This is very well observed. The same people who cheered the murder of a pharma CEO have now turned into Reaganite free-marketeers.
“The markets don’t like this!” say yesterday’s Democratic Socialists who have now embraced anthropomorphizing the market.
You know he was not a pharma CEO, right? He was the head of a financial company as that’s what insurance companies are.
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Yes, an insurance company, thank you. This is a Freudian slip as I’m in a fresh round of bickering with my pharmacy.
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OT, but this was quicker than expected:
EU offering zero/zero tariffs on industrial goods. Trump holding out for: EU buying energy from us. I have no idea if that’s a good long-term goal, but am certainly willing to give it a year and see what happens, as there does seem to be a strategy, and it hints at re-onshoring some industry, reducing inflation, and tightening the labor market, all good for us.
We’ll see if they can pull it off, whatever it is.
I think the tricky part is that all the big pieces have to be executed *right now* in order to start seeing positive results by midterms, which could either solidify or break some of this. And economies move slowly.
In the meantime, same as always I guess: educate kids, take care of the family, invest in our community, keep stacking pennies, and hope for the best.
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Only destroying is fast. Rebuilding is slow and painful. Which is the message I have tried to transmit at my university and failed completely.
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It’s one of the downsides of a four-year election cycle. Long-term building strategies take… a long time to bear fruit.
It’s short work to tighten up labor markets– stop importing cheap labor– and that makes an immediate difference that’ll grow larger over time if it’s allowed to continue: right now, the *better* things to go to trade school for (we’re talking maybe top 5) still only get you a salary around $70k ($80s for maybe the top 2), with a few years’ experience. Right now that’s enough to scrape by if you have a small family, not enough to buy a house responsibly, not enough to retire. And we’re talking essential skilled labor, not grunt work any old schmo can do. And while that $70k at the beginning of trade school looks like a good deal, in five years when you actually qualify for it, inflation has already downgraded it so you will struggle to live on it (getting inflation under control would solve this, but again, you have to hold the line for longer than an election cycle). If you wondered why so many people are selling drugs these days, that’s part of it. And then we lament the shortage of skilled tradesmen…
A tighter labor market immediately improves the job situation for guys already in those trades, and encourages more to go through the process, but it takes at least 2 years to graduate them, and it’s easy for an election cycle to tank their chances before they get through the training stage. One thing a tighter market does for these guys is force employers to offer them a better deal: right now, if you want to OTJ train your way into a better-than-$80k industrial job (they’re out there, and most of them involve training you can only get from the company), you have to be willing and able to work nights, weekends, swing shifts, travel for training programs, and put in massive amounts of overtime: stuff that absolutely rules out having any kind of a family life, and will destroy your health– you can get away with it at 20, but if you’re looking at a career upgrade in your 30s… not so much. For some jobs that situation is more or less permanent, and for others, you can promote to something more regular, maybe, in four or five years based on seniority. Almost all of them come with a ball-and-chain deal where they offer a big bonus up front, but you have to pay it back if you flake out in under 2 years because, say, your health failed after a year of working 80hrs/wk half nights half days. Plus, many (maybe most) of these jobs have listings that look great by the salary numbers (compared to some meaningless national average), where you get a tech certification, start out at $80k with a promise of a raise in three months… but then when you look at trying to move to that area, $80k lets you live in your car. I’ve done the job offer/cost of living research pretty intensively for a few areas like this (helping a friend evaluate job offers), and it is scary out there. A peach job offer in a place like Cabot, VT or Charlotte, NC or Sturgeon Bay, WI… where there are still industries to be found, is not a job offer at all. It’s a sick joke where a salary that would support a family in many perfectly livable places… will leave you deeply in debt for the privilege of working there for a year.
Tightening labor can force companies to offer guys on this track a better deal: better wages possibly, but more importantly, better quality of life.
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radiant! Self-Sustaining Eco-Village Becomes Reality 2025 kind
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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