Fiscal Clifford

Sitting around with my friend, Fiscal Clifford, and discussing the vote.  What I want to know is how these guys can vote so fast.  A bill is written in normal English first, but a staff of experts have to put together the actual code of the bill.  This may include thousands of changes to the law in obscure places.  A bill that extends unemployment benefits may, for example change the coffee-break times of union contract workers in the unemployment office.  It may require a cost of living adjustment in certain locales and not in others.  Net result is that a bill cannot be completely written for days. Steve has shown me bills that were a page long in normal English versions that wound up being an inch thick once written as law.  And the codified entire bill is what counts and must be available for reading.  Lest some weird unintended side effect on the law occur.  "What! They are closing all the post offices in 4 counties!!"

Clifford smiled at me and answered, "You are right to be suspicious.  In fact the Senate got to look at the codified bill 3 minutes before they voted at 1:39 am.  You can find that on Drudge Report.  But, don't think that the bill was really complete.  By a parliamentary trick, the Senate reserved conference committee time for the bill when it came back from the House, so that staffers could complete their research of the legal codes and make all the changes they deemed necessary.  In other words, they didn't really know what the hell they were voting on--even if Harry Reid could speed read it.  Hare just waved his arms and said, 'Let's vote'.  Gives new meaning to the statement by Pelosi about Obamacare that we would have to pass it to find out what's in it."

Okay so they passed more than the tax stuff in the form of Puerto Rican Rum subsidies and so forth.  I thought the House had a moratorium on earmarks.  How did that get passed?  I did note that all sorts of earmarks had cluttered the Sandy Relief Bill.  So how did HR8, the Fiscal Cliff Avoidance bill get passed?  Clifford smiled again.  It just slipped through, he noted.  Now Charlie Wrangle and Harry Reid can dance around while drinking cheap rum.  I thought of the old cheer of St. Johns College I had to learn as a freshman, "Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo, laroo, ishabakka, ishabakka, boo!  Pass me a legislator, half-past an alligator, RUM, BUM BOLLIGATOR, Chicasaw a dog! St. Johns Seniors, Rah! Rah! Rah!"  Does this not fit?

Well, the Dems certainly got the upper hand in this, I lamented.  But Clifford just laughed.  "After arguing for ten years that the Bush tax cuts were bad and that the Clinton tax rates made business boom, they are now saying that a return to Clinton rates would have been a disaster and did what the R's could never achieve--made several tax fixes permanent.  The alternative min tax will be indexed to inflation.  And the ultimate irony is that they decried middle class tax cuts while demanding justice that the upper class pay their fair share.  In other words, if you make $449,999 they are your friend, but if you make $450,001, you are one of the evil rich.  Worse, the number of tax returns above $450,000 represents only 0.7% of all returns, and 6 days of revenue which could run the government."

But the wealthy didn't come out unscathed, I offered.  Most people who manage to accumulate assets do so by tax  strategies that utilize the lower capital gains rates--which have gone up.  "Yep," Clifford responded.  "And nobody is going to scrap their trusts and estate planning with a 40% tax on assets either."

But doesn't this mean that the Republican congress is neutered?  They will barely have a majority in a couple weeks and the leadership is split,  I asked.  Plus, Obama got all the credit.  Clifford chuckled.  "Well, the R's shot themselves in the foot expecting that the mandatory taxation and defense spending cuts would be so onerous that the D's would look for a compromise.  What we all see plainly is that Obama doesn't care a fig about deficits.  He scoffs at deficits.  And of course, so do a lot of Americans.  They have heard about deficits for so long they are jaded and don't care.  They won't know what hit them when the debt bomb explodes.  The next round is over the debt ceiling.  I would like to see the Congress just hang tough and talk about how Obama needs to live on his means.   But it will never happen," Clifford insists.  "They will make a show, but ultimately don't want to be blamed for a recession."  Which prompted me to laugh.  I recently read Paul Krugman, that leftist economist say forebodingly that this year we might get a recession started by politics 'for the first time'.  Ha! He finally admitted that recessions are not normally caused by politics.  The Dems have blamed every recession since Hoover on Republican politics.  Now Krugman let his hand slip.

