Declining Labor Force Participation Rates -- It's Not the Boomers

Don't blame the old people you ageists out there.  The decline in labor participation rates isn't due to the graying population leaving the workforce.  Quite the opposite.

The data are clear.  It is increasing proportions of the young and the middle aged who are no longer seeking work.  As for the staying in school response, that's a rational response for one, two or perhaps even three years while the economy is recovering.  But in the Obama's print, borrow and spend economy, staying in school is becoming a permanent strategy to avoid confronting an anemic recovery.

Even for an aging baby boomer like myself, who did retire and drop out of the workforce, lousy economic conditions played a role.  I had planned to retire in 2013 but left in 2011, when I realized during a downsizing at my place of employment, if I stayed I would be occupying a position that some younger person desperately needed.  In an era of economic strength my calculus would have been different, and my decision may have been as well.

I Didn't Set a Red Line

He makes such a big deal about color that I never imagined he was color blind.

Barack Pays For Golf Access in Montana

Access to The Golf Channel that is.

So you thought Obama's stimulus was done?  Nah, it keeps on cranking away.

West of Bozeman, crews are busily laying cable for Opticom between Belgrade and Big Sky (playground and ski resort for the rich and famous), along Ted Turner's ranch and other intermediate points.  In July 2011 the project received Illinois Senator Mark Kirk's "Silver Fleece" award.

The Silver Fleece Award for the month of July goes to a $64 million Stimulus award to provide broadband service to Gallatin County, Montana. According to an analysis conducted by Navigant Consulting, 93% of the households in the project's proposed service area were already served by five or more broadband providers. The fact that tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent to subsidize broadband service in an area with already strong private sector representation is reprehensible. Perhaps even more staggering, though, is the taxpayer cost of these services per unserved household. 

Ted Turner on his Flying D Ranch, Bozeman, Montana

According to the program's own definition of "unserved household", this project cost taxpayers more than $340,000 per unserved household. However, many of these so-called unserved households have access to 3G wirless broadband. Not only are 3G speeds approaching or even meeting Administration broadband standards, but 3G will soon be replaced with 4G broadband, which will far exceed current standards. Subtracting the number of homes that had existing access to 3G wireless leaves only 7 households in the Gallatin County service area unserved by broadband. It cost the U.S. taxpayer an astounding $7,112,422 per household to provide broadband service to the truly unserved population.  

Yellowstone Club, Big Sky, Montana
exclusive ownership, cable access by Obama

I wish I could say this project is the exception, but I cannot. This funding was provided through the Stimulus' $3.5 billion Rural Utility Service Broadband Initiative Program. On average, this program cost the taxpayer over $1,000 per household. In the projects analyzed by the Navigant study, 85% of the households served already had access to broadband. 

Unfortunately, rural broadband subsidization has been long mismanaged by the Rural Utility Service. A 2009 Inspector General (IG) report found that just 2% of Federal broadband buildout funds provided between 2005 and 2008 went toward unserved communities. The same IG report found that funds were also going to areas that weren't rural at all. In fact 148 of the communities provided with subsidized broadband between 2005 and 2008 were within 30 miles of cities with at least 200,000 inhabitants. We continued to see this occur in the Stimulus funding, where in my home state, Cook County, home of Chicago with a population of 2.79 million, and suburban Will County received funds.

We watched for three weeks as the drilling crew worked to lay cable under the driving range at our favorite golf course in Four Corners. The high water table and several feet of river rock just below the range's grassy surface repeatedly confounded the six person crew. Now that drilling is done and cable is accessible, here's hoping the course manager is willing to buy an Opticom telecast package that includes the Golf Channel. For some reason, he has been unwilling to buy a Golf Channel included package with his Dish TV subscription.  

$37.7 million of the $64.1 million grant has been spent but I doubt the driving range bill has been submitted. According to the Obama administration this 40 smile stretch of coaxial cable funded 136 jobs last quarter, or about 5 times as many jobs as what Obama acknowledges for 2,000 plus miles of oil pipeline.

