GOP Cries “Job Killer,” But It’s Really Just Progress
BY SAM FIELDS
The official Republican mantra is to denounce all Obama ideas as “Job Killers”.
Obamacare — job killer.
Higher minimum wage — job killer.
Stronger OSHA regulations — job killer.
Increased car mileage — job killer.
The latest job killer — A.K.A., The War On Coal — are the Environmental Protection Agency regulations to lower emissions from power plants.
GOP Translation: Replace coal and you kill jobs.
Job killers have been out there since forever. The real name is progress or change.
Back in the 1950’s tens of thousands were making a good living constructing iron lungs, fabricating crutches and treating polio patients. Then Jonas Salk comes along with his vaccine and put them on the unemployment line.
Who could begin to count the jobs lost jobs from all those other vaccines for measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc.?
There is now talk of an Ebola vaccine. This could change Doctors Without Borders into Doctors Without Jobs.
For decades, filling cavities was the bread and butter of dentistry. Then came government mandated fluoride in the water eliminating 90% of that business. The John Birch Society denounced it as part of the Communist Conspiracy. They should have called fluoridation what it really is…a job killer.
As I am writing this the Internet is killing jobs in cable TV…which is wiping out jobs in broadcast television…which put thousands on the streets in the movie industry…which killed countless jobs in vaudeville.
Does no one else care about what this did to Al Jolson, George M. Cohan…not to mention Weber & Fields (no known relation)?
I cringe when I think about all the blacksmiths, large animal vets, saddle makers and stagecoach manufacturers that Henry Ford cruelly put on the streets with his cheap, newfangled horseless carriages.
Want another job killer…word processing. How many secretaries, typists and workers in carbon paper and typewriter factories lost their jobs when computers were introduced?
Want it on a personal level? Pity poor Mike Nesmith of The Monkees. His family fortune came from his mother’s invention of Liquid Paper. Then Bill Gates and his Word software put poor Mike on “The Last Train to Brokesville”.
Even science fiction promotes job killing. Forget Di-lithium crystals. I think Captain Kirk would do just fine if The Enterprise ran on coal. I’d love to have heard Scotty wax-poetic about anthracite versus bitumen.
To be fair The Left does not have totally clean hands.
Unions and their Democratic allies are often fighting to featherbed jobs and work rules that no longer make any sense in the same way that the GOP is fighting to protect industries that have no future and are poisoning our present.
The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, comes from coal rich Kentucky. The Bluegrass State is Ground Zero for this fight.
Right now McConnell has the Senate on his side.
What he doesn’t have on his side is the future or a way to stop time.
August 14th, 2015 at 11:38 am
I am not disagreeing with Mr. Fields, but you know when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s we had ladies’ dressmakers for my Grandmother, tailors for men, cobblers to make shoes (already dying out), milkmen, eggmen (ours was a German Jewish refugee lady, Mrs. Sass – I think my Grandmother used her our of sympathy), our butcher Mr. Reineke, all gone! I miss my typewriter. But I know that coal is a terrible source of pollution and lung diseases for miners, yet, what about the miners in West Virginia and the other coal states? What about Poland, where coal mining is the major employer?
Obviously the answers is science and technical growth (in Silesia coal mining is being replaced by car plants like GM’s Opel’s new Buick factory at Gliwice (the German Gliewitz).
But again, there MUST BE TECHNICAL, EDUCATIONAL, and SCIENTIFIC research that leads to NEW JOBS! Here in South Florida you can see Marine Research can be a new source of JOBS but research needs, (don’t scream conservatives) GOVERNMENT FUNDING! Fort Lauderdale in the 1950s had marine research firms (including my maternal Uncle’s) but they all closed because of the Vietnam War funding requirements for that Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson human tragedy and foreign policy disaster. Sadly I have to be EVEN MORE of a BIG GOVERNMENT advocate on EDUCATION, SCIENCE, and TECHNOLOGICAL research projects! But understanding this research is aimed at creating jobs that, no matter what I or you the reader wants, TIME DOES NOT STAND STILL and YOU CANT STOP PROGRESS, not even Mitch McConnell and the Republican Majority in the Senate or the hateful science denying “Freedumb Caucus” in the HOUSE.
August 14th, 2015 at 3:23 pm
This Sam Fields boy you get a lot of attention on this blog(what is your secret?). EPA is one big job killer too.. And that disaster in Colorado is a mess. What was it 3mill of toxic coal waste etc. in the rivers of Colorado. Job killer for anyone that has a business along the river banks. ,How about going for a swim in that river Chaz????
