Category: Happiness

California set for more exports, strong manufacturing

 

Los Angeles Harbor
Los Angeles Harbor

Click on above photo to see a full screen view of ship unloading operations

The outlook for growth in California is optimistic, according to a Beacon Economics report predicting expansion in manufacturing and exports and a job market recovery driven by more than low-wage work.

The report, conducted for City National Bank, notes that 56% of new jobs created in the state in the last year are in industries with average annual wages above $50,000. Most of those positions, according to the report, are full-time.

The findings seem to challenge other economists’ assertions that wages aren’t keeping pace with the job recovery. More low-wage positions will be created or opened by 2020 in Southern California than will mid-level or high-paying jobs, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

But according to Beacon, employers in the professional and business services field added 24,300 new jobs statewide since the fourth quarter. That’s more than half of the 44,200 net nonfarm job gains made in the state in the same period.

That’s more than half of the 44,200 net nonfarm job gains made in the state in the same period. The industry pays $29.11 an hour on average as of May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Beacon report also said that California’s 1.2% job growth in the first quarter trailed the 1.5% nationwide rate.

But Los Angeles and Orange counties each created 12,200 new jobs in the first quarter, helping pull the statewide unemployment rate down 0.3 percentage point from the fourth quarter to 8.1%.

And the Central Valley, often maligned as an economic dead zone, is showing surprising strength, according to Beacon.
The south San Joaquin Valley, which includes Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties, has boosted nonfarm employment by more than 50% in the last 25 years. The population has also swelled at nearly double the overall state rate.

The workforce participation rate in the state ticked up to 62.6% from 62.4% the previous quarter and the proportion of people working part-time due to economic reasons fell 0.6 percentage point to 6.8%, according to the report.

Beacon added that California’s growth slowed slightly in the first quarter due to the frigid, stormy weather bedeviling the rest of the country earlier this year.

Real gross state product, a metric of economic output, grew just 2.8% after surging 4.2% during the fourth quarter, according to the report. But manufacturing, thought by many experts to be a shriveling industry, continues to support a generous portion of the California economy.

The state is responsible for producing a quarter of the computers and electronics made in the country, according to the report. The products, which constitute nearly half of all California manufacturing output, are centered in Silicon Valley and, to a lesser degree, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Beacon estimates that exports leaving California rose 2.8% in the first quarter from the fourth. The effects of a weak dollar, slower growth in China, Europe shaking off its recession and Japan emerging from a decade-long stagnancy will likely propel increasing outbound trade for the rest of the year.

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Harbor

 

 

L.A. Versus N.Y.C. – The Payoff

"Langer's

City officials closed 7th Street in front of the MacArthur Park-area landmark as crowds lined up for what is known as the deli’s No. 19, its most popular sandwich. Normally, it sells for $15.20.

After the Kings took Game 5 Friday night in a thrilling double overtime win, after the New York Rangers went home, after the cup was kissed and the red carpet removed from the ice, there was still the matter of the pastrami sandwich.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and New York City Police Commissioner William J. Bratton (a former LAPD police chief) bet a pastrami sandwich that their home team would win the Stanley Cup. At stake was bragging rights over which city’s hockey team was better – and which city’s pastrami.

On Saturday morning, Bratton signaled his intent to honor the bet. He tweeted a photo of Katz’s Deli in New York and tagged Beck’s Twitter account.

langers-sandwiches“Do you take your pastrami sandwich with or without mustard? Congrats!” Bratton tweeted.

Beck’s response, after telling Bratton he was looking forward to having lunch again soon, was to tweet a picture of L.A.’s most-revered pastrami sandwich, the Number 19 at Langer’s Deli.

The sandwich – tender, hand-sliced pastrami, cool Russian dressing, crisp cole slaw and Swiss cheese between two slices of pillow-soft, crunchy-crusted twice-baked rye bread – is a favorite of the Los Angeles Police Department.

New York City loves it too – the New Yorker magazine once called Langer’s Number 19 “the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world.” Even Bratton admitted the corned beef at Langer’s was better than any in New York.

“Hold the mustard please, slaw inside, just like @LangersDeli #19,” Beck tweeted along with the picture.

