Fewer college grads will have jobs lined up this year: Still a bleak job market

While members of the class of 2014 have some cause to celebrate, they also know they are a few short months away from starting to pay down their share of the $1 trillion-plus student-loan debt.

The most shocking number of all is that only 17 percent of these soon-to-be grads have a job lined up, according to AfterCollege Inc., which crunches these numbers and also tries to help match employers with recent graduates. Despite our being a year further along on the road to economic recovery, this year’s 17 percent is actually down from the class of 2013’s 20 percent who had a job lined up before graduating.

I do not believe that is what I said.

I believe in working with other nations.

I do not believe China is working with us. We have completely different rules about globalism, and all of them lean wildly to the Chinese side.

China is poised to become the leading nation in the world.

I am just saying this is a critical issue.

We cannot have what we are currently building up in China, as the biggest system in the world.

It just won’t work.

We cannot build up a race-based, exclusionary regime with the largest population in the world, as our superior.

We just cannot. Now it the time to stand up for changes there.

Now.

RE: We cannot have what we are currently building up in China, as the biggest system in the world.

The solution lies HERE in the USA.

STOP THE WILD SPENDING, THAT WILL PREVENT MORE DEBT, which will mean we don’t need to borrow as much from China.

But that’s FISCAL policy.

Jobs in the USA?

INCENTIVES for businesses to expand HERE in the USA. Learn the lesson from businesses moving OUT of Illinois and California into friendlier climes like Texas.

I prefer INCENTIVES instead of coercion (e.g., TAX the hell out of products coming to the US which will only result in higher prices for consumers ).

So, the first thing to ask is this — Why are companies moving their HQ OVERSEAS? Why are Apple, Microsoft, Pfizer and a whole heap of other large companies reorganizing and establishing HQ’s in Ireland, the UK and other places?

The answer is simple — TAX ADVANTAGES. We have the HIGHEST corporate tax in the world.

Why would a business want to expand or grow in the US only to see Uncle Sam take nearly 40% of their profit?

Next question — why are car companies moving from Michigan and California to places like Tennessee, Alabama or ( most recently in the case of Toyota ), Texas?

Simple -— REGULATION, TAXES ( yes, it comes back to these again and again ).

IF the incentives are there, the businesses will come ( yes, even from China ).

So, think about it, I live in New York and Flushing in Queens is like Hongkong, Taiwan or Shanghai in America ( come and visit and you’ll know what I mean ).

Buildings are being created, houses being built, businesses, shops, supermarkets, shopping malls are being established even as I write this. Are many of them owned by Chinese investors? YOU BET.

So who is being hired to build and operate all of these shops, supermarkets, etc.? These investors and entrepreneurs are bringing in their own people and not hiring Americans. This burgeoning immigrant population helps the Democrat party since immigrants vote two to one for the Democrats. The immigrants favor Big Government.

Ethnicity of Flushing, Queens

• White 19.7%

• Black 3.5%

• Hispanic 18.4%

• Asian 44.3%

The Flushing Chinatown is one of the largest and fastest growing ethnic Chinese enclaves outside of Asia, as well as within New York City itself. Main Street and the area to its west, particularly along Roosevelt Avenue, have become the primary nexus of Flushing Chinatown.

However, Chinatown continues to expand southeastward along Kissena Boulevard and northward beyond Northern Boulevard. In the 1970s, a Chinese community established a foothold in the neighborhood of Flushing, whose demographic constituency had been predominantly non-Hispanic white. Taiwanese began the surge of immigration, followed by other groups of Chinese. By 1990, Asians constituted 41% of the population of the core area of Flushing, with Chinese in turn representing 41% of the Asian population. However, ethnic Chinese are constituting an increasingly dominant proportion of the Asian population as well as of the overall population in Flushing and its Chinatown.

