Improving the employment picture | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: Jim Bispo's weekly column appears in the Beaufort Observer.

    In between his $35,000 a plate fund raisers, the prez says he is turning his attention to improving the employment situation - or more specifically, the unemployment situation. Isn't that nice?? The problem seems to be that virtually all the Keynesian arrows in his quiver have been spent, with no noticeable impact on employment (other than government employment) or the economy. Cash for clunkers; cash for insulation, home buyer's tax credit; renewable energy credit; ethanol credit; GE tax credit (all we know about that one is that it reduces your taxes to zero and leaves you with a carryover toward reducing next year's taxes - despite a rather healthy income). There are more - a lot more. Now the Prez.is reportedly "casting about" for new approaches. He seems to have found one. The latest brainstorm provides a tax credit for employers who hire a vet - surely not in an effort to get the military vote next year.

    If the Chief community Organizer is really serious about getting more folks back to work, here are some suggestions:

    Open up drilling in the gulf again and quit "playing office" with the permitting process. Yes, it may take up to five years for that new oil to get to market, but that will still be sooner than if we don't start now. When Ken Salazar shut it down, he idled a reported eighty thousand or so oil drillers and support personnel in the offshore drilling activity around the gulf. These were all well paying jobs (no pun intended). .

    Open up ANWR for drilling and get busy with the permitting for the drilling up there. ANWR comprises 19,286,722 acres. Surely there is room for a little drilling, without doing too much violence to the wildlife up there. Before we get all excited about ruining the wild life reserve, let's see if we can provide some perspective on that proposition. Reportedly, if you put a postage stamp on a football field you have a proportional representation of how much of the millions of acres comprising ANWR would be disturbed by the drilling operation. Nuff said??

    Get the NLRB out of the Boeing Aircraft "site selection" process. Instead of putting a handful of lawyers to work fighting the NLRB's over reach in court (where sooner of later Boeing will prevail), put several thousand folks to work in south Carolina building aircraft. If we can't see our way clear to do that, we may be creating a whole lot of good paying jobs in Mexico building the next generation of Boeing aircraft. And while you're at it, please don't give us that "NLRB is an independent operation so there's nothing we can do about what they decide" dodge. It matters not whether you actually believe that or you think that we will believe it. Either way, it is an insult and only proves you are grossly more inept than even the most rabid of your detractors has suggested; and that would be really bad. Really?? Yes, really!!

    Cancel all of the new regulations that have come out of Kathleen Sebelius' department. In fact, perhaps a better idea would be to cancel her entire department as well as all the regulations that have been issued during your entire administration. It might also be a good idea to look at a lot of the legislation that has been enacted during the current administration with an eye toward doing away with it. (I'm thinking about Dodd-Frank and Obama care in particular - but there is certainly more. Perhaps the folk would be better served by being made aware of "issues" (I still call them "problems") and let the folks figure out what to do about them instead of trying to control every aspect of our lives. Additionally, it seems likely that if we were to recycle all the paper involved in printing and copying all that stuff, we likely would not have to cut down another tree for pulpwood for forty or fifty years. Everybody wins - except the loggers, who perhaps will have to be retrained in paper recycling - but that's probably doable.

    Leave labor law alone. Quit trying to give the unions a"leg up" on organizing and the like. If they would offer something of value in return for all the dues they collect, they wouldn't need any help from the government. The administration needs to quit trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace. It has really come down to the unions seemingly being good for only one thing any more; that would be bankrolling liberal candidates. We hear that union membership in the private sector has decreased to the point where it is but a small percentage of what it was in days gone by. The public employee unions have apparently prospered and are likely the ones bankrolling the union demonstrations etc. There is one question that seems to evade an answer. That is, "How much is it and where does all the money that the unions are lavishing on public demonstrations and Democrat politicians come from??". As long as they continue to get the lion's share, there would seem to be little likelihood that anyone who is the beneficiary of the union's largesse would look this gift horse in the mouth. I suppose that if anyone who doesn't get much from the unions tried to smoke out the truth, they would be accused of trying to foment class warfare. What is not clear is how that would differ from our continuing fixation with "getting more" out of the rich or having them pay their fair share .. It might be interesting to learn just what the anointed one thinks a fair share is.

    D'ya think??