August 14th, 2015 at 3:30 pm
You are right it is also the left. Democratic County Commissioners try to kill Uber, which is surely progress. I bet the owners of horse drawn carriages fought the car with the help of their stooges in office as much as the taxis are.
August 14th, 2015 at 3:40 pm
You are right in three, wrong in one and the fifth is a maybe, Mr. Fields.
Obamacare is not a job killer. That is a stupid argument. For every person laid off because a company can’t afford health insurance, Obamacare creates at least one new one in healthcare.
Higher minimum wage may cause employers to lay off employees. The ones who remain will spend more, which presumably create new jobs.
Stronger OSHA regulations & Increased car mileage are many times Democratic overkill. As far as OSHA, jobs should be safe. Too many times, the Democrats try to regulate too much. Whether this is a job killer is not known by me. Car mileage should not be mandated. Car buyers would buy high milage cars if gas prices went up. When they are down, people buy for SUVs. Why not? Why should the government tell people what kind of cars to buy? Since SUVs are made in the U. S. A. and small cars are made in Japan and Mexico, yes, gas milage requirements kill jobs in THIS COUNTRY, Mr. Fields
Environmental Protection Agency regulations to lower emissions from power plants are generally unnecessary, Electric companies are switching to natural gas because it is cheaper and plentiful. Coal is old school, dirty and expensive to clean up. Any EPA regulations may be a job killer for coal miners, but many new jobs in the gas fields of North Dakota make up for it.
August 14th, 2015 at 4:58 pm
Coal vs natural gas??? What about solar or wind? That’s progress and cuts down on the carbon emissions that are slowly pushing most of Florida into the Atlantic Ocean without a life vest in sight…
August 14th, 2015 at 4:59 pm
Look, I’m a Cuban American in my late 50’s so being born a Republican is pretty much a given.
But I left the party years ago. In truth, in my beliefs I had left it years before. I left because they shifted from the party that manages money and had moderate tendencies to the one that just got selfish and didn’t care about the working people of the country.
As a Democrat I can continue being a fiscal conservative but also a moderate on social issues. You can’t be a moderate today and remain in good standing in the GOP.
There was harshness in policy throughout their platform; policies that dug into the party I had known for years. We became estranged on policy grounds and I left because I want to be in a party I can agree with, not feel forced to live within one I disagreed with more often than not.
I found that their policies were simply not good for business. And this has nothing to do with wishing ill on the rich. I want everyone to be rich and couldn’t ew happier if we had huge growth in upper income families. I simply don’t want misery in the US. I think we should be better than that plus it is good economic policy to hold that view.
It’s simple.
We’re a nation of over 300 million people with an economy that satisfies only about 200 million. Sadly, not everyone is going to go to college, become a computer tech or a professional but they are Americans. They deserve respect and the ability to raise a family within a traditional level of dignity. Our economy does not produce this. When the paradigm shifted away from manufacturing in the 80s I said it wouldn’t work then and I’m sad to realize today that my worries were well founded.
Today, too many Americans are unemployed and as bad, too many are underemployed. Part time jobs, which kids need to be doing for their own development, are today being done to a much greater degree by adults who need the cash. In the last 100 years, Americans have never worked harder for less pay than they do today.
This is largely because of the flight of manufacturing from our country which helps corporate bottom lines but is bad for the American people. It needs to be right sized and there are ways to do that by managing import and export taxes, investing in factory infrastructure and getting unions to pay greater attention to the larger issues in the economy.
Those views are not welcomed in the Republican party so I left but the nation’s labor surplus can be put to work, which has inherent economic value or we will pay, and pay and pay more taxes, which is a drain on the economy, to sustain them.
Americans will not go hungry. They will not stand for misery.
Republicans do not offer a solution but rather excuses, denial, obstruction tactics and rhetoric for that conundrum. They don’t offer answers, solutions or action plans. Democrats have been unable to fix the problem also, but at least they try and that should be recognized.
It won’t work unless we work together. Americans used to work together for the benefit and good of all Americans. We need to start doing that again.
I want everyone to do as well as they can but there has to be opportunity for everyone if that is to happen. I like lower taxes rather than higher ones and believe that a decent paying job is for the most part the best social program we can offer anyone. Create them. Stop this constant bickering and respond to the needs of our people!
The economy is there for us to manage it, not the other way around. We are supposed to be masters of it, not the other way around and this notion that Americans are “captives” of the economy is unusual, not traditional and certainly leads to no conservative outcomes.
We have always been at our best as a country when everyone does well, when the economy we manage helps all boats in the harbor rise with the tide of prosperity. Isn’t it time we got back to that moderate way of doing business?
Angelo
August 14th, 2015 at 5:20 pm
All this talk about job killing and its impact on the economy, makes me think of the $80B in revenue if we could/would/should start taxing churches.