"But by being the big spender when the bomb explodes," Clifford mused, "Obama and the Democrats have shot themselves in the foot for a long long time.  There are a lot of people who will be cussing them when the bills come due and America becomes a weaker country.

Jan.2, Naval Act and nickels

I was watching the bowls and the announcers were bragging about the quarterbacks and a lineman, how they had such cerebral grade point averages.  So why, I asked myself, does the median NFL player retire with a net worth of under half a million dollars.  I guess they all buy fast cars and don’t watch their nickels. 

January 2, Naval Act of 1794, is the day that Congress approved money for 6 ships for the first US Navy.  There was no Dept. of the Navy at the time, it was just a defensive move by Congress because the Barbary pirates were intercepting our shipping.  In anticipation, a certain William Brabb, a shipbuilder’s purchasing agent, had immigrated from Hull, England to Boston in 1792 at the invitation of George Claghorn, shipbuilder.  I know Bill Brabb.  He was my great grandfather 7 generations ago. Hull, on the coast north of London was the center for the shipbuilding industry of the British Empire.  The enterprise takes a lot of different materials, specialist builders and careful watching of the nickels. Brabb was a minor player, but he had an important job. And my gang still watches its nickels.

                Claghorn was the shipbuilder hired to build the USS Constitution.  6 frigates were authorized by the Naval Act, most with 44 guns and designed by Joshua Humphries.  Humphries was a genius.  America was a small player.  England had 800 navy ships and France had 250.  Our ships had to be rugged enough to withstand a hard fight but also fast enough to avoid an encounter with a British Ship of Line which might have 80-100 cannons.  (An old French saying, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.”) The French built fast blockade-avoiding ships to get past the British, but they were made of pine.  British ships were pine also, but had white oak masts.  Humphries called for ships of smaller beam (width) and longer keel like the French ships, but made of live oak and white oak primarily.  Southern Live oak was used for the ribs of the hull.  It is extremely hard and waterproof.  The upper sides were also made of oak.  And then the Constitution was fitted with very large ship-of-line type bombardment cannons shooting 24 lb. balls. Most ships carried guns for 12 or 18 lb. balls.  The heavy use of oak became famous for the Constitution in the war of 1812 when it demolished the HMS Guerriere and the sailors gleefully reported that British cannonballs literally bounced off the sides.  I’m no authority on 18^th century naval warfare, but I have heard it said that tactics were multiple.  You could shoot for the rigging and masts using either chainshot or balls.  This disabled the craft.  You could use balls to try to blast holes near the waterline for a sinking, but the best idea was to blast the sides.  This caused a spray of deadly splinters into the opponent’s crew.  It took a dozen men to arm and fire each cannon so by killing/injuring the manpower, this was the most effective technique. 

            Apparently defense spending was the same then as now.  The 6 frigates Humphries designed were built in 6 different seaports since Congress wanted to spread the money around—or had to for enactment. They authorized $688,888, a big number for the day.  Building low volume, specialized military weaponry costs real bucks.  There was a year-long delay when a crew sent to Georgia to cut live oaks all came down with malaria. Congress was informed there were cost overruns, and at least twice had to appropriate more money, making the total tab over $1 million.  By autumn of 1797 only 3 ships were built and Congress was in a terrific argument, Democrats claiming this was money down a rat hole.  A big investigation ensued, 3 shipbuilders were fired, and Congress decided April 30, 1798 to create a Department of the Navy in order to get a handle on costs in the future.    But in Boston, Constitution was launched in October, 1797.  And several of the folks who had been instrumental in getting costs down and schedules done in Boston were asked to help organize the new Navy department. 

