Congresswoman Donna Edwards Replies

Periodically, I send my Congressional Representative or my two Senators notes expressing my abhorrence about something or other they are about to do to suppress the rights of the individual.  Usually, the response indicates no appreciation for my note in the form of acknowledging the legitimacy of my points.  But, most of the time, it at least broadly indicates something about what I was addressing.  Sometimes they respond as though I agreed with them, as all right-thinking Progressive Elitists, or Aristocrats, do in Maryland, where the Free State of old has long been a sad, poorly used skeleton.  They simply cannot conceive that a decently written note could come from someone who opposes the Nanny State and their Progressive Aristocracy dedication to the victims of a society that has made almost everyone rich and free by the low standards of most of the world.  Today, I received a particularly aggravating non-response from Congresswoman Donna Edwards.  My reply is given below:

Donna Edwards,

I contacted you last year when I was still in your gerrymandered district.  I am not sure about what and I cannot find a hint about what from your response.  Now I am in the most incredibly gerrymandered district of John Sarbanes.
Of course, neither of you are in the least interested in my one, dominant need for the freedom to exercise my equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of my own body, mind, and labor, and for the pursuit of my own personal happiness.  You are both enthusiastic supporters of tyrannical, rights-violating, and illegitimate government.  If you think your government is legitimate, re-read the Declaration of Independence.  You might also observe that the reason for a Constitution was for the People to mandate a government of highly limited and precisely enumerated powers which would operate as a legitimate government as defined by the Declaration of Independence.

I am a small business owner and operator who can no longer provide as many jobs as I could before the government-induced recession, from which my business is still suffering.  Thank you for the big government model of special interest controls which has brought about a total stagnation of the real per capita private sector portion of GDP.  It is so clever of you to understate inflation, which acts as a hidden tax on all of us Americans.  It is a neat trick to take any increase in GDP, even government spending on your favored special interests and campaign donors with dummy green energy companies, and attribute that to the health of the economy.  It is especially neat that we are not supposed to be aware of the fact that what matters is the size of the per capita private sector, hence a stagnant economy is one that grows in real value at the same rate as the population is growing.  The number of missing jobs has remained constant over the last 3 years (see http://objectivistindividualist.blogspot.com/2013/03/obama-jobs-recovery-in-99-years.html).  With the booming potential of our fossil fuel supplies and American innovative proficiency, it is a really amazing feat that big government has been able to totally stagnant our economy.  Industry-killing regulations, ever increasing taxes, and many unfunded mandated expenses imposed on the private sector are your stock-in-trade.

Finally, I will always remember that you voted for ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax according to our crazy Supreme Court.  That unread bill is an attempt to steal the very ownership of my body from me.  It expects me to sign over my body by filling in an IRS tax form that acknowledges government ownership of my body.  I am supposed to bow and scrape and prove that I have submitted to the government directive on how I will maintain and support my body.  The draconian 5-year prison sentence you voted for, is supposed to cow me into slavery as a numbered body owned by the government.  Nothing about my individual nature is of interest to the government that aims to take control.  To be sure, you hope to simply steal money from me or that I will submit instead of revealing your tyranny so dramatically as to be hauled off to prison by tyrannical government thugs.  The theft of hard-earned income or the draconian prison sentence are supposed to prevent such public displays of principled stands for liberty.  As the Congress, President, and the Supreme Court have abandoned the Constitution and the concept of equal, inalienable individual rights, so are we the People supposed to abandon them.  I will not do so.

Perhaps that is why you are buying up so many assault weapons, as you call them, and so many rounds of ammunition for domestic government agencies.  American government has undergone quite an amazing transformation toward tyranny.

An American Dedicated to Liberty,

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.
Lab: (410) 740-8562
Mobile: (301) 830-1886
Home: (301) 384-3253
http://www.AndersonMaterials.com
http://AndersonMaterials.blogspot.com
http://ObjectivistIndividualist.blogspot.com/

Obama's New Normal Part-Time Economy

Average hours worked for all non-farm private employees has been stuck at 34.4 hours for 4 months now.  The average hours for non-farm private production and non-supervisory employees dropped 0.1 hours in October to 33.6 hours.

