Monday, August 6, 2018

WALL STREET SHUDDERS! - TRUMP'S TIGHT LABOR MARKET INCREASES WAGES FOR SMALL BUSINESS WORKERS


"Nearly half of Americans now agree that illegal immigration crushes U.S. wages."

Trump’s Tight Labor Market Increases Wages for Small Business Workers



immigration
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert




American workers employed at small businesses across the United States are benefitting strongly with increased wages as President Trump clamps down on immigration.

The Trump economic model has been to tighten the labor market — partially through increased immigration enforcement—by asking businesses to hire Americans who have been marginalized from the workforce rather than imported a foreign underclass of cheap labor.
This economic model has secured new job opportunities and higher wages for blue collar American workers as there is less downward pressure on their hourly salaries from mass unskilled, illegal immigration.
The latest National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) survey finds that small businesses are raising wages to retain and attract new workers into the workforce.
“Reports of higher worker compensation increased 1 point from June to a net 32 percent of all firms,” the NFIB report states. “Plans to raise compensation also rose 1 point to a net 22 percent, just 2 points below its recent peak of 24 percent in January.”

(NFIB) 
Likewise, NFIB officials said the tightened labor market absolutely gives room for more and more marginalized Americans to readily re-enter the labor market.
The NFIB survey found that 37 percent of all small businesses said they had unfilled job openings. About 57 percent of small construction businesses reported unfilled job openings, along with 46 percent of small manufacturing businesses and 45 percent of small wholesale trade businesses.
“Record job openings suggest that the economy has the potential to keep up its growth pace over the next few quarters if the ‘staffing problem’ can be resolved or mitigated,” the NFIB report notes. “An increase in the labor force participation rate would help.”

(NFIB)
Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA)—Trump’s closest ally in the House—told local media that there are still roughly 10 million prime working-age Americans who are not in the labor force. Brat says the U.S., as Trump has sought to do, should focus on re-integrating those marginalized Americans back into the workforce rather than import foreign workers to take coveted American jobs.
“The irony is it makes it more transparent what the real problem of the labor market is,” Brat said of the tight labor market.
“The answer is not to bring in 10 million folks from abroad,” Brat said.
With immigration, the U.S. continues to import more than 1.5 million illegal and legal immigrants every year, resulting in decades of poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.
Nearly half of Americans now agree that illegal immigration crushes U.S. wages.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

PUT EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IN JAIL AND AT THAT INSTANCE THE INVASION ENDS!

THE LA RAZA INVASION:

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration floods the market with foreign laborspikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.   NEIL MUNRO


"The president must have uttered/tweeted the words “E-Verify” at some point over the past three years, but no instance comes immediately to mind, certainly not a recent one"

Where’s E-Verify? 

By Mark Krikorian 

The Corner at National Review Online, July 24, 2018 

Illegal immigration isn’t just about criminals and the border — but that’s almost all we’ve been hearing about, whether at the national level or in the states, as had been the case leading up to the July 24 Georgia Republican-primary runoff.

Criminal deportations are essential, of course, and need to be increased. Sanctuary cities, shielding such criminals, have to be reined in. And the routine abuse of asylum, especially using children as a ticket into the U.S., has to be quashed. 

But most illegal aliens are neither drunk-driving, dope-dealing rapists, nor bogus asylum seekers coached by immigration lawyers on how to game the system. They’re ordinary working stiffs, half of them arriving legally and then never leaving. They’re mainly coming to work, and that’s why weakening the magnet of jobs that attracts is essential both to the practice and the rhetoric of immigration control. 

The president must have uttered/tweeted the words “E-Verify” at some point over the past three years, but no instance comes immediately to mind, certainly not a recent one. Even just a tweet or two would help keep the issue in the public discussion, providing for a more balanced immigration message and giving traction to ongoing efforts such as that of House Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte to get an E-Verify mandate passed. 

The same holds true in the primary vote in Georgia. Both candidates — Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and Secretary of State Brian Kemp — check a lot of the right boxes on immigration and don’t have any really obvious red flags. But, as Georgia’s steadfast immigration activist D.A. King has noted, the two candidates: 

have mostly kept their immigration focus away from topics that may offend the Georgia Chamber of Commerce and narrowed to “sanctuary cities” and on illegal aliens who have already committed additional crimes in the United States — or “criminal illegal aliens.” 

The main driver of illegal immigration is illegal employment, which was not mentioned in either campaign. 

This matters because E-Verify is a state issue as well as a federal one. Georgia, one of the nation’s leading illegal-immigration states, does have an E-Verify mandate, but it could be further strengthened and in any case needs consistent oversight and audit. 

