Amicus Brief in V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump
10 hours ago
The Personal Blog Site of Joel Voelz
It typically takes a team of two certified electricians half an hour to replace the old, spinning meter. In one day, two people can install about 15 new meters, or about 5,000 in a year. Were a million smart meters to be installed in a year, 400 installation jobs would be created. It follows that the planned U.S. deployment of 20 million smart meters over five years, or 4 million per year, should create 1,600 installation jobs. Unless more meters are added to the annual deployment schedule, this workforce of 1,600 should cover installation needs for the next five years.Job destruction through efficiency improvements isn’t a bad thing, but it is when the government forces it upon us. If new smart metering technologies are economically sensible, the private sector will introduce these technologies to the market. Just as the government shouldn’t attempt to create jobs, it shouldn’t protect jobs from being destroyed, either. Sharan writes, “[I]nstead of creating jobs, smart metering will probably result in net job destruction. This should not be surprising because the main method of making the electrical grid “smart” is by automating its functions. Automation by definition obviates the need for people.” We replaced ditch diggers with mechanized agriculture equipment with the end result being a net gain in productivity and wealth. The process of creative destruction allocates capital and labor to better use, increases gains from productivity and makes us all better off. Using stimulus money for smart metering is unnecessary if it such a good idea.
Although a surge of new digital meters will be produced, the manufacturing process is highly automated. And with much of it accomplished overseas, net creation in domestic manufacturing jobs is expected to be only in the hundreds. In R&D and IT services, high-paying white-collar jobs are on the horizon, but as with manufacturing, the number of jobs created is forecast to be in the hundreds or low thousands. Now let’s consider job losses. It takes one worker today roughly 15 minutes to read a single meter. So in a day, a meter reader can scan about 30 meters, or about 700 meters a month. Meters are typically read once a month, making it the base period to calculate meter-reading jobs. Reading a million meters every month engages about 1,400 personnel. In five years, 20 million manually read meters are expected to disappear, taking with them some 28,000 meter-reading jobs.”
A small news item from Tracy, Calif., caught my eye last week. Local station CBS 13 reported: “Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 911 for a medical emergency. But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year, which allows them to call 911 as many times as necessary. Or there’s the option of not signing up for the annual fee. Instead they will be charged $300 if they make a call for help.”The lean years? The lean years!?!?!?!!?
Welcome to the lean years.
Yes, sir, we’ve just had our 70 fat years in America, thanks to the Greatest Generation and the bounty of freedom and prosperity they built for us. And in these past 70 years, leadership — whether of the country, a university, a company, a state, a charity, or a township — has largely been about giving things away, building things from scratch, lowering taxes or making grants.
But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, “where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,” said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum.
Indeed, to lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag.
Ms Anna Coote
New Economics Foundation
London, UK
Dear Ms Coote:
The BBC reports on a newly released study in which you and your co-authors endorse a 21-hour workweek (“Cut working week to 21 hours, urges think tank,” Feb. 13). You’re quoted by the BBC: “So many of us live to work, work to earn, and earn to consume, and our consumption habits are squandering the earth’s natural resources…. [With a 21-hour workweek] We could even become better employees – less stressed, more in control, happier in our jobs and more productive.”
Intrigued, I read your study on line. I’ve many questions; here are four.
First, if a shorter workweek makes people more productive in their paid jobs, how do you know that they won’t the “squander the earth’s natural resources” at a faster pace than they’re doing now?
Second, even if a 21-hour work week results in less “squandering of the earth’s natural resources” while at paid jobs, why are you so sure that the total amount of resource “squandering” won’t rise as a result of all the “unpaid labour” that you are so keen that folks do with their time away from paid work? Driving Granny on Friday to a holiday in the Cotswolds might “squander” more resources than staying in London to work for pay that day.
Third, because much paid work is devoted to discovering new resources, new supplies of resources, and new ways to get more output from each unit of resource, how do you know that shortening the workweek won’t result inlower supplies of the earth’s natural resources? For example, BP’s recent discovery of a huge oil supply at its Tiber Prospect in the Gulf of Mexicoincreased the relevant supplies of the earth’s natural resources. After all, resources that remain unknown to humans are effectively non-existent: these ‘resources’ might not be “squandered,” but being unavailable for use as resources today and forever means that, economically, they don’t exist – they’re not resources in any meaningful sense.
Fourth, you choose 21 hours because it’s close to the average amount of time each week that working-age Brits (employed and unemployed) work for pay. So what? If I work 42 hours a week and my unemployed neighbor works zero hours, why does the average of 21 hours of paid work between us present itself as the ideal length of the workweek – especially given your goal of reducing the total number of hours that people spend “squandering the earth’s natural resources” while working for pay? Why not, say, a ten-hour workweek? Because you merely presume that most people will be happier with Britain’s workweek shortened from 35 to 21 hours, why not presume that they’d be downright euphoric by being allowed to work no more than ten hours weekly?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
I don’t know if people noted, because during the health care debate everybody was saying the President is trying to take over — a government takeover of health care. I don’t know if anybody noticed that for the first time this year you saw more people getting health care from government than you did from the private sector — not because of anything we did, but because more and more people are losing their health care from their employers. It’s becoming unaffordable. That’s what we’re trying to prevent.First of all, we definitely noted the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report the President references above. But more importantly, if we are to take the President at his word, and believe him when he says he wants to prevent a government takeover of health care, then he should know that his plan is the exact wrong direction to go.
We’ve got to control costs, both for families and businesses, but also for our government. Everybody out there who talks about deficits has to acknowledge that the single biggest driver of our deficits is health care spending. We cannot deal with our deficits and debt long term unless we get a handle on that. So that has to be part of a package.But guess what? According to that same CMS report, Obamacare would increase, not decrease, U.S. health expenditures by $234 billion by 2019.
Let’s establish some common facts. Let’s establish what the issues are, what the problems are, and let’s test out in front of the American people what ideas work and what ideas don’t. And if we can establish that factual accuracy about how different approaches would work, then I think we can make some progress.As the facts above clearly show, if reducing health care spending and stopping the government takeover of health care are your priorities, then Obamacare needs to be scrapped and Congress needs to start over.
People want the government to help provide jobs, but they also want it to cut the deficit.
They wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves
the job of serious Washington grown-ups with big populist constituencies--both presidents Roosevelt, Reagan, even Richard Nixon--is to respond to the rage with the minimum necessary demagoguery, throw them a few bones to calm them down, and then make deals with your fellow members of the elected elite.
...In the old days, the elite media really did control the national political discourse; there were no partisan, splenetic cable news or ubiquitous talk-radio channels and no blogosphere to keep the populists riled up and make them feel the excitement of a mob. Until fifteen years ago, presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations, keep them on reasonable simmer. But the new technologies have, maybe permanently, turned up the political heat to boil.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.