Labor

Submitted by Roger Barris via Acting-Man.com,

Blind to Crony Socialism

Whenever a failed CEO is fired with a cushy payoff, the outrage is swift and voluminous.  The liberal press usually misrepresents this as a hypocritical “jobs for the boys” program within the capitalist class.  In reality, the payoffs are almost always contractual obligations, often for deferred compensation, that the companies vigorously try to avoid.  Believe me.  I’ve been on both sides of this kind of dispute (except, of course, for the “failed” bit).

Thousands of Clinton aides and campaign staffers are being forced to leave Washington D.C., move back in with their parents and go on welfare, according to counselors working with the recently unemployed staff. “There’s anger, there’s frustration, there’s anxiety, there’s burnout,” said Russ Finkelstein, a managing director at Clearly Next who has been counseling Clinton campaign staffers. “People are in shock,” said Anastasia Kessler-Dellaccio, 35, who quit her job at Sister Cities International to run Foreign Policy Professionals for Hillary.

The New York Times would like for you to know that, after attending the annual meeting of the American Economic Association where they sat in on multiple presentations on the economic impacts of minimum wage, they can now confirm what most of us have known for most of our adult lives, namely that basic economic supply/demand models actually work.

Apparently, the NYT was pleasantly surprised when the first presentation suggested that higher minimum wage didn't actually result in job losses, just lower hours, but then quickly realized it's basically the same thing.

As the City of Dallas continues to work with the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) board on solutions to help close the pension's massive $4 billion funding hole, Standard & Poor's has finally decided that the "continued deterioration in the funded status" of the fund merits a downgrade.  As such, S&P has downgraded the city's general obligation bonds to "AA-" from "AA" and placed them on "negative watch."  Per the Dallas Business Journal:

With Amazon having an exponentially growing (if mostly part-time) work force, which as of Q3 amounted to just shy of 320,000 employees...

... not to mention a surging robotic support base, on Thursday the rapidly growing internet retailer issued a press release stating it "plans to create an additional 100,000 full-time, full-benefit jobs in the U.S. over the next 18 months."  Of course, it is likely that Amazon would have added that number of jobs anyway, simply by extrapolating its current growth rate.