The Economy

There's a guy who's president of an investment firm who buys radio time every week to give his opinions on politics and the economy. He's obsessed with Art Laffer. Plays excerpts from his speeches and basically treats the guy as the guiding light we all should follow.

‎Lighthouse Retirement Hour on Apple Podcasts

Maybe I'm imagining it, but his regular speaking voice reminds me of the Sam Kinison "calm" voice.

 

Laffer is the best medicine.

 

I wish I could have found exploitment when I was a teen instead of being stuck delivering papers for $30/week.

 

Kind of like the guys in India who are happy to be exploited putting out pages for McClatchy papers, even though it killed decent jobs in this country.

 

I'm 99% sure my job at McClatchy came about because of previous layoffs of higher-paid employees. And the job was only needed because my highly paid Tribune Company job in Fort Lauderdale was set to be outsourced to lower-paid employees in a Chicago hub.

Same for many NFL jobs. Thus the term salary-cap casualty.

The vicious circle never ends.

 

What's so funny about this is that Hollywood is one of the last big guild and union outposts.

How Fran Drescher Went From TV Nanny to Union Boss | The Nation

 

Here's an interesting conundrum from my neck of the woods.

So, for many years farmers/land owners in Washington state did not have to follow overtime rules for seasonal workers -- the argument being that, when crops are ready to be picked, workers migrating here (legally) from elsewhere want to work as many hours as possible, and of course farmers need their work for only a limited time of the year.

A few years ago, some workers at a central Washington dairy sued, noting that the original intent of the loophole had been used to exploit people like them, who have standard hours year-round at a dairy farm yet they weren't getting time-and-a-half pay after working 40 hours in a week. A judge ruled in their favor, and the state Supreme Court was prepared to apply that standard to all agricultural workers until the state Legislature brokered a deal phasing in overtime.

Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 54 hours for ag workers, and it's 48 this year. Next year it be after 40, just like hourly workers in other jobs.

What might actually happen, according to farmers and their legislative allies, is workers will make less money because no one will pay overtime, and fewer apples, cherries, hops, etc. will be planted because there will be less (non-overtime) hours of work available to harvest these crops.

A good read about it here: Some farmers question WA state's plan to pay workers overtime

 

Somehow it's always labor's fault.

Hmmm.

 

Finally some clear-cut evidence that I actually have had some influence on you.

 

This is pretty good.

https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/farmwk_history.htm

 

Was informed at work we are so behind because of pc board shortages from Taiwan over the last two years that we could work overtime for the next two years and not catch up. This is good, perhaps even recession-proof news for my household.

The question no one asked was…if China invades Taiwan, what the fuck is going to happen?

We really should’ve used the pandemic as a catalyst to build the important stuff here in the U.S. again. Instead, we did nothing.