[Synnen]

I am blocked from watching videos at work--can you sum up the article, please?

[excon]

I am blocked from watching videos at work--can you sum up the article, please?

Hello Synn:

In summation, he saw the senate take away $10 billion in subsidies from the ethanol industry yesterday, and he's simply guarding HIS $10 BILLION in taxpayer handouts... He mentions them SEVERAL times during the interview.

I'm sure Steve will have a different take on what he said, so I encourage you to watch it when you get home.

excon

[speechlesstx]

I am blocked from watching videos at work--can you sum up the article, please?

The transcript was there also Synnen, but here you go.

Watson: “I was very concerned about the tax proposals in the Menendez bill that came forward that day because i never thought I would see the day when an administration and more than half the U.S. senate would propose a tax bill that actually would disadvantage 132-year-old company like Chevron relative to Russian, Chinese, French, Italian and other companies, not just outside the united states, but inside the united states of America. So we did push back on bills that were being critical trying to impose punitive taxes on our business. We can create jobs, we can play a positive role and that’s my message.”

...

CNBC: So do you think… we’re in D.C. this is the red tape capital, are the policies or lack of policies that we’re seeing here hurting job creation at Chevron?

Watson: They are. In fact, we told a group of senators this morning, that there’s a long list of regulations that have been enacted and been in place for a long time and new ones that keep coming that are restricting our ability to create jobs. We’ve provided that list to the senators. But for our industry in particular, you know, deep water drill ship employs about 200 people directly and 1,000 indirectly. It raises revenue for the government, puts people back to work, reduces imported oil. We just want to be put in the game. We can create jobs if we’re given the opportunity.

Some of the oil companies "demands":

• Opening up acreage to development

• Issuing permits in a timely fashion

• Keeping in place a tax structure that allows the investment to create those jobs

[Synnen]

Sorry--I clicked on the link and got "your corporation blocked this webpage. Reason: videos". I wasn't even able to see the transcript. Thank you for posting it. (they're kind of Nazis around here for where we can go on our computers).

And yeah... sorry. I don't feel sorry for the oil companies at all. Want to know how to lower costs? Stop paying the shareholders such a high portion, and reinvest it in the company. Even if we DID open more land (which is just asking for another environmental disaster), they still have to get it to a refinery.

Want to know how the oil companies could create a LOT of jobs AND lower the price of US oil? Build 3 more refineries in the US. With their own money, thank you very much.

[excon]

• Keeping in place a tax structure that allows the investment to create those jobs

Hello again, Steve:

In other words, keep your hands OFF MY taxpayer handout!

excon

PS> If the tax structure they need to create jobs is already IN PLACE, where's the jobs??

[speechlesstx]

Who said anything about feeling sorry for oil companies?

[talaniman]

Lets face it, corporations and banks want the laws they want, and they pay good money to get them. According to the video, they gave a list of laws they want struck down so they can make more money, on top of record profits.

Bottomline, they want more money than they have, and then they might share it, or invest it, or circulate it. Yeah that 35% business tax looks good on paper, but with all the loop holes, they don't pay nearly that, no American company does. Nor has ever in the last eight years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/bu...ardt.html?_r=1

Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

The problem with the current system is that it distorts incentives. Decisions that would otherwise be inefficient for a company — and that are indeed inefficient for the larger economy — can make sense when they bring a big tax break. “Companies should be making investments based on their commercial potential,” as Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, says, “not for tax reasons.”

Instead, airlines sometimes buy more planes than they really need. Energy companies drill more holes. Drug companies conduct research with only marginal prospects of success.

Inefficiencies like these slow economic growth, and they are the reason that both conservatives and liberals criticize the corporate tax code so harshly. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, says it hurts job creation. Mr. Obama, in his State of the Union address, said that the system “makes no sense, and it has to change.”

Right now, they don't have to create jobs to make money. Just keep giving them MORE tax breaks.

[paraclete]

Back to the original premise, governments don't create jobs, they take credit for job creation, if they are doing their job they create opportunities. It is people whether acting through corporations or otherwise who create jobs, who have the individual vision to take a risk.

We can have a massive public service but this administration's job is the next's budget cut, so let's not talk about creating jobs, but about employment. Now someone says consumers create employment but reality says more productivity, so the existing labour force can deal with more consumers. How do we do this? By reorganising what we do and we do this continually. Soon robotics will take over manual tasks and so employment will become intellectual. What happens to those who are unskilled? This is a question no one wants to tackle, because retraining just doesn't cut it.