Real per capita GDP is $50,166 through the third quarter, but it would be $55,932 if long-term historical trends had not been replaced by the Obama "new normal."  This loss of $5,766 per person is sorely felt.  High unemployment and all-too-common part-time employment has kept the economy from expanding at historic rates.

As Mike Shedlock has noted, the recovery of hours worked following the period of nominal GDP contraction shown in the light blue region of the plot below has stalled out.  The earlier rate of increase was substandard following a recession.  For many months now, Obama's "new normal" has settled in.  The question is, are Americans ready to settle for the Obama "new normal."

There is no reason at all to do so.  The U.S. economy is more than ready to recover, if only Washington will stop doing everything it can to prevent business success.  One of the big factors is the pressure that ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, is putting on businesses to convert full-time positions into part-time positions.  ObamaCare defines full-time employment for the purposes of requiring health insurance coverage or the payment of a penalty by the business as a mere 30 hours of work a week.  As a result, many businesses are putting a limit of 25 to 28 hours a week on their employees.  The tax assessment on employees requires a look-back period of 3 months to a year, to be selected as an option by the employer.  Consequently, companies have had to ensure that at the latest, many of their employees had less than 30-hour workweeks for more than the last 3 months of this year.  The Obama "new normal" is a 25-hour workweek for many Americans.

Glacial Obama Jobs Growth Will Take a Complete Generation to Return to 5% Missing Jobs

The September employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate a glacial increase in employment.  The Obama jobs recovery over the last two years is at a rate adequate to return the U.S. to a real 5% rate of missing jobs in 18.5 years!  Add this to the four years under his presidency so far with awful unemployment and a complete generation will have passed before we return to a real 5% unemployment rate.  The real unemployment rate now is 12.88% and in September 2010 it was 13.73%.  The real rate of jobs growth under Obama in the last two years is at a rate of 0.425% a year.  Thus, to go from 12.88% missing jobs to 5.00% missing jobs will take (12.88% - 5.00%)/(0.425%/yr.) = 18.54yr.  Add the almost four years of the Obama presidency to this and one has a complete generation mired in a very sorry jobs economy.

Of course, Obama is presently holding back on many of the jobs-killing policies he wants to implement after he is re-elected.  These will likely wipe out the meager jobs growth we are presently seeing.  We also have to remember that the Federal Reserve is pouring $40 billion a month into the economy now, which should be able to purchase a few jobs upon the first pulse of that money surge.

The number of missing jobs and the real unemployment rate are given in the table below using the BLS Household Survey Data without seasonal adjustments:

The classical unemployment rate has fallen considerably, but it is substantially due to people quitting their job search.  The working age and available population increased from August to September by 206,000 people.  The number employed increased by 775,000 according to these Obama administration BLS numbers, though given the state of the economy, I find that number rather difficult to believe.  Unless, there are a lot of small business people out there who decided in September that Obama was not going to be re-elected and they are hiring on that belief!

Looking at the numbers of people unemployed, we see an even bigger decrease of 954,000 people.  If we assume that none of the 206,000 new working age people wanted jobs and 775,000 of the officially recognized unemployed found jobs, then another 179,000 people gave up looking for a job.  Does it not seem very unlikely that if 775,000 found a job in one month, that 179,000 who had just been looking for work would choose that time to stop looking for work?  There is something rather out of kilter in these numbers.  It may be that a lot more people really stopped looking for a job and decided they were by default self-employed.  These days, many of the self-employed are not able to pay themselves a salary.

But even if we use these numbers, there are 21,189,000 missing jobs now.  This is more missing jobs than were missing in September 2010!  Thanks to the population growth, the percentage of missing jobs has come down slightly though as noted above.  Here is the missing jobs chart:

Obviously the missing jobs chart does not show any major breakout in the rate of jobs creation once again in the last two and half years.