Praise be to Jesus, pass me those benjamins.
August 14th, 2015 at 5:27 pm
1. Al Jolson worked in movies n stage shows until he died. His recordings still sell.
2. George M Cohan wrote for the movies and his heirs still collect a fortune in royalties from ASCAP
3. Weber & Fields retired well before technology would have effected them.
HOWEVER
350 people in South Plantation just lost their Motorola Nobility’s owner Chinese Lenovo had an 80% bath and is laying off thousands.
This is on top of firings when Google purchased it, bungled it and drumped it on Lenovo who promised 2 years ago to expand Jobs in the USA
The Yuan exchange rate to the US dollar and Euro. The rate of consumer spending in China has caused these firings nothing to do with anything in the US
Globalization is a whore with clap, it looks good, it feels good, then you pay in pain n suffering.
August 14th, 2015 at 10:18 pm
Does anyone realize the highest number of construction accidents and injuries occur in the State of Florida? Much of them because the contractors don’t enforce the existing OSHA regulations. How about the men who died in the garage being constructed at Miami Dade College for instance.
As to higher minimum wage, how about those CEO’s making 8-9 million dollar bonuses (McDonald’s), why not give your employees a higher wage since electric, water, property taxes, food are all rising?
The Natural Gas is fracked gas being brought in from Oklahoma.
Why does FP&L ignore solar and wind alternative energy but wants its customers to pay for fracking or bringing in the fracked gas from Oklahoma with more than 200 earthquakes this year. However, FP&L’s company of which they are a part are not installing solar energy throughout Hawaii, but not Florida. FP&L’s profit margin is 10% and their average salaries are $75,000 annually. This was communicated during their community meetings prior to their receiving approval to raise residential electric rates.
I thought the reason for increasing gas mileage was to decrease carbon emissions – remember global warming?
August 14th, 2015 at 10:20 pm
Correction: FP&L’s mother company IS INSTALLING SOLAR POWER THROUGHOUT HAWAII, but not Florida.
August 15th, 2015 at 12:29 pm
I was reminded that god, in whatever flavor of the day you pray to, isn’t all that good with money.
Helping scoring touchdowns? Oh yes… But the almighty’s credit score? Probably in the 400s.
So then, we’ll not be able to start taxing churches, after all, do you want to see Jesus H. Christ & Co. declare bankruptcy?
August 15th, 2015 at 8:39 pm
The sooner the Republicans regain control of this country the better. Your president and his co- “no show, never had a job” political hack appointees have almost run us off the proverbial cliff. This obama moron is destroying this country.
August 15th, 2015 at 9:56 pm
If an industry like buggy whips and typewriters die a natural death because of market forces, that is progress. If an industry like coal is killed off by government regulations, rules and edicts, you can bet there are politics behind it. And behind those politics is someone else making a shitload of money.
No market forces, just crony capitalism and influence pedaling.
August 16th, 2015 at 11:59 am
Sam, you are half right. The innovations you cited are just that, innovations. Simply increasing regulations to regulate an industry out of business is not innovation.
I support creating new, cleaner, renewable energy that will innovate coal out of business. But I do not support regulating it out of business.
August 17th, 2015 at 11:19 am
Thank you for wasting 4 minutes of my precious time reading this really REALLY dumb article…
August 17th, 2015 at 2:16 pm
PLEASE TAKE A VACATION
Quit reading and posting on blogs when you are suppose to be working, do not use your government computers, I Phones, or any other government sponsored electronic device or means of communication to post your blather.
Between the salary you and your wife receive from the public trough surely you can afford to get your own electronic communication system.
In closing please post your work schedule hour of operation showing true transparency.
August 17th, 2015 at 4:14 pm
Little Annjello
PLEASE TAKE A VACATION
Quit reading and posting on blogs when you are suppose to be working, do not use your government computers, I Phones, or any other government sponsored electronic device or means of communication to post your blather.
Between the salary you and your wife receive from the public trough surely you can afford to get your own electronic communication system.
In closing please post your work schedule hour of operation showing true transparency.
August 18th, 2015 at 8:05 am
Angelo,
What you say could be considered very hypocritical as your City has privatized almost all the “good” middle class jobs that were available in your City…..hard to justify what you write with what is going on on your City….the dumbing down of municipal services in the name of fiscal responsibility…kills “good” jobs.
September 3rd, 2015 at 8:31 pm
A time when Republicans, trying to derail the bill, began actively labeling the health-reform legislation a “job-killer. The President … continues to push his job-killing government takeover of health care that will hurt small businesses at a time when they need certainty, not more Washington tax hikes and mandates.