State troopers combine efforts against the most egregious violators with more routine enforcement to increase compliance with traffic laws. The IRS goes after money launderers but also conducts unremarkable, everyday enforcement to deter run-of-the-mill tax evasion. Immigration is no different — deporting rapists is essential, but so is conventional enforcement against ordinary people who flout the law. 

PARTNERS WITH MEXICO:

The LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY and the PRO-BUSINESS GOP to keep wages for LEGALS depressed (today they are depressed to 1973 levels).
But you will still get the tax bills for the Mex welfare state and crime tidal wave!


“Illegal aliens are not supposed to work, and knowingly providing shelter for illegal aliens can be construed as harboring and shielding, elements of a felony under federal law, Title 8 U.S. Code § 1324.”  

“Where aliens and jobs are concerned, even many categories of nonimmigrant aliens (temporary visitors) including aliens who lawfully enter under the Visa Waiver Program or with tourist visas may not work in the United States and immediately become subject to removal (deportation) if they seek gainful employment.”  ----MICHAEL CUTLER – FRONTPAGE mag

AMNESTY: THE HOAX TO KEEP WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED!

 "Critics argue that giving amnesty to 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. would have an immediate negative impact on America’s working and middle class — specifically black Americans and the white working class — who would be in direct competition for blue-collar jobs with the largely low-skilled illegal alien population." JOHN BINDER

"Additionally, under current legal immigration laws, if given amnesty, the illegal alien population would be allowed to bring an unlimited number of their foreign relatives to the U.S. This population could boost already high legal immigration levels to an unprecedented high. An amnesty for illegal aliens would also likely triple the number of border-crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border." JOHN BINDER
“At the current rate of invasion (mostly through Mexico, but also through Canada) the United States will be completely over run with illegal aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion, ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the United States”…. Tom Barrett 

NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks:

 

E-Verify Ignored in DACA Negotiations Because ‘Members of Congress Know It Will Work’



Members of Congress broadly oppose a legislative nationwide E-Verify mandate for employers because “they know it will work,” said NumbersUSA’s Rosemary Jenks, explaining why E-Verify is not being pushed in congressional negotiations for an amnesty deal for recipients of the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Jenks further noted that both parties are beholden to special interests supportive of “mass migration.”

Hispanic Unemployment Rate Reaches Record Low Two Months in a Row




LOS ANGELES, CA - DECEMBER 8: A worker uses a torch to clear debris from the 110 freeway after an early morning fire that destroyed a seven-story apartment building under construction on December 8, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. The fire also damaged nearby high-rise buildings and shut down freeways, …
David McNew/Getty Images
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday the Hispanic unemployment rate sunk to a record low in the month of July — marking two consecutive months where this figure hit all-time lows.

The Hispanic unemployment rate dropped from a previous record of 4.6 to 4.5 percent in July.
President Donald Trump has made job creation for minority groups a focal point of his America First economic agenda. In a meeting with inner-city pastors this week, President Trump highlighted the falling unemployment rates among the African-American community.
“So important, because we have companies, once again, coming back into our country, and they want to employ people,” the president said. “So we’re training and working with these people, and we’re getting companies to do the same. It’s been — actually, it’s been a very beautiful thing.”
At the gathering, Pastor Darrell Scott praised President Trump for enacting policies to help inner-city communities and predicted he would be the “most pro-black president in our lifetime.”
“I will say this, this administration has taken a lot of people by surprise… this is probably the most proactive administration regarding urban American and the faith-based community in my lifetime,” Scott said. “To be honest, this is probably going to be the most pro-black president in our lifetime.”
The president on Thursday evening echoed the sentiments at a rally in Wilkes-Barr, Pennsylvania with Congressman and GOP nominee for U.S. Senate Lou Barletta (R-PA). They “reached the lowest level in the history of our country. Honestly, think of that number,” President Trump his supporters. “I honestly think that’s hard for the Democrats to beat … how do you stop that?”
The U.S. economy added an additional 157,000 jobs in July, while the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, according to the Department of Labor. The Manufacturing sector grew by 37,000 jobs, adding 327,000 jobs over the past 12 months. 19,000 construction jobs were added and have grown by 308,000 in the last year.