            It is not clear what William Brabb had to do with this, but we do know that one of his grandkids married a granddaughter of General and Congressman Dan Morgan of New Jersey. Morgan was the ultimate redneck who rarely wore a uniform and had founded a group called the Virginia Sharpshooters.  They had accurate rifles and long-barrel muskets that could pick off British officers instead of just firing generally into the crowd of the opponent’s line.  At Saratoga he got frontier women to work as sharpshooters which confused the Hessians and Brits who felt it was dishonorable to shoot at a woman. His victory at Cowpens, North Carolina was instrumental in defeating the British in the Revolutionary War.  A couple generations later, the Brabbs founded a small town, Romeo, Michigan (now a suburb of Detroit).  They were the bankers and accountants, naturally.  A great, great aunt was the first woman to graduate as a medical doctor at the University of Michigan.  My great grandfather, Bill Brabb (Same name again) dreamed of being a cowboy and came to the Flint Hills north of here.

            The War of 1812 could have turned out so differently had it not been for the hurricane that destroyed the British invasion in 1814.  But some historians hold that an important reason the British decided ultimately to sue for peace was the US Navy, though tiny, had ship-for-ship beat the stuffing out of the greatest navy in the world. They reasoned that the Americans, acting as pirates, would forever harm shipping, even if the Brits recaptured the American colonies. Constitution became famous for its exploits with the public and thus it was preserved time and again, and now sits in Charleston Naval Yard at Boston as a floating museum.  It is the oldest commissioned vessel afloat in the world, has been used to promote the Navy and many other causes.  Now that’s a well-spent nickel.

 

Odds and ends

A few odds and ends as I wait for the new year. 

I think the reason I don’t like Obama is because I must have rented to the guy.  Of course my memory is dim after all the renters and their shenanigans, but I’m sure he is one of those guys who just doesn’t pay his rent and then brags that he “saved” by not doing it.  One of my renters put up a big stink once, swore that he had dropped his cash in my mail slot when I was gone.  Finally I agreed to forgive a month and swallow the loss.  But then he bragged to his next-door neighbor about having gotten out of paying the rent.  Since I am a person who prides in my word, I didn’t confront him about this.  I just found other excuses to evict the following month.  Everyone was sure that there would be a “doc fix” outside of Obamacare.  Obama was bragging that his bill saved untold billions in medical costs.  Then we found out he simply cut Medicare payments to the docs by billions. That sucker just didn’t pay the rent.  And now it turns out that the Harry Reid never brought up the ‘doc fix’ in time so doctors are now slated to get a 25.3% reduction from Medicare.  And then last summer, Obama demanded that insurers just cough up coverage without being paid for Catholic birth control and abortion coverage.  Then he bragged long and loud about it during the campaign.  Didn’t that sucker rent from me once? He looks familiar.

And if your Dem friends say that health insurers make huge windfall profits, just tell them they can put a stop to this almost instantly.  Just require all insurers to be mutuals.  Mutuals already comprise 55% of health carriers.  Then everything will be non-profit and we can get on with a healthy discussion of the real problems.

Air Force played in a bowl game but came up short.  Trouble was they had only a ground game.(???)

With all the gun talk, the libs are trotting out the old arguments about how you should only own a gun if you are a soldier since the 2^nd A starts out, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,…”  Ask them if they know what a Militia is.  No one seems to have a clue.  Militias were common in the days before there were any police.  Every able-bodied adult male from some age (say, 18-45) in an area was required to own a firearm and supply ammunition.  The purpose was for instant defense of the community or to keep law and order in a vigilante style.  “Well-regulated” doesn’t mean that there were bureaucrats regulating; they hadn’t been invented. It was synonymous with functioning well. Polished.  Working together.  OK abolished their militias just a few years ago since not everyone owns a gun.  There are counties in Georgia that still require you to own a gun for such purposes.  I heard some pundit on TV protest that the weapons of 1791 were muskets and not guns.  Ahem.  A musket was a gun with an un-rifled barrel (was not scribed on the inside to impart spin and accuracy to the projectile). Rifled guns were expensive in those days and so few existed.  The colonial fix for accuracy was to use a very long barrel and those long-barreled muskets were the death of so many British soldiers. 