A 1986 estimate by the Flushing Chinese Business Association approximated 60,000 Chinese in Flushing alone. Mandarin Chinese (including Northeastern Mandarin), Fuzhou dialect, Min Nan Fujianese, Wu Chinese, Beijing dialect, Wenzhounese, Shanghainese, Suzhou dialect, Hangzhou dialect, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and English are all prevalently spoken in Flushing Chinatown, while the Mongolian language is now emerging. Even the relatively obscure Dongbei style of cuisine indigenous to Northeast China is now available in Flushing Chinatown. Given its rapidly growing status, the Flushing Chinatown may surpass in size and population the original New York City Chinatown in the borough of Manhattan within a few years, and it is debatable whether this has already happened. The New York Times says that Flushing's Chinatown now rivals Manhattan's Chinatown for being the center of Chinese-speaking New Yorkers' politics and trade.

Flushing is included in the 6th and 5th Congressional districts. The 6th District is represented by Grace Meng. She won with 68% of the vote. Greg Meeks is in the 5th District. He won with 90% of the vote. Both went overwhelmingly for Obama.

That’s CAPITALISM and we ought to welcome it. It keeps companies that provide the best products and services on their toes.

The kind of capitalism we practice in the US is not the kind of capitalism practiced in the PRC. We are not playing on an even playing field. And remittances from nationals in the US to their home countries total over $50 billion a year with $12.2 billion going to China annually.

And what about labor costs? We can't compete against the Third World. And there are some regulations that won't be changed, e.g., child labor, minimum wage, environmental laws, etc.

Next question — why are car companies moving from Michigan and California to places like Tennessee, Alabama or ( most recently in the case of Toyota ), Texas?

And the next step is from Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, etc. to overseas. It is not only tax friendliness but low labor costs and right to work laws that motivate companies to move to the South. Certainly, it makes good business sense for foreign car companies to move their assembly plants to the US.

The problem with globalization and free trade is that the US is not playing on an even playing field. We don't have the same access to these other countries' domestic markets. There is disguised protectionism from these countries including the EU with its agricultural products.

And in the US, government at all levels controls 40% of GDP. Government decides winners and losers. Crony capitalism abounds. Is it any wonder that big business and Wall Street contribute more to the Democrats than the Reps? The taxpayer is helping to bail out the banks too big to fail. Multinationals have no allegiance to the US--even those founded here. And they are behind the effort to bring in more foreign workers to depress wages and take American jobs. In the process they are destroying the country.

RE: The kind of capitalism we practice in the US is not the kind of capitalism practiced in the PRC. We are not playing on an even playing field. And remittances from nationals in the US to their home countries total over $50 billion a year with $12.2 billion going to China annually.

You are IGNORING THE OTHER SIDE OF THE EQUATION.

China is also INVESTING IN the USA.

From energy to aviation to entertainment, Chinese investment in the U.S. swelled to a record last year.

I’m not sure we have to FEAR such trade.

The Chinese energy giant invested $2.2 billion in 1.2 million acres in Devon’s position in the Tuscaloosa marine shale in Alabama and Mississippi, the Niobrara in Colorado, the Mississippian, the Utica Shale in Ohio and the Michigan Basin. Why is that a bad thing?

Dalian Wanda Group completed the biggest purchase of a U.S. company by China when it bought AMC Entertainment Inc. for $2.6 billion. Why is that a bad thing?

By the end of this decade, Dalian expects to invest another $7 billion in the U.S. Why is that a bad thing?

A revival in U.S. automotive market has attracted a growing Chinese population and business network to Detroit. Membership in Detroit’s Chinese Business Association counts over 100 Chinese owned businesses, most auto-related, in the region. Well, no one wants to go to Detroit, but the Chinese are willing to take the risk. Why is that a bad thing?

Chinese Internet company Tencent took a majority stake in Santa Monica-based Riot Games worth roughly $400 million in 2012. Best known for the blockbuster game League of Legends, Riot Games boasts the game has amassed 32.5 million players, 11.5 million who play monthly and 4.2 monthly who play daily.

In March 2012, League of Legends became the No. 1 title in Korean PC Café. In Taiwan, estimates are 5% of the city’s entire population plays the game.

Those games are made, designed and programmed HERE in the USA. Why is that a bad thing?

What kind of “capitalism” are they practicing differently that we in America aren’t practicing when our businessmen go overseas to their territory?

“Can someone show where a tariff on foreign goods went well for the USA in the past?
Care to handle this one SOTS?”

