Category: Economy

I get it; you’re collectively saying “who?”  Raimondo is the former governor of tiny little Rhode Island who “failed upwards” by being anointed Commerce Secretary by the current Democrat Party.  I won’t say Joe Biden because we all know he “aint callin’ the shots.”  Raimondo who is famous for shutting her state down during Covid, might just be what pure evil is. Like all other Democrat governors and weak-kneed Republican ones, under the fake guise of Covid being the plague, she actually stopped commerce.  I guess she deserved promotion?

Raimondo was approved by the Senate and most recently made headlines again for wanting to use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to produce more “electronic chips” like the ones in computers, and most new cars. 

“The Biden administration is considering invoking a Cold War-era national security law to force companies in the semiconductor supply chain to provide information on inventory and sales of chips, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Thursday.

The goal is to alleviate bottlenecks that have idled U.S. car production and caused shortages of consumer electronics and to identify possible hoarding, she said in an interview.

Her team for months has sought clarity into how companies allocate their semiconductor supply. But previous meetings that convened firms from different industrial sectors haven’t led to increased transparency and many companies have refused to hand over business data to the government.

The Commerce Department is now asking companies to fill out questionnaires within 45 days providing supply chain information. The request is voluntary but Raimondo said she warned industry representatives that she might invoke the Defense Production Act or other tools to force their hands if they don’t respond.

“What I told them is, ‘I don’t want to have to do anything compulsory but if they don’t comply, then they’ll leave me no choice,’” she said. “I said today we’re evaluating all of our options right now, all the tools. I hope not to go there but we need to see some progress and we definitely need compliance.”

White House Weighs Invoking Defense Law to Get Chip Data

I will go ahead and say it.  What an evil b***h this women is.  Hand over your data to the government?  Fill out questionnaires?  What the heck is this?  Compliance of what?  Just remember folks she is from the government, and she is here to help!  Big shout out to the “never Trumpers” I say to them I hope they reap what they sow.  Things may be bad but at least the Orange Man isn’t tweeting mean things!

If you are wondering, the DPA is a large government order that essentially requires business to adapt and do anything possible to ramp up production of needed materials for national defense.  The DPA has been around for since 9/8/1950 around the Korean War I believe.  Trump used this during early Covid stages essentially forcing Ford/GM and others to make ventilators since, well every American would be on one…. because Covid.

Now apparently computer chips are a vital national security thing, I guess we need to make sure junior has a faster laptop to play Grand Theft Auto, or my new F-150 super duty can be finally put together.  Since you know those are real priorities right now. 

My biggest gripes are this.  Benevolent Queen Raimondo shut her state down, and kept it shut, not following science, she was following Fauci.  Now she wants entire industries to not only work but work harder.  Yeah, did you know any person ignoring her decree about DPA is subject to a felony and a $10,000 fine?  All while government workers, most corporation’s office staffs, long term unemployed, and executives stay at home, because errrrr Covid.  Yeah.  Makes no sense to me.  Push paper?  Well, you can do that at home.  Work in a factory?  Get your butt to work and prepare for 60-hour work weeks!  No time off, no vacation.  This is a decree from your benevolent queen.

Sadly, idiots like Raimondo honestly think this decree will help.  The worst part is, more and more workers will simply walk off the job, it simply isn’t fair to them to sacrifice while others stay at home.  We have seen it play out at Frito Lay and Oreo plants across the country, with workers walking off the job due to conditions and poor work life balance.  Sadly, Raimondo and the Democrats will never understand this.  Maybe that is why the jobs report wasn’t that great the other day?

Hopefully I can get a chip from China for my new laptop or my new truck soon!

The Chief

(Editor’s Note: President Trump was accused of xenophobia and hating minorities when he expressed concerns about microchip production being vital to our economy and saying that it should be in the US and not overseas. Raimondo invoking DPA is another case of symbolism over substance. She is grandstanding on an issue which she has no control over. )

Folks we all know that America’s citizens are honest, hard-working folks; just ask any politician. Conversely, we all know that our leaders would sell-out their dear old granny for another term in office. Stuck in the middle are America’s families.

Families are faced with the question of where to send their child/children to college. I know this process can be a daunting task. My son is looking at a college with an annual tuition of $50K plus room and board. Given the high cost of college, perhaps you should rethink college.

Why, you may ask? We have solid proof that college is a waste of money.