But, there may have been some jobs growth due to the decrease in savings rate and the increase in spending of Americans over the last two months.  A good part of that spending increase went to pay for higher gasoline prices, however.  The Economic Confidence Index improved in August, though many more Americans are still pessimistic about the economy than are optimistic.  The Institute for Supply Management Manufacturing Index rose to 51.5 in September from 49.6 in August, indicating expansion for the first month since May.  This expansion is based on the American economy alone, since world trade is decreasing.  Europe is importing less and while China is claiming to have a GDP growth rate of 7.5%, its real growth rate is about zero.  The service sector has been expanding all year, though it did the same in 2011.  In September, it was at 55.1 up from 53.7 in August.  Some of this service sector expansion is likely to have been generated by that $40 billion pumped into the economy in September by the Federal Reserve.  Mortgage rates have continued to fall as well and are now averaging 3.36% for a 30-year mortgage.  While mortgages are still hard to get, home sales have increased slightly.

I cannot see any reason whatsoever to give Obama any credit for the slight improvement implied by the latest jobs report, however.  We should long ago have had much better jobs growth.  Obama has worked overtime to cut down the U.S. economy with his wrongheaded economic policies.  The 1.3% GDP growth claimed in the second quarter is surely a zero or negative growth rate in terms of real real per capita GDP.  The cost of living index being used by the government understates our real cost of living so that the real GDP growth is overstated.  The adjustment for per capita GDP means that a 1% growth in GDP is just that due to the population growing at a 1% rate a year.  GDP has to grow faster than 1% so that our average standard of living will not fall.

The slightly higher 1.6% growth rate of GDP for the first half of the year is likely about a zero real real per capita growth rate.  This is a highly stagnant economy.  When Obama tries to brag about it and claim he is responsible for it, he is just showing his ignorance of the economy.  We do not have to share that ignorance.  If enough people do and he is re-elected, we will not see any significant improvement in the economy over the next four years.  His plan to increase taxes by another $1 trillion and to implement ObamaUncaringTax will be a great kick to the head for the economy.  Who knows how much more damage he will do as the rules for Dodd-Frank financial industry regulations are fixed or left unfixed so that no one can safely undertake any significant financial activity.  He is also about to march his EPA brown shirts out to strangle all coal-fired power plants and he will take more actions to generally impede the use of fossil fuels.  Of course, he will also continue the mal-investment of our tax money in impractical green energy schemes doomed to failure and run by his parasitic campaign donors.

17 Countries Now Have More Economic Freedom than the USA

The Economic Freedom of the World: 2012 Annual Report published by the Fraser Institute measured the economic freedom of countries using the data of 2010.  The principal authors of the report are James Gwartney of  Florida State University, Robert Lawson of Southern Methodist University, and Joshua Hall of Beloit College with contributions from eight other academics.

The economic freedom evaluation of the USA continued its nearly monotonic decline since the year 2000.  In 2000 we had a rating of 8.65 on a scale of 10.00, but we have sunk to a rating of 7.70 now.  Since the year 2000, the rest of the world has seen a small increase in rating from 6.71 to 6.83.  In 2010, our 8.65 rating of the year 2000 would have made the USA a close third to Singapore, with Hong Kong number one.  But in our state of degradation as of 2010, the USA is now disgracefully 18th in the world in economic freedom.  When the evaluation is made for 2012, we will find that we have slid much further down the list.

Here is what the world looks like color coded by quartile in economic freedom:

You can see why Mexicans have been coming across the border illegally to work in the USA from this map.  I was not surprised to see Venezuela and maybe even Argentina in the least free quartile, but I was surprised to see India there.