As is so often the norm, the big beneficiaries of Obama's largess are corporate interests, and rich folks, not poor rural farmers, isolated women and children on the other side of the digital divide as the title and justification for the program suggests.

The head of the firm that won a $64 million federal stimulus grant to install a new fiber-optic network in Gallatin County is part of a Pittsburgh family that owns property at the exclusive, gated Yellowstone Club at Big Sky and is involved in a similar development nearby.

Exclusive private golf, Obama cable access,
The Club at Spanish Peaks, Big Sky, Montana

James Dolan Jr., the manager of Montana Opticom, also owns property at Big Sky, including a lot at the private Spanish Peaks housing and golf course community - which, so far, is home to the only customers served by Opticom, a small broadband firm based in Gallatin Gateway.

Opticom, which won the $64 million award Aug. 4, serves about 300 customers at the Spanish Peaks development.

Dolan's father is a former investment fund manager and founder of Ascent Data, the Pittsburgh-based parent of Montana Opticom, as well as a principal in the Spanish Peaks development. Dolan Sr. owns a home at the Yellowstone Club that is appraised at $11.5 million, according to state records.

You get the government you vote for. I hope you are happy with it.

Obama and Income Inequality

Another Obama economic "achievement" that I deferred writing about Labor Day weekend was increasing income inequality. We held back, but The Huffington Post did not. 

Despite President Obama’s view that growing income inequality is hurting the nation, it’s actually gotten worse during his tenure, at least according to one measure.

The difference between America’s median and average wages grew at a rate of 0.28 percent under President Bush, while it’s grown at a rate of 1.14 percent -- or about four times that -- under Obama, according to The New York Times. The median wage is the midpoint of all workers’ wages, so it only ticks up when everyone is earning more. While a small group of people earning higher pay can push the average wage up.

So, as the difference between the two rises, it means that those at the bottom of the income scale are making fewer gains compared to those at the top.

This data point is one of many that illustrates that in Obama’s America the rich are gaining while the rest of us are struggling to get by. The wealthy took home a greater share of the nation’s income during the years following the recession, under Obama, than between 2002 and 2007, under Bush, according to a 2012 analysis from Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

That's right -- worse than Bush.

We blogged in April,

... that Obama’s print (money), borrow (money) and spend (money) policy triad favors people with money -- the uppercrust. Obama is a money lever guy, not an economic leader. The money changer in chief doesn't understand or promote a value driven economy. Real exchanges of actual goods and genuine services drive value and build a strong, broad based and resilient economy and sustainable economic growth. The demand and production led economy that we should be building has attributes that reach into every household.  

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that what money leveraging does is help people with money! Let me repeat, Obama’s policies help people with money! It’s a rich guy’s game playing paradise. You don’t have to believe me. Look at the data.

There is no free pass for the President. What is happening is a natural consequence of his policies and personnel appointments.

Despite this record, Obama's answer is simply to increase the dose of the very same treatments — more government spending, more taxes, more intrusions into the marketplace in the name of "shared prosperity" — that hobbled the recovery and produced the very misery he now claims he can fix.

In other words, Obama is selling snake oil.

Enough said.

It's for the Children, Really?

Please excuse my ignorance, but I fail to see how lobbing missiles into Syria for a few hours or a few days is going to accomplish anything for the children and other innocents who are caught in the crossfire of civil war. 

The Pentagon’s most likely means of attacking Syria will not degrade or deter the regime’s use of chemical weapons, and could drag the U.S. more deeply into Syria’s civil war, retired military officers and analysts say.

Five Navy destroyers armed with about 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles are deployed in the eastern Mediterranean Sea in anticipation of a limited attack on Syrian military sites. Obama administration officials have said the attack’s goal would be to punish the Syrian regime for the Aug. 21 chemical attack on civilians, not to topple President Bashar Assad. 