From 1865 to 1900, the average tariff paid (not the posted tariff, the tariff paid) on imported goods into the US exceeded 27% in every year. In 1990 the average tariff paid was 2.8% and today the average tariff paid is 1.3%. Today foreign factories pay less (as a percentage of product value) for access to the US market than the American consumer pays in sales taxes to purchase those same products.

The US enjoyed unprecedented industrial growth and economic expansion in the 35 years following the Civil War and became the largest industrial power on the planet. From 1865 to 1900 the average income of non farm workers grew by 75% and grew another 33% by 1918. The number of farms tripled in the nation from 1860 to 1905. GNP grew 600% from 1865-1900. In 1865 there were 35,000 miles of railroad track in the US, by 1900 193,000 miles. US entrepreneurs and inventors created entire industries and innovations — petroleum, electric lighting, camera, typewriter, phonograph, motion pictures, telephone, the department store, national discount store chains (Woolworth), mail order catalogs (Sears), prepackaged foods (Kellogg, Post), refrigeration, and the corporate organization structure. Manned flight would follow in 1903.

I suggest the 35 year period of record economic growth from 1865-1900 is proof high protective tariffs can facilitate a period of rapid economic expansion and high innovation. I would also suggest the past 25 years of virtually zero tariffs, with the resulting deindustrialization, have been a disaster for the US economy and the average working American who has seen a decline in his/her standard of living for the first time in US history.

Please explain to this person who made that “dumb” statement....

I have lived two years in a Communist country. It matters not what the majority of the people want or think. The heavy hand of oppression guides national policies, e.g., the one child policy. We must deal with the government of China when it comes to foreign policy and bilateral relations. The government decides to set up aircraft exclusion zones or to assert territorial claims. Basically, it doesn't matter whether the majority of people in China are Communist or not. It is irrelevant for us. We must deal with the authoritarian government of China.

Read this: State Department 2013 Human Rights Report on China, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macau

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitutionally is the paramount authority. CCP members hold almost all top government and security apparatus positions. Ultimate authority rests with the 25-member Political Bureau (Politburo) of the CCP and its seven-member Standing Committee. China completed its once-in-a-decade leadership transition in March, and Xi Jinping holds the three most powerful positions as CCP general secretary, state president, and chairman of the Central Military Commission. Civilian authorities generally maintained control of the military and internal security forces. Security forces committed human rights abuses.

Repression and coercion, particularly against organizations and individuals involved in civil and political rights advocacy and public interest issues, ethnic minorities, and law firms that took on sensitive cases, were routine. Increasingly officials employed harassment, intimidation, and prosecution of family members and associates to retaliate against rights advocates and defenders. Individuals and groups seen as politically sensitive by authorities continued to face tight restrictions on their freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel. Authorities resorted to extralegal measures such as enforced disappearance and strict house arrest, including house arrest of family members, to prevent public expression of independent opinions. Authorities implemented new measures to control and censor the internet and particularly targeted bloggers with large numbers of followers, leading some to close their online accounts.

Public-interest law firms continued to face harassment, disbarment of legal staff, and closure. There was severe official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, association, and assembly of ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and of ethnic Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and other Tibetan areas. These minorities also faced harsh restrictions on movement. Abuses peaked around high-profile events, such as the visit of foreign officials, national meetings, and commemorations.

As in previous years, citizens did not have the right to change their government, and citizens had limited forms of redress against official abuse. Other human rights problems during the year included extrajudicial killings, including executions without due process; enforced disappearance and incommunicado detention, including prolonged illegal detentions at unofficial holding facilities known as “black jails”; torture and coerced confessions of prisoners; detention and harassment of lawyers, journalists, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others who sought to exercise peacefully their rights under the law; a lack of due process in judicial proceedings; political control of courts and judges; closed trials; the use of administrative detention; restrictions on freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel; failure to protect refugees and asylum seekers; pressure on other countries to return PRC citizens forcibly; widespread corruption; intense scrutiny of and restrictions on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); discrimination against women, minorities, and persons with disabilities; a coercive birth-limitation policy that in some cases resulted in forced abortion (sometimes at advanced stages of pregnancy) or forced sterilization; trafficking in persons;

prohibitions on independent unions; lack of protection for workers’ right to strike; forced and child labor; and poor enforcement of wage, overtime, and occupational safety and health laws.