Russia  isn’t a free country.  Proof: Vlad decided to impale the lives of all those orphan kids who had Americans as adoptive parents.  If any politician in a free country suggested such cruelty, they would never be re-elected.  So Russia ain’t free.  It is as if the President of the US decided to create a healthcare system where all the people were told they would get care.  But the price of insurance will double and you still can’t afford it.  If you don’t buy insurance, you get fined and then you still don’t have any insurance. Now that’s real cruelty. (Please don’t write me and inform me that Vlad the Impaler was actually Wallacian)

Speaking of, I think that the next step after Obama phones should be Obama Barbecue.  All the poor people would get free barbecue.  The rich have to pay but could only sniff.  And you’d be required to buy and eat barbecue no matter what your religious inclinations.  Supreme Court says what you buy is not a 10^th Amendment right reserved “to the people” anymore.  It’s a tax. All you Vegans need to develop a taste for calf fries. Muslims, try the pulled pork.

Bill Engvall says his mom’s southern fried chicken could bring peace to the Middle East.  Do Barack and Hillary know this?  Of course she has a concussion and he’s not allowed to go farther than Hawaiian hoi poi and spam.  Otherwise he’d never hear the end of it from Michele. Maybe we should have sent some to the Wisconsin capital building last year.  Where Steve came from in the Ozarks, they hunt hogs and hog fish. You think Michele understands this?

Batshit Crazies

It snowed and we were housebound and watched a movie.  “Moneyball” was one of the big surprises of this year, a movie that was supposed to be grade B and the makers merely hoped would break even.  Instead it became a blockbuster hit.  It’s about the management of baseball talent, the story of how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s managed to contract a bunch of cast-off players and remake the A’s after they had gone to the World Series the year before, but then all the big players had left for rich contracts with other teams. A’s had no money to replenish the team and Beane managed to hire a young kid who was a statistical/computer whiz who found the undervalued players.  And of course, if you know baseball history, the A’s made the playoffs and set a new major league record of 20 straight wins.  All the while Beane’s scouts and manager and the rest of the baseball public made fun of his changes.  But the punch line of the movie comes through the President of the Boston Red Sox who tried to hire Beane at the end of the season.  Roughly quoting, he said, “The first guy to break a barrier, to go through a wall, usually gets pretty bruised up.  That’s because the guy who comes in with a new idea threatens the guys in power, the guys who are used to running things their way, the guys who hold the reins.  And they go absolutely batshit crazy over the change.” 

How true in all things.  It was true of the Civil Rights movement when Southern governors and officials went batshit crazy over the marches and the marchers got pretty beat up.  True of Washington at Valley Forge, true of the guys who started Apple, true of Karl Benz and his auto-mobile. And most of all, I remember how true it was of Ronald Reagan and Arthur Laffer who came in with a novel idea that if you tax less, government gets more revenue.  That was utterly counter-intuitive for many political junkies and politicians.  Reagan’s own V-P went batshit crazy, calling it voodoo economics.  The media, the Europeans, the ruling Congressional Democrats, just about everyone went batshit crazy with criticism. But Lafferism worked.  And then Thatcher tried it also and it resurrected the Brits from “The British Disease” of welfare statism.  The Pacific rim countries paid note.  They had longed to become developed countries, and couldn’t decide if they wanted the Japanese model or the Chinese.  When they saw Lafferism they tried it and they became Asian Tigers of growth.

Sometimes the guy with the new ideas loses.  Benz just didn’t have enough resources to fight and wound up selling out to a guy who named the cars after his girlfriend, Mercedes.  Henry Ford had a vision of cheap cars but then when the country got richer, they wanted something upscale and bought GM.  And the Republicans put the Voodoo Economics Veep in after Reagan and gradually lost the movement to Washington political hacks.  But as the Red Sox Prez noted, “Next year any team that isn’t rebuilding their team with your model [Beane and the A’s], is going to ultimately lose.” And now the Northern Europeans as well as Asia are converting sheepishly to Laffer’s models. 