Most cruise missiles have no “bunker busting” capabilities and are less effective against mobile targets, military analysts note. And Pentagon officials have said that chemical weapons stockpiles would not be targeted to avoid the inadvertent release of poisonous gas.

What the missile strikes will do is dramatically raise the risk of retaliation and escalation, all for nothing. Why do you think virtually every other country in the world wants nothing to do with the ballistic exercise? This is insane.

Declining Median Incomes

Our friends at Growls published median income data on Labor Day, that we declined to highlight.

The data confirm that those who support the President the most, have fared the worst under his economic regime.

Labor Day Note

Labor Day is a good time to highlight the achievements of the Obama administration on the labor front.  

It occurred to me to write about union success in garnering waivers from Obamacare, but thought not -- better categorized as hypocrisy than success. Then I considered median income trends and income and wealth inequality.  But real incomes are down and disparities are increasing -- can't do that, it would be considered anti Obama and racist. Then I thought about reprising the strategies successfully employed to reduce unemployment. Let's see, converting full time to part time jobs -- a numbers game more than anything else. Nah, nothing to crow about there -- even the labor unions are upset.

Then it occurred to me.  Let's look at where Obama's policies have taken us on workforce participation. Settled.

Look at what Obama and his cabinet have done. They've brought labor participation rates down to levels not seen since the Carter administration when women were first entering the workforce in droves. Phones, food, disability, unemployment, you name it, the rolls of every give away program are burgeoning with record or near record numbers of supplicants, still now, years after the recession has ended. Now that's progress.

Slow Play in Syria

Obama changes his mind.  Do cruise missiles have a rewind? Never mind until September 9.

Syria has gone way beyond the issues. Ain't gonna do our country no good, no how, no matter how the votes turn out.

By mid-afternoon, Obama emerged in a steamy White House Rose Garden, surprising lawmakers, reporters and the public with news of his plan.

"I'm ready to act in the face of this outrage," Obama said. "Today I'm asking Congress to send a message to the world that we are ready to move forward together as one nation."

Then Obama and Biden left the White House by motorcade to play a round of golf.

Members of Congress, forgive me for playing out of order -- it's your turn now, of course, please. NATO, how about we play a scramble? We could use more involvement here. Fore -- President Assad! Incoming! I said fore, did you hear me? Duck! Vladmir, sorry to have distracted you as you were preparing to putt in. Israel, you can go hide in your bunkers. Iran, maintain your stance and play through whenever you are ready. 

Golf etiquette, that's no answer to this entire bloody mess. 

Saturday Pictures

Saturday Pictures

August 31, 2013

(click to enlarge)

Rain plume crosses Gallitan Valley at Four Corners.

Hay bales stacked looking down the Gallitan Range from Painted Hills.

How do you stack 'em?  Nothing runs like a Deere.

Green flag start. Gallitan International Speedway (aka dirt track), Belgrade, Montana.

White barn.  Not fall -- yet.

Looking up the Bridgers -- note neighbor's firewood stash, stacked.

Sequester as in Scare-Quester -- Montana Style

It's everywhere. The mainstream media is working against the factual grain, trying to scare up support for more spending and ending the sequester. The scare tactics have spread out west.

Early last week, a Bozeman Daily Chronicle page 1 story raised the specter of fiery destruction at the hands of the sequester. The headline reads "Wildfire suppression efforts suffer under budget cuts." Local fires in what is collectively referred to as the Miner Paradise Complex fire were listed in a sidebar -- North Eightmile fire (containment at time of publication, none), Horsetail fire (containment, none), Emigrant fire (containment 5 percent), Sheep fire (containment, none), and also three fires in Yellowstone. All are lightening caused.

Emigrant fire smoke plume.