Bottom 40 percent of Americans have a negative net income

By Gabriel Black
3 August 2018
The bottom 40 percent of households in the United States have an average net pre-tax income of negative $11,660 a year, according to a new report by Reuters.
The report, “Poorer Americans Buckling as US Economy Booms,” published July 23 and written by lead author Jonathan Spicer, exposes how life really is for most Americans in the midst of the supposedly booming economy. While the official unemployment rate is low and growth rates are rising, the reality is that the working class is stretched to its limit, relying heavily on borrowing and working two or more low-wage jobs to survive.
The report’s data shows that the bottom two quintiles of households make, on average, $11,587 and $29,414 a year in pre-tax income, respectively. Their expenses, meanwhile, are $26,144 and $38,187, respectively. This means that the bottom quintile has an average net loss of $14,557 a year and the next quintile a loss of $8,773, prior to taxes.
How is it that the bottom 40 percent of households are losing, on average, well over $10,000 every year?
The data covers students, who are taking on student debt, and recipients of food stamps and federal benefits, who may receive small sums to help pay for expenses. However, the bottom 40 percent of households is overwhelmingly composed of low-wage workers, who, despite their immense sacrifices, are unable to cover the basic cost of living.
The next 20 percent, the middle quintile of the country, is not faring well, either. With an average pre-tax income of $51,379, it is able to achieve a net income of only $2,836 before taxes. A family making $50,000 a year in 2017 would have to pay $3,448 in federal income tax, plus state and FICA taxes. This means that even the middle 20 percent of the population is unable to save money and is, on average, taking on some form of debt.
This growing burden of debt on the bottom 60 percent of the population is expressed in the sharp drop in the US personal savings rate over the past three years, declining from 6 percent in 2015 to between 2.5 and 3 percent in the past few months. Likewise, the rate of credit cards becoming seriously delinquent rose from 3.5 percent in 2016 to 4.7 percent in March 2018. Subprime auto loan delinquencies are now higher than what they were at the height of the financial crisis.
This data from Reuters exposes the real character of the post-2008 “economic recovery.” It is a recovery for the rich at the expense of the living standards of the majority of working people. While the stock market has surged to astronomical heights, and the wealth of the millionaires and billionaires has surged alongside it, the majority of the American people are substantially worse off than they were prior to the financial crisis.
This is no accident.
The post-2008 recovery, led first by Barack Obama and now overseen by Donald Trump, was based on slashing the wages and living standards of the working class to extract more profit for the capitalists. Starting with the autoworkers and spreading to every major section of workers in the country, employers demanded “sacrifices” that they, and the unions, promised would be made up after the recovery.
The “recovery,” however, has arrived, and none of the sacrifices workers made are being paid back. Instead, it is the ultra-rich that are cashing in. This year will see a record level of share buybacks and divided payments, exceeding $1 trillion. These parasitic financial measures, which take money out of investment in new jobs, research and infrastructure, allow people like Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, to pocket $250 million in a single year.
Data from Reuters shows that while the bottom 60 percent of the population generally saw its expenses outpace its income between 2012 and 2017, the income of the top 20 percent increasingly outpaced its expenses over this same period. On average, the top 20 percent of the population makes $188,676 and spends $112,846. This layer makes more money than all of the other income quintiles combined.
The amount the top 20 percent of the population is able to save each year ($75,831) is more than six times the average income of the bottom quintile and more than two-and-a-half times the income of the next quintile. Within the top 20 percent, there is immense social differentiation, its low end composed of workers in decent-paying professions and its high end composed of millionaires and billionaires.
The report notes that the surge in debt and general economic precariousness of the bottom half of the population threaten to trigger a new financial crisis. The authors write: “As many of the most vulnerable workers sink deeper into the red, the nearly decade-long economic expansion may be more vulnerable to a further spike in gasoline prices or an escalation of trade conflicts.”
The authors call attention to how, historically, US consumption growth is dominated by the top 40 percent of earners. However, in the past few years, the bottom 60 percent of earners has accounted for the majority of consumption as it ran down its savings. Consumption makes up for over 70 percent of all economic activity in the United States and plays a critical role in economic growth.
In the past few years, the United States has been wracked by opioid addiction, increasing suicide rates and declining life expectancy. The fundamental cause of this immense and growing social crisis is the impoverishment of the working class, the broad mass of the people.
President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers states that the war on poverty is “largely over.” This is obviously a lie.
The Trump administration and before it the Obama administration have been fighting a war. But, it is not against poverty. They have been fighting a class war to impoverish the working population in order to further enrich the financial oligarchy that they represent.
The working class, however, is ready for a counter-offensive. Heralded by the teachers’ strikes earlier this year in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, workers are prepared to enter into struggle to take back the wealth they have created and gain control of their workplaces.