Although authorities prosecuted a number of abuses of power, particularly with regard to corruption, in many cases the internal disciplinary procedures of the CCP were opaque and only selectively applied to senior officials. Citizens who promoted efforts to combat corruption were themselves detained and arrested. For example, throughout the year, NGO sources reported that authorities arrested at least 29 persons associated with the New Citizens Movement on charges stemming from activities to promote good governance.

Here is how I see tariffs on the other hand...

This is the argument that Professor Walter Williams made.

Imagine that you and I are in a rowboat. I commit the stupid act of shooting a hole in my end of the boat. Would it be intelligent for you to respond by shooting a hole in your end of the boat?

Or, imagine I were a politician and told you that the Russian, Chinese, Korean, Brazilian and German governments were ripping off their citizens by, on the one hand, taxing them to provide subsidies to their domestic steel industries and, on the other, erecting tariff barriers forcing them to pay higher prices for products made with or containing steel.

Would you deem it responsible or intelligent of me to propose retaliatory tariff policy, whereby Americans are ripped off until Russia, China, Korea, Brazilian and German governments stop ripping off their citizens?

Both of these scenarios are applicable to the Bush administration’s 30 percent steel tariffs imposed when he was president. Those tariffs caused the domestic price for some steel products, such as hot-rolled steel, to rise by as much as 40 percent. The clear beneficiaries of the Bush steel tariffs were steel industry executives, stockholders and the approximately 1,700 steelworker jobs that were saved. Well and good, we SEE the jobs saved. But what about the effects that WE DON’T SEE?

Frederic Bastiat said long ago.... “Let us accustom ourselves, then, to avoid judging of things by what is seen only, but to judge of them by that which is not seen.”

Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don’t know whom to blame for their calamity.

According to a study by the Institute for International Economics, saving those 1,700 jobs in the steel industry cost American consumers $800,000 in the form of higher prices for each steelworker job saved. That’s just the monetary side of the picture. According to a study commissioned by the Consuming Industries Trade Action Association, higher steel prices have caused at least 4,500 job losses in no fewer than 16 states — over 19,000 jobs in California, 16,000 in Texas, and 10,000 in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. In other words, industries that use steel are forced to pay higher prices, the products they produce become less competitive and they must lay off workers.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says Congress has the authority “To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” It wasn’t the Framers’ intent to give one group of Americans, such as those in the steel industry, the power to use Congress tax other Americans.

When Congress creates a special advantage for some Americans, it must of necessity come at the expense of other Americans. Those Americans who’re harmed, such as steel-using industries, descend on Congress, asking for some kind of relief for themselves.

Why can’t the same argument apply to OTHER industries we try to protect with tariffs?

China is also INVESTING IN the USA.

These are nationally approved and designed investments. We have to look very carefully at what the Chinese are investing in. They are stealing our technology and intellectual property. They are insinuating themselves in industries that involve national security. They have launched major cyber attacks against the US. They are manipulating their currency. They are not our friends.

In 2012 China invested $77 billion in the US. This represents just 2% of total foreign investment in the US.

TRENDS AND IMPLICATIONS OF CHINESE INVESTMENT IN THE UNITED STATES--Congressional hearing THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2013

"For now, Chinese companies seem most interested in the U.S. energy and service sectors, particularly real estate and financial services. In energy, as in other sectors, they are pursuing technology and expertise they do not yet have. Chinese investors are, for example, acquiring companies with fracking technology, a field in which they are several generations behind.

If current trends continue, much of China's outward FDI will be made by Chinese state-owned enterprises. These SOEs receive substantial benefits from the central and provincial governments that are not available to their foreign competitors, including preferential policies and low cost of capital.

These SOEs are increasing their global presence, seeking to expand China's economic reach and power around the world. They are involved in aerospace, autos, oil, steel, and telecommunications, all industries that the Chinese government have designated as strategic. U.S. companies may face an uneven playing field when competing against Chinese SOEs in the United States and in the global market while enjoying none of the benefits afforded to SOEs by the Chinese government.