Here are the ratings and the rankings of the upper two quartiles:

These economic freedom ratings are made based on the following criteria with the individual USA ratings and rankings following each:

1) Size of government (6.43, 73rd, our worst major category ranking)

2) Legal system and property rights (7.14, 28th)

3) Sound money (9.68, 7th)

4) Freedom to trade internationally (7.46, 57th)

5) Regulation (7.76, 31st)

Regulation is further broken down into the following subcategories:

a) Credit market regulations (6.95, 121st, our worst regulatory ranking)

b) Labor market regulations (9.06, 3rd)

c) Business regulations (7.26, 30th)

If we evaluate which areas of economic freedom are most pulling our ranking down in order, they are:

Size of government, 73rd
Freedom to trade internationally, 57th
Regulation, 31st
Legal system and property rights, 28th

in which areas our ranking was worse than our overall ranking. Note that our size of government ranking of 73rd puts us at the top of the list of nations in the third quartile.  That is in the lower half of the 144 nations evaluated.  Does that hurt your pride?  It should.  It should be excruciating pain.  Personally, I find each of these rankings to be disgraceful and a source of great anger.

Our economic freedoms are as basic as any other freedoms.  To sustain our lives, we need to be free to earn a living.  We also need to be free to enjoy earning our living without having burdens constantly loaded on our backs such as heavy taxes and unnecessary regulations and paperwork requirements.  The American businessman sees his business drained by excessive taxes, is forced to be an unpaid tax collector, is forced to divulge much too much private information, is forced to assume responsibilities and risks that are properly either those of his employees or his customers, is kept from doing things according to his own judgment by laws that are often irrational, and is forced to comply with unintelligible and excessively voluminous rules and regulations.

The American businessman is treated like a slave of the state and generally forced into being a criminal by laws and regulations he cannot even read, cannot understand, and in many cases could not abide by if he understood them.  This is exactly what a great many politicians want.  They want to extort tax money, favors, and campaign contributions at will from businessmen.  They use the overly complex and voluminous law and the threat of still more laws and regulations to make most businessmen cower before them.

There are very practical consequences for our economy.  As our economic freedoms are lost, our ability to grow our real per capita GDP decreases.  See the graph I have prepared from World Bank data for the years from 1980 to 2011:

Note that the post-2000 performance is clearly much worse than that of 2000 and earlier.  A loss of economic freedom is a loss of opportunity and an increase in uncertainty.  With less opportunity and more uncertainty, fewer people will start start-up companies and fewer people will be hired by such companies:

George W. Bush grew government and added many regulations, but Obama has grown government even more and added slightly more regulations and many more very expensive regulations.  With many more regulations awaiting a second term and hopes for many tax increases, Obama intends to further degrade our economic freedoms in the name of redistribution and a wrongheaded claim that catastrophic man-made global warming will result if he does not drastically cut our fossil fuel energy use.  If he is re-elected, he will attempt to greatly further decrease our economic freedoms.

GDP and Industrial Output Comparisons by Country

I needed to find out if China was the number 1 manufacturing nation in the world or was it the United States?  This proved a bit more difficult question than I thought it would be.  But the CIA World Factbook had the information needed to determine this and to calculate the actual value of each of the three sectors into which they divide the GDP for the year 2010.  These sectors are Agriculture, Industry, and Services.  The results I found for the 7 nations with the largest GDPs expressed in dollars with purchasing power parity are given in the following table:

 

The answer to my original question is that the value of China's industrial output, which includes mining and construction, is $4.73 trillion, while that for the United States is $3.24 trillion.  China's industrial output is 46% greater than that of the United States.  No other nation comes close to having so much industrial output as China or the United States.  The value of China's agricultural output is also the largest in the world.  In this case, it is 6 times that of the United States.  It is the delivery of services that the U.S. excels in doing.

The per capital GDP for the United States is more than 6 times that of China.  Germany has the second highest per capita GDP on the list and that of the U.S. is 32% higher.  The United Kingdom and Japan both have per capita GDPs very nearly as great as that of Germany.  This group has a per capita GDP more than twice that of Russia, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of China, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of India.