He actually advocated raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour on his show last night. Said that Pubs who opposed that are "pinheads" who will lose elections as a result.
He shows his deficient economic chops like this from time to time. Whenever there's a spike in the price of gasoline, he's quick to accuse "big oil" of "gouging."
I realize he has amassed many academic and career accomplishments, that he's well-travelled and has had historic encounters with world leaders, but there is a thread of sloppy "Hey-I'm-just-an-Irish-cop's-son-from-Levittown-lookin'-out-for-the-folks" default setting to his take on a lot of issues. And this whole business of inventing his own "traditionalist" label to characterize his ideological orientation is pretty shaky.
Kudos to Kate Obenshain for standing her ground against his characteristic dismissiveness toward the substance of the pro-freedom argument.
It hurts to have opposition so we can tend to cast asperisions.
ReplyDeleteMight take me a while to unpack that statement. It's pretty short, but it's not readily sensible to me.
ReplyDeletePinhead!
ReplyDeleteI love your "pro-freedom argument" but it pertains only to economic freedom. You scoff at efforts to increase personal freedoms in America when it comes to legalizing marijuana, preferring to address the shortage of certain sized allen wrenches. I have a new Indian roomie here on a HB-1 Visa. Ask the American tech industry workers what they think of this. It is a variation of slave labor (where the slaves make 60 to 80K a year, but no health or retirement bennies of course). It is cheaper to hire them and have our tech workers train them than to hire American workers. Pinhead!
ReplyDeleteIndia has transformed the entire American high-tech sector in a way that has demoralized U.S. workers, Hira argues. Companies like Pfizer, Siemens, Wachovia and Bank of America have all reportedly required their U.S. workers to train foreign replacements that have H-1B or L-I visas. "This practice, unfortunately enough, appears to be perfectly legal under the current sets of regulations and laws," writes Hira. "We do not know how widespread it is because employers have threatened workers with lawsuits and conditioned their unemployment insurance and severance packages to guarantee silence. Each new report, however, further reduces the attractiveness of IT to students of American universities."
Corporate CEOs and President Obama constantly implore more Americans to study science, technology, engineering and math, but the top concern of people working in technical fields is the negative impact of offshore outsourcing on their job prospects. A recent survey done by Information Week found that offshoring of technology jobs "is discouraging young Americans from pursuing tech careers and [is] shipping innovation abroad." The survey found that most IT workers, managers and students believe that the practice has led to the United States losing its leadership position in technology, "with 66 percent -- the single highest percentage -- citing offshore jobs movement as one of the top three reasons."
read more at http://manufacturingnews.com/news/newss/outsourcing111.html