Wildfires are inevitable and naturally occurring phenomena. Burns maintain balance and ensure diversity in the ecosystem. Elk herds, for example, graze in summer at elevation in areas where shade trees and brush have burned away and grasses flourish. Bears and buffalo like the more open habitat as well. Certain conifers have (serotinous) cones which require the intense heat of fire to open and release seeds for the next generation of growth. When wildfires are suppressed, this causes dead trees and dried wood and other organic debris to accumulate to the point where the build ups fuel intense conflagrations that completely denude the landscape, leading to soil erosion and dangerous mudslides. The resulting fires are so intense and uncontrollable that large numbers of structures may not survive. 

Sequester No Problem When It Comes To Syria

When the sequester went into affect Barack Obama announced curtailment of naval deployments to the Persian Gulf, fronting Iran, with its nuclear ambitions and an announced policy of annihilating Israel, and site of the Straight of Hormuz, where 35 percent of seaborne oil and 20 percent of worldwide crude passes through. Yet Obama and friends are surrounding Syria, which other than a buffer has essentially no geopolitical strategic value, has no net oil exports and is a direct threat to no one outside its borders, with a broad array of military assets.  

Boy that sequester, it's a helluva problem, isn't it?

Ka-Ching: More Million Dollar Bus Stops On Their Way

In the land of the million dollar bus stop an emergency fix was needed for an existing shelter because it was rusting and missing a panel. The progressive loonies of the People's Republic of Arlington replaced the old stop with a new enclosure, including seating, protection from the rain, trash receptacle and bus schedules. And there's a Washington Post vending machine for anyone so inclined. The bill was way too low, $12,500, or 1.25 percent of the million dollar extravaganza installed a few blocks up Columbia Pike.

New serviceable and functional $12,500 bus stop.

Oh my, it doesn't have the real time bus information which you can get for yourself on your cell phone if you have the inclination and you are willing to trust the frequently out of date and incomplete data. This week on a local Arlington Listserv a super stop user said,  

I would add ... that during our excessive hot couple of weeks we had, having used that stop, the real time was useless as the screen got too hot. When it rains that new stop, albeit pretty does nothing to protect you from the elements.

But do not fear, a million dollar super stop is still coming to this very location in front of Rappahannock Coffee Shop too. No sweat, it's your money. That's how spending works inside the Beltway. Nothing is too good or too expensive for your precious civil servants. Do not concern yourselves. Carry on.

Get Going!

Rise above it. Never let culture and conformity hold you back.

Late Summer Banner Photo

We have a new picture of our house on the masthead. It's our end of summer shot. Recent rains cleared out wildfire smoke and haze to the point where we could get a decently clear picture.

Bozeman Deaconess Hospital across the fields.

We rotate the banner pic when the spirit moves. The photographs have been either of our home or views from our property. We have mountains on three sides and hay fields and pasture on the fourth, with town proper a mile and half distant across the fields. The intervening land is owned (and leased to farmers) by the hospital, which is visible in the distance. Someday the full landscape will be developed. 

On the other three sides of home sweet home, it is pretty much what you see is what you get. We are above and outside the city water and sewer service area, so lot sizes need to be large enough to support septic and yield reliable well water supply. The lots closest to home along the three mountain view vistas are already built out; we can see over or around the man made intrusions. Above are views of steep mountains and hillsides, state and federal lands that will never be developed, except for an odd privately owned parcel here and there at densities not greater than one residence every 20 acres.

Red barn and small white barn.

The small white barn with the rusted corrugated sheet metal roof, visible to the right of our house, is on common land, property under the control of our eight parcel homeowner's association. It's land that cannot be built on because it includes the community drain field that services the septic systems on association properties. White barn will stay there as long as the homeowner's association allows, which hopefully will be for the duration. A neighbor says it is an attractive nuisance.  If so, potential intruders should beware of the appeal lest they disturb and surprise the family of skunks which lurks within.