I suggest we are going to need many more gardeners, because it is difficult to do that job with robotics, but even that job can be done once and then maintenance. Academia here we come!

[speechlesstx]

Remember that minimum wage increase that was supposed to give people a "living wage" I think they called it? As had been forecast, the least skilled among us are finding it difficult to reap the benefits. Only 1 in 4 teens are finding employment, the lowest level since 1948.

Perhaps you've already noticed around the neighborhood, but this is a rotten summer for young Americans to find a job. The Department of Labor reported last week that a smaller share of 16-19 year-olds are working than at anytime since records began to be kept in 1948.

Only 24% of teens, one in four, have jobs, compared to 42% as recently as the summer of 2001. The nearby chart chronicles the teen employment percentage over time, including the notable plunge in the last decade. So instead of learning valuable job skills—getting out of bed before noon, showing up on time, being courteous to customers, operating a cash register or fork lift—millions of kids will spend the summer playing computer games or hanging out.



The lousy economic recovery explains much of this decline in teens working, and some is due to increases in teen summer school enrollment. Some is also cultural: Many parents don't put the same demands on teens as they once did to get out and work.

But Congress has also contributed by passing one of the most ill-timed minimum wage increases in history. One of the first acts of the gone-but-not-forgotten Nancy Pelosi ascendancy was to raise the minimum wage in stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007. Even liberals ought to understand that raising the cost of hiring the young and unskilled while employers are slashing payrolls is loopy economics.

Or maybe not. The Center for American Progress, often called the think tank for the Obama White House, recently recommended another increase to $8.25 an hour. Though the U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%, the thinkers assert that a rising wage would "stimulate economic growth to the tune of 50,000 new jobs." So if the government orders employers to pay more to hire workers when they're already not hiring, they'll somehow hire more workers. By this logic, if we raised the minimum wage to $25 an hour we'd have full employment.

Now ain't that some kind of logic, force employers to pay more so they'll hire more people. Makes no sense at all, unless of course you WANT the economy to tank.

And who was hit the hardest? Black teens, whose unemployment rate stood at 41.6% in April.

Black teens have had the worst of it, with their unemployment rate rising to 41.6% in April from 29% in 2007, faster than almost any other group. A 2010 study by economists William Even of Miami University of Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University found that as a result of the $2.10 increase in minimum wage, "teen employment dropped by 6.9 percent. . . . For the teen population with less than 12 years of education completed, teen employment dropped by 12.4 percent." For teens priced out of the labor market, their wage fell to zero.

Well at least they'll have the summer off.

[Wondergirl]

Only 1 in 4 teens are finding employment

Once all the states get rid of all the illegals immigrants, there will be plenty of jobs. One state's blueberry harvest isn't getting picked after it made such a law. The teens in that state should be overjoyed!

From the Peach Pundit, May 31, 2011 --

Last week, Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black agreed to conduct a survey for Governor Nathan Deal to determine if media reports of labor shortages for picking crops across South Georgia are real or contrived by opponents of the newly signed immigration reform law.

According to the Associated Press’ Ray Henry, Black is to report his findings by June 10th. A letter sent by Deal requesting the analysis stated “Many farmers have raised concerns about the availability of an adequate, stable workforce for Georgia’s production agriculture industry.”

In the same report, Black accepted the Governor’s request, stating “We’re trying to determine if there’s a problem at all and to what extent it’s affecting growers.”

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association places a $300 Million price tag on crops at risk because of labor shortages. The same report lists anecdotal evidence of a Tifton farmer who had between 75 and 100 workers that usually show up to harvest fruits and vegetables but did not, causing some crops to perish in the field. He’s now planning on cutting back planting for summer crops.

Similarly, a blueberry farmer from Baxley reported that he’s short one third of his labor, despite paying a $50 signing bonus and $25 weekly bonuses on top of his normal pay scale.

[talaniman]

Minimum wage applies to everyone, not just teen agers. If you are adults making minimum wage, that makes you poor enough to be on welfare, and hardly able to barely buy groceries. That might be great for companies, but hardly great for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Try to get sympathy about unemployed teen agers when dad is unemployed because his factory closed, and now he flips hamburgers for minimum wage. Just because they can be happy with a 7/8 bucks an hour in India, doesn't mean the living is great here.