Bratton isn’t the only New York official who will have to make good on his bet. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has to send Gov. Jerry Brown a basket of buffalo wings, Italian sausage and oysters from Long Island. Brown had wagered a book of California history and lightly salted organic brown rice cakes.

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio has agreed to sing Randy Newman’s “I Love LA” on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show,” a relief for those who hoped to avoid listening to Mayor Eric Garcetti sing “New York, New York” on the same show.

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

Matzos You Can Eat

BY: Karon Liu in the Toronto Star

When the Israelites were freed from bondage, they were in such a rush to beat it out of Egypt they couldn’t wait for their dough to rise. For observant Jews, the arrival of Passover means a week without leavened bread. Enter matzo. We asked six chefs how they’d keep their chosen cracker interesting. This full day of Passover-friendly ideas proves you can do lotsa with matzo.

Republican Party Stands Opposed to Social Welfare

Social Welfare is the various social services provided by a state for the benefit of its citizens.

In the United States the range of services includes Social Security (a program that guarantees a stipend to all senior citizens), Medicare (a program that provides health care to all senior citizens), minimal support for those unable to earn a living (usually referred to as welfare), and unemployment benefits (for those who lost their jobs through no fault of their own). Those are the primary programs that American residents are entitled to when there is a need.

In every instance those programs have been opposed by the G.O.P. In every instance those programs were instituted when a Democrat held the office of President of the United States.

The current chairman of the House Budget Committee, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan has sustained the Republican view on social welfare programs with the following words copied from his web site.

The current Medicare program attempts to do two things to make sure that all seniors have secure, affordable health insurance that works. First, recognizing that seniors need extra protection when it comes to health coverage, it pools risk among all seniors to ensure that they enjoy secure access to care.

Second, Medicare subsidizes coverage for seniors to ensure that coverage is affordable. Affordability is a critical goal, but the subsidy structure of Medicare is fundamentally broken and drives costs in the wrong direction. The open-ended, blank-check nature of the Medicare subsidy drives health-care inflation at an astonishing pace, threatens the solvency of this critical program, and creates inexcusable levels of waste in the system.

Ryan’s solution:
Beginning in 2024, for those workers born in 1959 or later, Medicare would offer them a choice of private plans competing alongside the traditional fee-for-service option on a new Medicare Exchange. Medicare would provide a premium-support payment either to pay for or to offset the premium of the plan chosen by the senior.

The Medicare Exchange would provide seniors a competitive marketplace in which they could choose a plan the same way members of Congress and federal employees do. Every plan, including the traditional fee-for-service option, would participate in an annual bidding process to determine the federal contribution seniors would receive to purchase coverage. Health-care plans would compete for the right to serve Medicare beneficiaries.

What Ryan calls “the president’s partisan health-care law” is an appointed government board like the FCC, the FDA, the FAA, and dozens of other appointed boards. He favors the unelected bureaucrats in privately owned insurance companies that answer to private enterprise. His view is those government bureaucrats aren’t as reliable to private company bureaucrats.

Ryan goes on to say The President’s partisan health-care law creates an unaccountable board of 15 unelected bureaucrats—the Independent Payment Advisory Board—empowered to cut Medicare in ways that will result in denied care and restricted access for seniors. The bureaucrat imposed cuts threaten critical care for current seniors and fail to strengthen Medicare for future generations.

So is it the blank-check nature of Medicare or 15 unelected bureaucrats that will be threatening current seniors? Ryan has covered both possibilities in his contradictory analysis.

The point is that Republicans are trying their very best to end Medicare, Social Security, and all other social welfare programs. They offer no substitutes. Their obsession with free market principles is the view of the rich who say they have no responsibility for the less well off.

There are many other reasons to oppose Republicans but that will be addressed on another day.

Winston Churchill 1899

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Winston Churchill - 1899

This is amazing. Even more amazing is that this hasn’t been published long before now.


CHURCHILL ON ISLAM

Unbelievable, but the speech below was written in 1899… (check Wikipedia – The River War).