How? We have data from people without four-year degrees self-reporting their 2019 earnings to the government. If widely circulated, the data we are about to present would shatter the myth that college is the path to wealth.  The data that we are about to present is not manipulated by government bureaucrats or defenders of college. Why encumber yourself with debt when you can earn the wages that we are about to present for more menial jobs?

What you are about to read is data that was randomly collected during a one-week period processing unemployment claims at California’s Employment Development Department. You may ask how I know this stuff is true and all I can tell you is that the following wage information was visually verified by our blog’s staff.

There it is unequivocal proof that you don’t need college.

Analysis

Gospel truth, the highest paid person in our list was a maid who made $950,000. I guess that she learned from Al Capone that if you report illicit income, they can’t send you to prison for tax evasion.

The Beauty Operator Apprentice was one that I didn’t recognize. I had to ask the wife. Her understanding of the job is that this babe is the one sweeping up the hair clippings after you get a haircut. I never knew people pushing a broom were paid $65,000.

I tried searching for Abstract Manager on the Internet but came up with nothing that made sense. Given the wage scale, you’d think they were government employees, but we all know that government never lays off anyone. With a pay range of $83K to $300K, it must be a good gig.

The last job that needs special remarks is the General Maintenance/Janitor gig. Please note the wage of $150K. Folks this person claims to have earned this wage in Nevada County California. Per Nevada County statistics, the per capita income for this county in 2018 was just over $37K.

Hopefully by now, you are suspecting that I have withheld some information. If you think this is the case, then you are correct. Remember that I said that these wages were self-reported. This is true but I didn’t say why and therein is the rub. These wages were reported by people applying for California unemployment. The State category in my list is the state the person lives in now. Oh, none of these folks had any reported income on record with the State of California.

Who said crime doesn’t pay? These folks are doing all right or so they would have you believe.

Final thought, I hope this small widow into the fraud making its way thru EDD would be of interest to our readers.

Well, that is not an easy question, and I certainly won’t have the answer after these messages from our advertisers.  The answer also certainly isn’t in that click bait article you found on Yahoo News.  Additionally, it won’t be on your cable debate show were a left and right pundit lock horns for a segment and both declare victory afterwards.  The answer is easy to see, but hard to explain.

We are suffering in the overall economy; you just cannot see it yet.

First of all, we have to go back to the “essential workers only economy” this started the issue.  If you were really an essential worker; food operations, manufacturing, grocery etc. type jobs you were required to come to work, no days off and usually mandatory overtime.  Ask any grocery store worker, or someone at a slaughterhouse, or who makes toilet paper/Clorox wipes.  These folks are burned out after doing that for a year, and rightfully so.  They need a break; some in these fields are even quitting their jobs or leaving their fields all together.  So, you have a slight shortage as folks are tired, I can’t blame them. 

Next you have the supply/demand issue. As you may have forgotten, we closed down dine in, this essentially shut down food suppliers; think USFoods, Sysco and Restaurant Supply Co.  Contrary to public belief, manufacturing lines/plants aren’t convertible, meaning you can’t change the toilet paper from commercial grade 1-ply to household based 2-ply by flipping a switch.  Food service works the same way. The companies named earlier specialize in selling cases of food product to parks, restaurants, correction facilities and institutions, not a grocery store.  While most still would argue corporations are large enough, a company like Kraft can innovate on the fly, they can’t.  As a result, you had a supply chain meltdown, which is continuing to this day, as you can see with food prices. I will touch on that later.

The employment shortage is a massive issue right now.  Yes, it is 2 pronged; first of all, you have the aforementioned overworked employees.  Additionally, you have the workers who were laid off and collected the Trump/Biden extra money on top of unemployment.  You may notice I blame Trump. Yes, he signed it into law. I also believe he was given awful advice by his aides.  Either way, those folks are slowly coming back to work, but most are holding out since, well… its free extra money and the American Dream—according to the Democrats—is living at home and being paid not to work.  This creates a far bigger problem than any other factor so far mentioned in this blog post.

The issue at hand is that experienced workers are not reporting back. You may not believe it, but a waiter doesn’t get their start at The Capital Grill Steakhouse, they get it at a local diner or short order chain restaurant.  As a result, the top tier chains are having an impossible time finding help, leading to bigger issues down line.  Just today I went to Chili’s. The place was 100% open, but the staff was non-existent, the bartender was also waiting all tables in the bar area, as well as cleaning!  The lack of experience showed, but I cannot blame her, she doesn’t have help.  I saw other folks giving her an earful, several of which were old enough to know better.  The place had at least 3 signs that I counted, they are desperate for workers.

