Some time ago, an acquaintance told me he was moving back to Ireland. He said there was little point living here and having to work when he could be on the dole back home and live for free. Others I’ve met over the years complain about the stinginess of the U.S. government and wonder why we fail to provide for everyone, instead of making everybody work. Well, maybe they see why now.
The nanny state, the welfare state, is unsustainable. Doing something about environmental sustainability is fashionable, but not economic sustainability. The debt-GDP ratio is bad enough, but consider that these generous countries have a growing non-working population that will expect entitlements to continue, along with an inelastic workforce, and there will be too few workers to pay for it all.
In business school, during a discussion of the economic difficulties in the Caribbean, most students advocated wholesale forgiveness of debt. While their intentions might have been laudable, these actions are not without cost. We are still paying for the home giveaways through Freddie and Fanny, and the pressure on lenders to grant loans to those who could not pay, and the Fed has recently moved the recovery estimate out to five years (our initial estimate was fifteen years and we stand by it).
Recovery is far away, and will elude us until we get serious about cutting costs. The budget could be cut more aggressively just by removing waste. Reducing corruption is more difficult, but would yield additional savings. Government’s job specification needs to be cut down to the essentials: empower trade, protect the citizenry from invasion and crime, and perform those functions of government which cannot be effectively accomplished without it.
Taking a break from our usual pursuits and commentaries, we are posting a list of job boards analyzed and ranked by Scott Wilson, Director of Information Services at Shriners Hospitals for Children. His results are posted here, but if your browser cannot read it, the Excel file is here.
From our own experience as a consultant and interim manager, most postings on boards are useless. We respond within minutes to postings, hoping to catch the recruiter while the posting is fresh, and gaining a kind of first mover status, coming in strong and setting the bar high for latecomers. What a load of cliché, but largely true. If there is a phone number, we call to make contact right away, and ask at some point whether the recruiter is working with the hiring manager. If not, it will almost certainly go nowhere. In any case, we listen for objections and overcome them where possible.
WSJ: White House Proposes $3.8 Trillion Budget
LokiNomics’ brother-in-law is looking for a small loan for his business, but the banks are having none of it, despite many years of successful operation. Indeed, this is a common pattern and addressed in the recent State of the Union address. Continue Reading »
Amid the hoopla surrounding the election of the Brown-horse candidate in Massachusetts, it is worth remembering that this is not important, or only 1% so. He is one of a hundred senators now, but the effect on the moderate Democrats is important. In the coming days, Senator Brown’s “youthful indiscretions” will be paraded out, but too late. The only important reasons for his success at the polls is voter sentiment and the administration’s disconnect. A defiant Democratic party has been ramming a shoddy health care program through, loaded with the pork and back-room deals ostensibly deplored by the president, at least at election time. While record numbers of voters are losing their jobs, the administration and congress, working as a one-party system, has attempted to raid the voters to reward their supporters. Moderates (being moderate), lacked the spine to reject bad health care bills, but now they have an excuse. It may not be dead, but the president has apparently turned his attention to other ways to wreck the nation, imposing new regulations to guarantee further delays to the recovery and driving a jittery market down. A low Fed rate, 8.6 million jobs lost, a year wasted on a pork-infested health care effort while doing nothing about costs, escalated war spending (why are we paying a corporation for security there?), and the general feeling among most of us that the country is in decline yet the president and congress apparently have some agenda other than these concerns.