Red Barn Lot with White Barn (lower right)

The red barn is on a lot held back by the farmer who subdivided his land. The fellow who services our irrigation system says when he was growing up he came out our way to camp out with a childhood friend who lived in the farmhouse. He recounts they set up their pup tents, went inside to get some food and returned to discover cattle had trampled the tents. The farmhouse obviously has been expanded and modernized multiple times. There are three other large out buildings on what appears to be about a 2 acre lot.  

Well, that's about it.  We now have our late summer picture. It will stay up until we replace it with a fall scene. This is Montana. That won't be long.  And then winter.  Here's what red and white barn last looked like last then.

Winter Scene, Red Barn and White Barn

Barack Obama Disses Pigs

How could you elect this man? I mean, we know that he knows about pigs. He called Sarah Palin one. Didn't he?

Barack Obama has never had a real job -- a job that designs, locates, extracts, processes, manufactures, finishes, repairs and/or maintains products or assets of value. It's not only that he hasn't dirtied his hands or worked up a sweat from anything more strenuous than elocution, it is that his prep school background and Ivy League education never gave Obama an honest view of how value is produced and the economy works. But others of us are not so encumbered. We can detect his BS. (In my case I worked in a cardboard box factory, a culvert factory and a plastics factory, I was a caddie, a dishwasher and a janitor, all before I received a fancy pants law degree). Those in the know understand that virtually every economically driven business relationship and set of producers relies on webs of suppliers and partners, which while mostly invisible to the ultimate customer, are essential in the value chain that drives the economy and serves us all.

From his background of inexperience and ignorance Obama makes false claims like the Keystone XL pipeline will produce only dozens of jobs -- a claim that he emphasized in his New York Times interview with a smug, arrogant chuckle. We blogged earlier this year on the absurdity of Obama's left wing, kill-affordable-energy-at-any-cost claims, referencing government data documenting hundreds of thousand of jobs supported by the pipeline industry. We looked at Obama's ridiculous claims from the perspective of a relation employed as a pipeline controller. Constructing, monitoring, operating, feeding, maintaining and repairing pipelines is not a simple store front enterprise. The companies that own and operate the pipelines day-to-day are but a fractional part of the the industry. Let us explain further.

Pipeline Pigs

The reference company website Rigzone.com lists 55 companies alone under its oil and gas pipeline "pigging" category. Pigging is the process of inserting a pressure driven station (referred to as a pig because back in the day the original pigs squealed as they traveled down the pipelines) into a pipeline to perform a range of tasks including, cleaning, detecting corrosion, measuring thickness, detecting cracks and weld defects, and flushing pipeline contents, as the pig flows along.  Pigs are are also used as barriers to separate different fluids (such as crude from different oil fields) flowing through pipeline systems.  In Barack Obama's world pigs not only don't fly, they don't exist.  There is no design, manufacturing, engineering and pigging service workforce even though they are an essential part of every modern day pipeline operation.

Rigzone.com lists 145 pipeline contractors, companies engaged in manufacturing pipelines and components, and in building, inspecting and maintaining pipelines. These are companies that re-mediate pipeline spills and upgrade pipeline safety with protective liners. These are companies that weld, build and maintain pumps, and clean and map pipelines. Work in these areas counts for nil in Obama's contorted calculus. 

Cups and Discs for
Pipeline Pigs

There are 42 companies that specialize in pipeline plugging and repair, activities which are inevitably required to maintain pipeline integrity and protect the environment, once pipelines are built. Imagine building a road and forgetting about it. Cracks develop. Potholes develop and grow, and the surface begins to disintegrate, leading to the creation of ruts and a waffleboard surface. Eventually the road is so bad the roadbed is abandoned and allowed to return to its natural state by erosion, corrosion and invasive plant growth. The same principle applies to pipelines. Continuous investment is needed to maintain operability. In the world of Obama, the tooth fairy does this work.

The FERC and CFTC Chairmen sign a pact to create
even more jobs for lawyers.