Why is that a bad thing?

If you read the entire 130 page hearing transcript, you might understand why Chinese investment in the US should be looked at very carefully. The Chinese have some strategic interests guiding their investment decisions. Again, they are not our friends. At the very least, they are our biggest competitor and at the worst, they are our enemy.

Let me try to understand your policy.

I wasn't giving you policy, but just facts about why it is very difficult for us to compete with the Third World in terms of labor. We have other advantages that could help offset the lower labor costs, but make no mistake about it. Labor costs do matter.

America should create laws that:

1) Outlaw companies that do businesses in the Third world where their labor laws don’t meet our standards

2) TAX products that come to the United States by the same percent our goods are being taxed when we export to these countries.

I didn't provide any such policy recommendations. You are creating phony strawmen. The reality is that we do have to do business in countries that lack similar labor laws, worker protections, disability laws, health care, unions, etc. It puts us at a disadvantage. It is one reason why US firms relocate overseas. It is a given.

We have reciprocal international agreements such as GATT and the WTO that govern tariffs and taxation. In addition we negotiate bilateral trade agreements that specify terms and conditions, e.g. NAFTA. Our problem has been that our government is not tough enough when it comes to holding these other countries accountable when they violate international and bilateral agreements, For example, we have done very little to address Chinese currency manipulations or EU protectionist policies on their agricultural products.

That will bring jobs back to the USA and increase hiring for our college grads?

There are regulatory and tax changes that can be made to make the US more business friendly. We can also develop our energy resources further. Cheap energy is the lifeblood of any economy. We also have decided advantages in infrastructure, political stability, and property protection laws.

And we would have more jobs for our college grads if we stopped importing so many foreign workers to take their jobs and depress wages.

Let’s look at history...

After the stock market crash of 1929, The Hawley-Smoot bill raised American tariffs to record high levels, in an attempt to protect existing jobs and in hopes of helping the unemployed find work producing things that the United States had previously been importing from other countries.

Many businesses were in favor of the new tariffs, hoping to retain or expand their markets, and farmers were especially big supporters of the Hawley-Smoot tariffs.

Who was opposed?

Most of the leading economists in the country were opposed.

A front-page headline in the New York Times of May 5, 1930 read: “1,028 Economists Ask Hoover to Veto Pending Tariff Bill.” Those signing this public appeal against the new tariffs included many of the top economists of the day — 25 professors of economics at Harvard, 26 at the University of Chicago, and 28 at Columbia.

But, to a politician, what do 1,028 votes matter in a country the size of the United States? Rep. Hawley and Sen. Smoot both ignored them, as did President Herbert Hoover, who signed the legislation into law the next month.

The economic reasons for not restricting international trade then were the same as they are today. The only difference is that what happened then gives us a free home demonstration of what can be expected to happen if we go that route again.

The economists’ appeal spelled it out: “The proponents of higher tariffs claim that the increase in rates will give work to the idle. This is not true. We cannot increase employment by restricting trade.”

If 9 percent unemployment was troublesome in 1930, when the Hawley-Smoot tariff was passed, it was nothing compared to the 16 percent unemployment the next year and the 25 percent unemployment two years after that. The annual rate of unemployment in the United States never got back down to the 9 percent level again during the entire decade of the 1930s.

American industry as a whole operated at a loss for two consecutive years. Farmers, who had given strong support to the Hawley-Smoot tariffs, saw their own exports cut by two-thirds as countries around the world retaliated against American tariffs by restricting their imports of American industrial and agricultural products.

The economists’ appeal had warned of “retaliatory tariffs” that would set off a wave of international trade restrictions which would hurt all countries economically. After everything that these economists had warned about happened, tariffs began to be reduced but throughout the 1930s they remained above where they were before the Hawley-Smoot tariffs — and so did unemployment.

Many factors, of course, affected the Great Depression of the 1930s. But later economists looking back have seen the Hawley-Smoot tariff as one of the factors needlessly prolonging the economic disaster.

How much wiser are we today? Not much, if at all.

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