But here in America, the Batshit Crazies won an election with 52% in 2008 and 50.3% in 2012. They used all the old faithful ‘progressive’ tools—Class Warfare, Chickens in every special interest pot—and they are cocky as can be over 50.3%. Counter to the warnings of Britain and Scandinvians and Australians, they have doubled down on the Spend-Into-Prosperity model of government.  May I simply point out that it won’t work in the broader scheme of things.  Economics doesn’t lie.  We face horrid stagflation. What then? Default? Volcker 21% interest rates? At that point may I quote the words of Rev. Wright, “America’s chickens have come home to roost”.

The American people await new management.  The new manager will have to be expert at turnarounds in the political world, a communicator who can keep the people on his/her side, a bold artist of change back to the conservatism and free-market principles that made America the envy of the world.  We’ve come through the wall, been bruised a bit, but I have faith in American common sense.  Common sense will come out in spades when our team’s economy starts to look like the Royals and Expos.

In the end, Beane’s numbers guy encourages him to start attending the games and not distance himself from the team.  The romance of the game is still there.  So too, we need to take the fight to the Batshit Crazies.

Polar Express

Christmas Eve, babysitting my 2-yr-old grand-daughter and she wanted to watch the movie Polar Express. And the sound had to be turned way down so we wouldn’t disturb her month-old brother’s nap.  I had never seen the movie, you can’t lipread computer-generated characters, so I figured out what it was about just from the actions.  Here’s my version.

It starts with a kid who is awake at midnight on Christmas Eve. A huge train pulls up and he is asked to climb aboard.  They were rounding up Republicans, no doubt. Republicans get into politics with little experience because they have a life without it, so they were symbolized by children.  Awake at midnight—that meant he was worrying about his business, no doubt.  The conductor was the head bureaucrat who handed him a food stamp, so he could get on the gravy train for a life of cradle-to-grave security.  They had rounded up a number of Republicans, an Afro-American girl and a smart-ass kid and another who can’t trust the bureaucracy.  I mean they weren’t perfect people, just all individuals. 

The bureaucrats seem determined to make the train crash.  The engineer and fireman are a couple of bozos who  act like DMV employees who suddenly confront panic.  They try to run the train off the fiscal cliff and then take it into the abyss of debt, but each time the Republicans save the day with trepidatious acts, but complete common sense.  Likewise the R’s help each other, the way normal good-hearted people do. At one point they stop a certain crash into a herd of Independents, i.e. reindeer standing on the tracks. There’s also a good angel who saves them from time to time, dressed as a hobo who disappears after each near-disaster.  We never do see God and so we don’t know what party he belongs to, but Santa Claus is definitely a Democrat. And finally they arrive at his  headquarters of the State.

All the citizens of the State headquarters wear the same red clothes, like little socialist elves.  They turn out in mass to herald the head narcissist, Santa.  I guess the goal was to get the R’s to assimilate with the elfin Dems, but it doesn’t work.  The Republican kids wander off to find the secret underground where all the children of the world are watched and labeled as naughty or nice.  They walk by the vacated factories and finally manage to embed themselves in Santa’s bag of handouts.  In the end, the main character collects a bell that has fallen off Santa’s sleigh and tries to do maintenance.  Finally, the R’s are escorted back to the train as unconvertible and sent home.  They get their food stamps punched with labels like “lead” and “believe” which is exactly what a Republican does when called upon.  The main character kid receives the single bell he found from the narcissist-in-chief’s sleigh as a lame thank you for his efforts.  Nonetheless, he smiles in the acknowledgement of knowing that he had saved his country.  And that’s about all an R needs, of course.

So in the end, I suppose I really did like the movie, muted and all.  It tells an important tale about hanging in there, working hard, doing heroic things and even if we are outnumbered, we have a bell to ring for America.

