in order to eliminate ‘racial imbalance.’… Our earlier interpretations of Title VII, like the banners and posters decorating the square in Oceania, were all wrong.”

44 years after the Steelworkers v. Weber decision we are seeing the outcome of corporate and business hiring practices that now fully favor reverse discrimination as a means of achieving perceived equity and inclusion as a means of securing ESG investment, which grew to $8.4 trillion, according to the latest data by the USSIF, The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.

The majority of the current Supreme Court are all considered acolytes of Rehnquist. All were regarded as constitutionalists, originalists and textualists when they were nominated by conservative presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the latter of whom just secured an historic 6 to 3 majority on the nation’s highest court with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Today, the question of reverse discrimination posed by ESG’s Diversity & Inclusion corporate policies might be decided differently by today’s Supreme Court more than 40 years later. It would be up to those fired or cancelled to make the case they were discriminated against on the basis of race and/or sex.

This is exactly the Title VII approach this author advocated for in February to more broadly address ESG’s violations in retirement investments of not just civil rights laws but also antitrust with its policies to restrict U.S. carbon-based energy production of oil and coal in favor of green technologies and to drive up prices.

Marketing campaigns aside, this is where the real ESG battle is.

And it need not just be a legal strategy that plays out in federal courts — although that is a necessary component — it could also later be coupled with Labor Department, IRS and federal employee retiree restrictions against retirement investments into companies violating Title VII and antitrust. America First Legal is on the right track. If civil rights and antitrust laws are enforced as written, you can kill ESG for good.

https://dailytorch.com/2023/04/america-first-legal-files-civil-rights-complaint-against-anheuser-buschs-racial-and-gender-hiring-quotas-as-violation-of-title-vii-of-the-civil-rights-act/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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