The attached short speech from Winston Churchill, was delivered by him in 1899 when he was a young soldier and journalist. It probably sets out the current views of many, but expresses in the wonderful Churchillian turn of phrase and use of the English language, of which he was a past master. Sir Winston Churchill was, without doubt, one of the greatest men of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

He was a brave young soldier, a brilliant journalist, an extraordinary politician and statesman, a great war leader and British Prime Minister, to whom the Western world must be forever in his debt. He was a prophet in his own time. He died on 24th January 1965, at the grand old age of 90 and, after a lifetime of service to his country, was accorded a State funeral.

HERE IS THE SPEECH:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

“A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

“Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome …”

 Sir Winston Churchill; (Source: The River War, first edition, Vol II, pages 248-250 London).

Churchill saw it coming……

Winston Churchill

The Great Society

President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign rally cry was all about creating The Great Society. Within days of his ascendancy to office he told us about his “War on Poverty.” The census bureau says in 2012, the official poverty rate was 15.0 percent. There were 46.5 million people in poverty.

I have stopped going to the Town Hall meetings sponsored by my congressman. For him they are a great way of showing his constituency that he is really interested in the people he represents. I was at his last meeting that was held at the local high school. I learned nothing. Pocket sized booklets of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were free for the taking. These gimmicks have enabled him to be re-elected eight times.
John_HancockThe Declaration of Independence was the creation of the wealthy in 1776. The most famous signatory is John Hancock. Hancock was one of the wealthiest men in the Thirteen Colonies, having inherited a profitable mercantile business from his uncle. http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/signers/. It is the wealthy that made this country grow and succeed.

However it is the middle class that made this country an inspiration for the rest of the world. Thus far the 21st century has brought about that groups decline in significant numbers. If this country is to continue to be a beacon the government must take all action necessary to ensure those in the middle continue to thrive. As of this date the current congress has failed to “insure domestic Tranquility” and “promote the general Welfare” as directed in the preamble to the Constitution.

Recent evidence of a lack of effort to “promote the general Welfare” is the absence of legislation that would protect jobs and encourage hiring. Who cares? Not the mostly well-to-do members of Congress. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 25% in 2013.  And you thought the representatives were representing you. They are not! They represent their best interests. That would be the money men who contribute to re-election campaigns.

The unemployment rate dropped to 6.7% in December. Sounds good. It’s all about smoke and mirrors. The BLS wrote in its latest report in January wrote, “The number of unemployed persons declined by 490,000 to 10.4 million,” but the bureau reported that only 74,000 jobs had been created. How can this be? Simple. More people stopped looking for work and are no longer counted as unemployed. The unemployment rate is a feel good number that does not tell us the real employment situation.

This situation reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984. Lies and double talk. Two and Two could be Five. Especially if the government says so. Town Hall meetings and the unemployment rate are two of the many government efforts to make you believe that our elected representatives are making America a great success story.

Pointing Finger Don’t you believe it!

It takes more than the ballot box to change a 317 million population nation. Demonstrations and marches are needed. How many will be willing to participate? Not enough to make the changes. And so we march along as the peasants (the federal government hates that word) doing the bidding of our masters.

Raising the Minimum Wage is No Solution

Remember when cars cost $3,500 and a house cost $30,000?  Inflation raised your pay, the cost of that car, and houses are still just as unaffordable.

Over my many working years I have benefited from the increased minimum wage rates as well as the union won rate increases.  I have always been part of the administrative staff and always on a salary.  Some were weekly rates, some were monthly rates, and there was once even an annual salary.  I receive no overtime pay but my high pay rate is supposedly offset by better pay than the hourly employees.  Not true.

Huffington Post reports that 13 States Will Raise Their Minimum Wage For The New Year.  It seems like a good idea.  After all who could argue with the idea of increasing the pay for those least paid who clearly are in a world of hurt?  Many need food stamps and housing subsidies to survive.

Those salaried jobs of mine have not brought me to wealth.  So I can relate to the poorest paid.

The problem for me is that a pay hike for everyone still leaves the poorest paid at the bottom of the pyramid. Now they face proportionately higher cost for rent, food, and the other necessities of life.  They will be no better off than they had been before the pay increase.  Inflation will destroy their gains.

San Francisco is a city with a minimum rate of $10.55 per hour. The new rate in January will be $10.74.  The cost of living in San Francisco is 164% of the national average.  How has the high minimum rate helped the lowest paid workers?  It hasn’t!

Is there a solution?  I know of none.