Better is coming

Everyone keeps saying, “I’m a conservative first and then a Republican.”  Which is like saying you are a football player first and a Cowboy only by expediency.  Try making a team out of that attitude.  Like many, I was a bit disappointed with Romney, but we ought to understand what the Democrats did.  They turned out their base by scaring people about Romney being rich, played the racist card about how he was “white” and anti-minority, and captured a small amount of low-information voters with Obama the Cult Figure.  Meanwhile they and the media kept beating the foolish drum that says a race is all about winning the independent vote.  So Romney failed to turn out his base by 3 million fewer R’s than McCain did while winning the Indies by 19 points.  Result was a net loss. Conclusion: turn your base on and don’t get snookered by your opponent’s lies about you.  Secondly, Dems did a huge Get Out The Vote effort and it worked. We need to match that. 

A  true, blue conservative would be good at base turn-out.  Well, as long as they aren’t a poor communicator or quirky or scandalous.  But I tend to discount the Republican navel gazing.  Politics is a team sport.  Arm chair quarterbacking may be the luxury of Joe Conservative as he sits and cusses at the TV.  But it won’t get conservatives elected.

However, better days are coming. The Dems and Obama are acting cockier than the last banty rooster standing who now has all the hens.  With such behavior, I smell a Big Mistake coming. Theirs is odd behavior for a team that won with 50.3% of the vote.  R’s are being lectured about how they lost because we are all racists.  Michael Moore says that the suburbs are full of guns and the only reason this can be is because all the suburbanites are racist. That ESPN sage said the RG3 wasn’t really “black”.  NY Times and Matthews attacked Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott as Jim Crow enthusiasts.  Really? 

Meanwhile Obama doesn’t negotiate over ways to end the fiscal cliff dilemma, holds a supposedly important news conference to make a big announcement an hour late, comes in to say that he talked to Reid and Boehner and if Congress doesn’t come to a conclusion it’s all their fault.  He’s heading for Hawaii.  Even CNN thought that was a bit cocky, since after all, the Prez threatening veto is the reason nothing has been passed so far.  Why is he so cocky?  Everyone from Time Ragazine to Limbaugh is saying that Obama really wants to go over the fiscal cliff (he really wants taxes from everyone), then will come back in as a white knight with tax relief for the middle class 98%, while the dispirited R’s wring their hands and get blamed for putting us over the fiscal cliff.  Yeah, well, that will work so long as the R’s don’t propose to restore tax rates first.  In fact, I expect some opportunistic R to pledge that if we go over the cliff next week, he would propose, right after Jan. 1, to restore taxes for those making under $1 million, a plan all the Dems have said they would vote for in the past.  And so what if there aren’t enough votes to pass it?  Well, then there sure won’t be when Obama comes back with a worse proposal thereafter. 

Going over the cliff also would galvanize the R’s over things like Death Taxes that would go back to 55% on every American estate that is larger than an average one.  It would put talking points in their mouths about killing business with high cap gains rates and corporate taxes.  All this would be like a prophetical loaded gun (nothing racist intended!) should the economy go into recession or inflate.  And we are almost guaranteed that one of these two will happen.  It would also galvanize the R’s about the debt ceiling. 

And concerning the cult figure status of Obama, he is lucky so far.  Things are not bad for most disinterested voters.  Interest rates are low. Jobs are scarce but government takes care of everyone.  And Slick Willie assured us that poor ol’ Barack was just dealt a tough Bush hand.  But if our country falls into debt crisis or recession or both, when the international bond market demands we stop spending or raise taxes drastically, all those low information voters will channel flip from American Idolatry and ask what the heck just happened!  There are times in politics when people want to nap and times when they are wide awake and foaming at the mouth.  When the public woke up to Hitler, they started looking for that Churchill guy who had been warning about the war and said he had a plan.  Give us solutions, not image!

The tragedy is that USA will have to fall off the cliff in order to come to it’s senses.  I just hope and pray that we won’t get a convenient concussion that always allows some to disregard disasters.  I guess I have to rely on the common sense of Americans.