A teen who can't find work will have a lot of time with his unemployed dad this summer. Heck, if they lowered the minimum wage, then they could make you work for it, and they still can, skilled, or unskilled. How much has your pay gone up in the last 10/15 years?

[speechlesstx]

Then if the Dems are right, let's just raise the minimum again and we'll have full employment in no time. Dad and Jr can both find work.

[Wondergirl]

Then if the Dems are right, let's just raise the minimum again and we'll have full employment in no time. Dad and Jr can both find work.

Or the big corporations can bring back the jobs they sent overseas. Or hey! Use all that surplus money to create jobs.

[speechlesstx]

Create jobs for the hell of it, yeah that's going to happen.

[paraclete]

Remember that minimum wage increase that was supposed to give people a "living wage" I think they called it? As had been forecast, the least skilled among us are finding it difficult to reap the benefits. Only 1 in 4 teens are finding employment, the lowest level since 1948.



Now ain't that some kind of logic, force employers to pay more so they'll hire more people. Makes no sense at all, unless of course you WANT the economy to tank.

And who was hit the hardest? Black teens, whose unemployment rate stood at 41.6% in April.



Well at least they'll have the summer off.

there is a false logic here that low wages stimulate economic growth. That may work in an economy which has no industry such as in Asia, but it has limited application because many other things have to be in operation. China booms, it has a stable political environment, Pakistan languishes, it has an unstable political environment, yet both have low wages and abundant labour. The US is moving into a post industrial phase and structural unemployment is the norm until new skills are learned and it doesn't matter what the wage rates are, Soon you will need a degree to sweep streets not because knowledge is important but because employers value someone who can demonstrate they can think

[talaniman]

Then the "job creators" aren't the job creators you thought they were are they? No matter what they pay you, they make money, and it's a fact that wages are only 10 percent of business expenses. That's right 10 percent. The only companies that don't make money are MISMANAGED ones.

But I'm a former union worker, and we had profit sharing. AND THEY MADE BOO-KOO MONEY. If they didn't we didn't. Shared sacrifice, shared prosperity, shared risk.

[Wondergirl]

The US is moving into a post industrial phase

And the retail/service industry (what we are in now) has traditionally paid less than manufacturing.

[paraclete]

And the retail/service industry (what we are in now) has traditionally paid less than manufacturing.

That's it, there is a certain compensation for risk and skill, but service industries pay better than manufacturing and you are moving away from unionised industries to knowledge industries. My country lost most of its manufacturing and still maintains full employment, it took a lot of structural adjustment and a great deal of pain but it is all underpinned by an adult minimum wage of $15.50 an hour

[tomder55]

China booms, it has a stable political environment,

it's a Potamkin economy... construction on housing and office space that will never be occupied just to keep construction workers employed .

Soon you will need a degree to sweep streets not because knowledge is important but because employers value someone who can demonstrate they can think

College Education, Good Jobs: Why Degrees Are Overrated - TIME

Indeed many teenagers would benefit from an apprentice like education. That is where the minimum wage further harms their prospects. So instead of 'on the job training' ,where the young adult learns a trade while being paid for it ,they are forced instead to go to a trade school and pay to learn the same thing .

[paraclete]

it's a Potamkin economy... construction on housing and office space that will never be occupied just to keep construction workers employed .

Yes Tom much criticism, but remember those jobs exist because you exported your employment to China. Eventually those buildings will be occupied as the villagers move to the cities. In a nation where capital is in the hands of government who is going to initiate apartment building and civic development, the peasants or the government? I think you should visit China instead of criticising them, you might get a different view.
http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/j...-1226085341214

Indeed many teenagers would benefit from an apprentice like education. That is where the minimum wage further harms their prospects. So instead of 'on the job training' ,where the young adult learns a trade while being paid for it ,they are forced instead to go to a trade school and pay to learn the same thing .

no Tom you opted for a different paradigm. A minimum wage prevents exploitation a concept foreign in the US, which since its inception has depended upon it.. There is nothing wrong with trade education in schools, in fact we have adopted trade education as part of high school courses. This prequalifies the young for employment. There is nothing wrong with trade schools where skills are taught, usually as part of an apprenticeship. You have a pecular idea, on the one hand a paid college education yet object to paying for trade training.

No one values what they get for free, particularly the young