My God, even the lawyers get in on the act. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulates the interstate transportation of oil and gas, including the rates and practices of pipeline companies engaged in interstate transportation, establishing equal service conditions for pipeline transportation and establishing reasonable rates for transporting petroleum and petroleum products by pipeline. Washington, DC is crawling with FERC lawyers and FERC consultants. I would at least have thought that JD Barack would have caught on to the employment opportunities that pipelines afford to his highbrow lawyer and consultant pals.

An even larger impact ignored by Obama is the crude oil production and refining.  For oil to have value it needs to be transported and processed into usable form. The Keystone XL pipeline design has a 100,000 barrel a day on ramp in Montana.  At today's crude prices that is $10,000,000 a day of domestic cash flow.  No jobs associated with that eh, at least if you listen to Obama. 

We'll leave it there for now. You have elected an economic ignoramus. If only it weren't so.
   

How About That Golden Parachute?

We blogged earlier this year about Intel and Microsoft being joined arm in arm in a long death march. So it should come as now schock that leadership changes are in order.

According to the latest available proxy statement, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, holds a beneficial interest in 333,250.990 shares of the company.  Upon Ballmer's announcement of his retirement decision earlier today, to occur sometime within the next year, Microsoft's stock surged seven percent or $2.25 a share.  That translates into a tidy $750 million gain for the Microsoft insider -- a heckuva thick pad from the blow of the ownership wanting the guy out so badly. 
 

Kerplunk!

Well at least this means interest rates will stay low and the investing class will continue to make out like bandits in their stock portfolios.  You ordinary, hard working Americans will be left further and further behind. 

Sales of new single-family houses in July 2013 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 394,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 13.4 percent (±14.5%)* below the revised June rate of 455,000...

As we said in February, there will be a recession in the 2nd term. Here's to all the hopey, changey idolitors feeling proud about their rejection of fundamentally sound economics. 

Doing It All For You

As Seen on TV

In western New York McDonald's restaurants are giving away Big Macs this week to celebrate its 45th anniversary. The purveyors are pushing a little viral marketing to promote the event.  The Leo Burnett Dubai agency developed an anniversary 45 advertising campaign. There is even a stab at associating the Big Mac's introduction with the eventual tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Which reminds us that we were among the first to the party, before it even opened. Still, it is not so big an event. If you Google "Big Mac 45th" most what you get, page after page, are franchise locations on 45th Street, 45th Avenue and 45th road.  It'll be five years 'til the biggie.

We Need Snow!

Smoke and haze at 10,000 feet.

August 23:  Since this post we had rain, Thursday night, Friday afternoon and Friday evening.  Thanks for the response.  The snow can wait. 

New Life

Paul Bunyan is not just for Bathgate any more. He is making a comeback, this time to promote Obamacare.

The $9 million ad campaign is supposed to get 1.3 million Minnesotans in the tent to sign up for health care. But critics call it false advertising. 

Paul Bunyan outside of Bathgate, North Dakota
Close enough in movie land to stand in for Brainerd,
because Bathgate had snow.

“The biggest travesty here is that $9 million of taxpayer money has been spent coming up with Paul Bunyan and Babe,” GOP Rep. Peggy Scott said. 

Scott says MNsure’s marketing studies, costing millions, are missing MNsure’s target audience: healthy young people. 

“How many young healthy people even know who Paul Bunyon and Babe are?” Scott said.

Ironically, the ads promote Obamacare by showing Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox incurring traumatic but survivable injuries that physically active young people would logically want coverage for, such as through the low cost age-rated catastrophic care policies that effective October 1 are prohibited by the misnamed affordable care act.

I don't think there's anything Paul or Obamacare could have done to save the poor dude who was being wood chipped in "Fargo.". But betcha the ad does more to revive interest in "Fargo" than to promote the not so affordable health care act. Better yet, maybe it will draw attention to Bathgate. If you stop by, poke your head into Reiny's Bar and say heh.