Young, need job

I don’t know if you have seen this but the unemployment statistics are worse than awful among young people aged 16-24.  I’m not talking about the usual drivel about how minority youth can’t find jobs which is the standard template for a MSM story.  I’m talking about something we have never seen before.  Despite the talk of less unemployment, it’s a bleak story.  From a peak employment of 22 million in 2007, the 16-24 age group has slid to 17.5 million today.  In fact it hasn’t even made a comeback with the recovery started in July 2009.  So are all the young people dying off?

            Of course not! In fact the 16-24 population is a record.  They just aren’t working. The 55+ workers are.  From a fairly stagnant 16M in 2000 they have risen to 30M today.  These are stunning statistics.  We have never seen anything like this in our history.  Even the infamous 99% to 56% drop from 2007 to 2011 college grad employment saw a similar hesitancy to hire the young in the opening days of the Great Depression. But youth, with it’s beginner’s wages, eager energy, and new ideas has always made for a workforce that is desired by the boss.

            I don’t think you can conclude that the young are slackers today.  Employers are loading up on seniors because of supply.  A lot of seniors have paltry retirements and need a supplemental job.  Seniors often come with Medicare and—I don’t think, based on what I read in Obamacare—will require the purchase of healthcare by employers that typically amounts to about $5000 per employee.  And they often accept part-time. Moreover, employers are hunkering down reorganizing to minimize workers.  That often requires more duties and experienced folks to man the remaining jobs.  It’s going to get uglier for a young person to find a job. 

            It should be noted that total employment is 143M which is still down from the peak 144M in 2007.  Which is why so many are saying that the BLS is “cooking the books” to make unemployment look lower.  In fact they simply have reclassified vast numbers of workers as “not looking”.  If you counted all those workers, unemployment would be over 10%.  And that 143M counts a part-time job the same as a full-time job.  So lack of work is still quite bad.

            Here’s my advice if you are young and need a job.  1. Consider moving anywhere. Old workers won’t. Their house is paid for.  A lot of the jobs I have had don’t matter how smart you are, but can you take the grueling schedule.  Sure, you are willing to travel!   2. If you are in a hot field, that’s great but you need to get some sort of experience on your resume.  When I was at the university in the 1970’s, things in my field were bleak. Government labs and NASA were shutting down facilities.  Professorships were scarce. We joked about how we had to wait for someone to die in order to get a job.  I kept volunteering for curriculum committees and oversight committees and keeping a log of all the minimum wage jobs I had done.  You laugh.  Employers didn’t.  They saw someone who was willing to get his hands dirty, go the extra mile in his field.  3. If you aren’t in a hot field, study other industries and dream of how you could help them.  A lot of people say, I’ll do anything, but they haven’t studied the problems of business and can’t carry on an interview with a potential boss. Here’s the dirty truth.  A lot of people wind up with jobs not at all like what they studied in school.  Don’t worry about it.  Just adapt. 4. Take a stop-gap job.  Then when you have to explain that you graduated over a year ago and still don’t have a career, you say, “yeah, but I can’t stand not having something to do.  And I find it interesting to use my sociology in sales and marketing.”  This is music to a boss’s ears.  5. If you have the possibility of foreign study or just an excursion, go for the one that sounds like the most work. “I hiked the Appalacians”  doesn’t compare well with “I was a volunteer with the Forestry Service.” Better yet, go down the Chamber office and ask what you can do to volunteer.  They may put you on a board or give free training.  6. Get off the couch and write/blog. There is a need for all sorts of instructive ditties, but people fail to write about their experiences.  I once heard a world-renowned geo-scientist plead for this.  He said there is a need to write about the “craft of contouring a map”  or “how to load dynamite” in a seismic source and keep safe. Get published in a professional journal or on a trade website. Even if you are interviewing for something entirely different, there’s always a need for people who can document.  It will also help you articulate your skills. (“Being caretaker for my hospiced aunt was somewhat like working with an unskilled person because you have to be specific in instructions, but very respectful of the person. You also have to be aware of drug side effects.”)

            These are the kinds of things that make a young person look wise for their age, able to handle responsibility like an old hand, and willing to do the dirty work necessary.