Which brings me full circle.  The businesses now have to pay very high starting wages to low skilled workers.  I saw a McDonalds speaker box advertising $17.50 an hour starting pay.  A McDonalds, in a city of 175,000.  That is likely the person working the till, what do you pay the line cook?  Fry cook?  Assistant manager and Manager?  Are we going to see $85K a year managing a McDonalds in the suburbs?  In reality, the wages are necessary as one must coax the folks at home on the sofa watching daytime TV to get back to work.  Which means you must beat Uncle Sam’s $300 a week kicker to your paycheck.  As a result of this, you see price increases that are only going to get worse.  You see, most businesses hedge on food expenses meaning they lock into a long-term deal, at a fixed price.  Well, “Force Majeure” is a fancy term for an event outside of your control that allows you to cancel a contract and get out of it.  Due to Covid, suppliers invoked this contract clause. You didn’t really feel it at first since it was only grocery stores loading up on food.  Now we see businesses re-opening trying to load up on goods as well.  We haven’t even really seen the return of concerts, weddings or the like yet.  These put upward pressure on food.  A lack of workers puts upward pressure on wages, which increases food costs. 

Think of it this way, Slaughterhouse USA can process 10,000 burgers in a day.  That is not problem when they are selling to grocery clients, and a few restaurants doing mostly take out.  When demand picks up, they can still only produce 10,000 patties, so now the grocer, the takeout business which is ramping up, the fine dining business, and others are bidding for the 10,000 patties.  But my slaughterhouse is short workers who want to vacation/quit/breaks, so now I’m under pressure to produce 10,000 patties a day.  A tall order when there are only about 4 producers of beef in the economy, this was due to merger and acquisition activity.  Now due to a supply, demand, and labor shortage, price inflation is nuts.  Don’t believe me, a friend who is a big shot at a food supply company told me he can’t believe what he is seeing, and says it’s going to get worse.  Consider this a lesson as to why the 90-day calendar does not allow for any deviation from the mean from business.  We saw this coming, and couldn’t keep up, as a result we will pay the price.

The first solution is re-open fully, the second is eliminate the extra unemployment kicker, then we must normalize the labor market and try to get the supply chain under control.  That will be a tall order for President Depends, Joe Biden.  Biden seems more enthralled with going door to door and finding out whether folks have gotten the vaccine than doing anything to help the country.

Enjoy your $20 fish and chips, with no drink mind you… Seriously check out the menu at Mimi’s Café.

The Chief

Editor’s Note: Mimi’s official online menu does not have any prices on it or I would have posted the link. In my experience, when a menu has no prices and you have to ask, you better go somewhere else that you can afford.

Folks, as I reported, I recently took a position at California’s most publicized agency, Employment Development Department (EDD). While I’m just a tiny part of the organization, I can attest that there is a lot of crazy junk gumming up the works. This post is to give you an idea of what’s happening.

To collect unemployment in California, and presumably anywhere else, you must normally meet two conditions: first you must be able to prove your identity, and second, you must have worked in California and contributed to the state’s unemployment fund.

The following are all true. Names are withheld so I can keep my job.

While I was in a training session, an applicant for unemployment was randomly picked as an example. This guy applied with a variety of documents such as Green Card, driver’s license, etc. The training allowed us to actually see the documents submitted to the State of California. While the name on all the documents matched, the birthdays were very wrong. The initial batch of documents submitted by this applicant had birthdates in two different months and on two different days. Of the documents submitted, at least two had one birthdate and others had a second birthdate. In the initial pass, this guy was denied unemployment; however, he appealed the denial. He was approved in the appeals process by someone that seems to be designated as an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ). Since he was now identity approved, the trainer, entered the Social Security Number that he provided into one of their many computer programs and the Social Security Administration (SSA) returned the same name with yet a third birthdate for this individual. At this point, I and another trainee, both with private sector background, challenged the instructor. How can a guy that submitted identity documents with three different birthdates in different months be approved for benefits? The instructor answered that when he appealed, he submitted two documents with the same birthdate; thus, he was now identity approved by the ALJ and it’s our job to mark the applicant as eligible.

