Bloomberg: The Last of a Dying Breed?

I can't think of a single Republican I've ever even considered voting for, not that there haven't been a few smart ones along the way. Too young for Eisenhower, and Nixon, as my grandmother used to say, would have sold his own grandmother to the Communists to get elected. Well, he didn't go quite that far but he wasn't called Tricky Dicky for nothing and there's actually reason to believe he was pretty smart - that is, until he tricked himself out of a job.

Since then, it has been down hill in the Republican smarts department and today we are faced with a collection of reprobates with nary a brain between the entire lot of them. Maybe this explains why New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg sticks out and stands tall among the rest of these jackals and jackasses. He's classy as hell, even dignified. He makes more sense in one or two sentences than an entire herd of Republicans braying in the House Chambers or hee-hawing before the cameras. Best of all, he has his own money.

Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino launched the bipartisan Mayors Against Illegal Guns in 2006, which now includes 600 members. Sue at Hellooo Mr. President describes a very interesting interview the mayor recently had with Rev. Al Sharpton about President Obama.

On his weekly WOR radio show this week, Hiz Honor warned of street rioting if the U.S. fails to create jobs.

"We have a lot of kids graduating college, can't find jobs, " Bloomberg said . . .  "That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kinds of riots here."

"The damage to a generation that can't find jobs will go on for many, many years, said Bloomberg, adding, Obama did create the economic crisis that has developed "over long periods of time."

Further on Bloomberg praised Obama for coming up with a proposal. "At least [Obama has] got some ideas on the table, whether you like them or not."

Now everybody's got to sit down and say we're actually gonna do something and you have to do something on both the revenue and the expense side. When you start picking and choosing which groups do and do not, that's when it becomes unfair in a lot of people's minds. But we're all in this together. 

No doubt the jackals and jackasses will tune out these simple words of wisdom and bray about what the American people want -- at least according to their own barnyard lore.

So, You Think Your Wages Stink

The "land of opportunity" may soon become "the land of low wages." Lower paying jobs which were seen as "the domain of younger workers" who were just starting out in the work world, "have become "survival jobs for midcareer folks who have been downsized," said Randall Hansen, a workplace expert with Quintessential Careers.

The Department of Labor lists the following eight jobs as the lowest paying in the nation:

1. Food preparation and serving workers, including fast food

$8.71 an hour or $18,000 annually
Job requirement: minimal education
Mostly part tume
Long hours and hard work

2. Dishwashers

$8.81 an hour
Florida has the most dishwasher but pay the lowest hourly wage at $8.62
Nevada pays the highest at $11.29 an hour

3. Cashiers

$9.15 an hour or $19,000 annually with about half part-time
Ranks No. 2 on BLS’s list of biggest occupations with a workforce of about 3.3 million
On the job training
Employers prefer a highschool diploma and a knowledge of math
High turnover

4. Hosts and hostesses

$9.23 an hour; waiters and waitresses get $9.80 an hour
Don't forget to tip them

5. Amusement park attendants

Florida and California have the most people employed in this profession
Florida has 30,410 workers at a salary of $8.90 an hour
California has 40,640  park workers at $9.57 an hour
So much for the land of enchantment (author's note)

6. Movie theater ushers, ticket takers

$9.43 an hour but you can watch all the movies you want
The BLS expects jobs for ushers and ticket takers to jump nearly 12 percent in the next 10 years

7. Farm workers

$9.51 and hour
Seasonal, physically demanding and dangerous
About seven in 10 migrant workers are born outside the United State
233,000 workers in the nation with 150,000 in California
It will be interesting to see what happens in The Grand Canyon State

8. Personal and home care aides

$9.75 an hour
630,000 personal aides but numbers are expected to grow as the population turns gray
High risks of injury and work-related illnesses

All the wages on the list include the mean, or midpoint, hourly rate

Factcheck: Does Immigration Cost Jobs?

May 13, 2010

Summary

Do immigrants take American jobs? It’s a common refrain among those who want to tighten limits on legal immigration and deny a "path to citizenship" — which they call "amnesty" — to the millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. There’s even a new Reclaim American Jobs Caucus in the House, with at least 41 members.

But most economists and other experts say there’s little to support the claim. Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.

To read the full analysis click HERE.

Tennessee Tales: A Stimulating Tale

Perry County was named after the War of 1812 naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry. Located about 90 miles southwest of Nashville, the Tennessee River is to the west and the Buffalo River dissects it from north to south - a fisherman’s paradise. This bucolic setting is rural and has a population of only 7,600 people.

After the Fisher & Company auto parts plant closed, the unemployment rate rose to 25 percent. People lost their homes, their savings and their health insurance. So, what makes this story different from the thousands of similar stories across the country?

A modern version of that socialist program called the New Deal.

Welfare money from the stimulus package is being used to underwrite 300 new jobs with employers such as the Tennessee Department of Transportation all the way down to a soda shop near the high school.

The New York Times reports:

Tennessee is planning to pay for most of the new jobs, which it expects will cost $3 million to $5 million, with part of its share of $5 billion that was included in the stimulus for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. . . . The state did not wait for the federal paperwork to clear before putting residents of Perry County back to work.

Other states are still drawing up plans for spending the welfare money, which is typically used for items like cash grants for families and job training. Some are likely to use part of it to subsidize employment, as Tennessee is doing, but it is hard to imagine many other places where the creation of so few jobs could have such an
immediate and outsize impact as it did in this bucolic county.

The impact has been enormous, all across the county. Even the look of the place is changing, following the old W.P.A. model. In addition to the jobs for adults, there are 150 summer jobs for young people, some of whom have been working with resident artists to paint murals depicting local history on the buildings along Main Street in Linden, the county seat.