Folks you can’t believe the ages of applicants for unemployment. A large segment of the applicants are minors. And no, I don’t mean 15 with a paper route. The youngest applicant that I personally have seen was 1 ½ years old. Born in 2019. But the little tyke is in good company. Here are some other years that I noted, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2010, 2007, 2008, and 2005.

One girl applied for unemployment because she earned $100 in cash during 2019 and due to Covid, she couldn’t babysit in 2020.

One applicant (still a minor) says he (or she) was a child actor but hadn’t worked in seven years and was applying for unemployment during Covid.

One applicant about 11 years old, said she was a part-time model and lost income due to Covid. She was the only minor that had any reported income to the state.

Not the be left out, the infirm and elderly are also trying to cash in on California’s Unemployment Give-away. The oldest applicant I personally have seen was born in 1930. This person is in good company also. Again, no reported income but they’re applying anyways. Makes you wonder if there’s a consolation prize just for entering.

Many people have notes on their accounts stating, “over 100 SSNs submitted from this address.” I’ve seen others with 35 at the same address. Multiple applicants at the same address are common to see.

Other notes on accounts include, “Claimant has not lived at address filed on this claim for 17 years” and “claimant letter … postmarked FedEx International from India” and “verified claimant address on internet maps, the address is a vacant lot.”

You may not realize that you can live virtually anywhere in the world and apply for unemployment in California. I spoke with my sister about this, and she correctly reminded me, it’s a matter of where you worked then, not where you are living now. Thus, applications have arrived from all over. In a brief time, I’ve seen applications from Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas. The thought of California sending money to Texas is funny, considering that they are already send many jobs there.

This reminds me that one fellow did have a note on his account stating that he had never lived or worked in California, only Georgia, but he applied anyways.

There is a diversity of applicants. I’ve seen many great leaders seeking handouts at the public trough including Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, and Israel. Oh and a few folks named after Greek gods as well. No matter who you are or where you live, every applicant is given the same process. If we can check the boxes for you, then you can qualify.

Oh, all my examples above were approved for identity purposes. Whether they eventually got a check from Uncle Gavin is unknown.

EDD has the same problems as every other state agency, the computer programs can’t talk to each other. EDD has a mind-boggling amount of resources available but at the end of the day, its up to humans to enter data because processes and programs are limited. Again, the backbone of the agency are those pesky Unix programs that we patched back in the Y2K days.

I currently have to use four different programs to do my job but I’m aware of at lease five more that others in the agency are using. My first step is to match the claim information in three different programs, if the unemployment application is not entered in all three, it’s a hard stop and the email telling me what to do gets returned to the pool of limbo and despair and I go on to the next item.

Folks, I might get into more detail about the claims process in another post, but my overall point is that all these dead-end claims are clogging up the system. All these folks with no business applying are gumming up the works and preventing others from being vetted for eligibility. Yes, EDD is a mess, but they have plenty of help as I hope I’ve illustrated.

Folks I just want to make a quick point and alert you to where this country should be spending its defense dollars…cyber security.  Yeah, like to stop hackers.  Like the ones from Russia who shut the Colonial Pipeline and are causing gas shortages in the southeast and eastern seaboard.  Reports are that Colonial was using antiquated software and the Russians were easily able to hack into it, causing the failsafe to shut the pipeline down. 

I will defer to the Blog Father on issues of hacker defense and the like since that is his wheelhouse, but allow me to point out, not a single bullet was fired.  Russia didn’t need a fighter jet, a tank or a boat, just a few hackers.

We paid the hackers 5 million, because well, people were panicking due to a lack of gasoline.  Folks, if you are just now starting to pay attention to this threat, the number of businesses, school districts, hospitals, and cities that have paid ransom over the last two years are legion.

We spend all this money each year on defense: jets, tanks, boats, missiles, bombs, guns etc.  Why nothing on cybersecurity?  This needs to be a wake-up call, actually it should be the second, we shut the entire country due to Covid-19, and now a pipeline gets hacked, and we cannot supply the south or east coast gasoline.  Stop the military industrial complex and start getting with the program!

We spend all this money and have nothing to show for it, stop with all the pension and bloated payroll spending and let’s rethink this strategy before something bad happens, like I don’t know the electrical grid is taken down? Or an EMP weapon is used.

Johnnie Does

Troll commentary:  Joe Biden was asked about his thoughts on the pipeline, and he said, “I stopped that pipeline the day I was inaugurated…come on man!”