 Bottom 40 percent of Americans have a negative net income


By Gabriel Black
3 August 2018
The bottom 40 percent of households in the United States have an average net pre-tax income of negative $11,660 a year, according to a new report by Reuters.
The report, “Poorer Americans Buckling as US Economy Booms,” published July 23 and written by lead author Jonathan Spicer, exposes how life really is for most Americans in the midst of the supposedly booming economy. While the official unemployment rate is low and growth rates are rising, the reality is that the working class is stretched to its limit, relying heavily on borrowing and working two or more low-wage jobs to survive.
The report’s data shows that the bottom two quintiles of households make, on average, $11,587 and $29,414 a year in pre-tax income, respectively. Their expenses, meanwhile, are $26,144 and $38,187, respectively. This means that the bottom quintile has an average net loss of $14,557 a year and the next quintile a loss of $8,773, prior to taxes.
How is it that the bottom 40 percent of households are losing, on average, well over $10,000 every year?
The data covers students, who are taking on student debt, and recipients of food stamps and federal benefits, who may receive small sums to help pay for expenses. However, the bottom 40 percent of households is overwhelmingly composed of low-wage workers, who, despite their immense sacrifices, are unable to cover the basic cost of living.
The next 20 percent, the middle quintile of the country, is not faring well, either. With an average pre-tax income of $51,379, it is able to achieve a net income of only $2,836 before taxes. A family making $50,000 a year in 2017 would have to pay $3,448 in federal income tax, plus state and FICA taxes. This means that even the middle 20 percent of the population is unable to save money and is, on average, taking on some form of debt.
This growing burden of debt on the bottom 60 percent of the population is expressed in the sharp drop in the US personal savings rate over the past three years, declining from 6 percent in 2015 to between 2.5 and 3 percent in the past few months. Likewise, the rate of credit cards becoming seriously delinquent rose from 3.5 percent in 2016 to 4.7 percent in March 2018. Subprime auto loan delinquencies are now higher than what they were at the height of the financial crisis.
This data from Reuters exposes the real character of the post-2008 “economic recovery.” It is a recovery for the rich at the expense of the living standards of the majority of working people. While the stock market has surged to astronomical heights, and the wealth of the millionaires and billionaires has surged alongside it, the majority of the American people are substantially worse off than they were prior to the financial crisis.
This is no accident.
The post-2008 recovery, led first by Barack Obama and now overseen by Donald Trump, was based on slashing the wages and living standards of the working class to extract more profit for the capitalists. Starting with the autoworkers and spreading to every major section of workers in the country, employers demanded “sacrifices” that they, and the unions, promised would be made up after the recovery.
The “recovery,” however, has arrived, and none of the sacrifices workers made are being paid back. Instead, it is the ultra-rich that are cashing in. This year will see a record level of share buybacks and divided payments, exceeding $1 trillion. These parasitic financial measures, which take money out of investment in new jobs, research and infrastructure, allow people like Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, to pocket $250 million in a single year.
Data from Reuters shows that while the bottom 60 percent of the population generally saw its expenses outpace its income between 2012 and 2017, the income of the top 20 percent increasingly outpaced its expenses over this same period. On average, the top 20 percent of the population makes $188,676 and spends $112,846. This layer makes more money than all of the other income quintiles combined.
The amount the top 20 percent of the population is able to save each year ($75,831) is more than six times the average income of the bottom quintile and more than two-and-a-half times the income of the next quintile. Within the top 20 percent, there is immense social differentiation, its low end composed of workers in decent-paying professions and its high end composed of millionaires and billionaires.
The report notes that the surge in debt and general economic precariousness of the bottom half of the population threaten to trigger a new financial crisis. The authors write: “As many of the most vulnerable workers sink deeper into the red, the nearly decade-long economic expansion may be more vulnerable to a further spike in gasoline prices or an escalation of trade conflicts.”
The authors call attention to how, historically, US consumption growth is dominated by the top 40 percent of earners. However, in the past few years, the bottom 60 percent of earners has accounted for the majority of consumption as it ran down its savings. Consumption makes up for over 70 percent of all economic activity in the United States and plays a critical role in economic growth.
In the past few years, the United States has been wracked by opioid addiction, increasing suicide rates and declining life expectancy. The fundamental cause of this immense and growing social crisis is the impoverishment of the working class, the broad mass of the people.
President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers states that the war on poverty is “largely over.” This is obviously a lie.
The Trump administration and before it the Obama administration have been fighting a war. But, it is not against poverty. They have been fighting a class war to impoverish the working population in order to further enrich the financial oligarchy that they represent.
The working class, however, is ready for a counter-offensive. Heralded by the teachers’ strikes earlier this year in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, workers are prepared to enter into struggle to take back the wealth they have created and gain control of their workplaces.


Financial parasitism and the American oligarchy

The report of plans by the Trump administration to push through yet another $100 billion rip-off for the super-rich underscores the urgent reality facing the working class: American society can no longer afford the endless demands of the ruling elite for the accumulation of ever-greater personal wealth.
This is, of course, a global problem. As an Oxfam study found last year, eight billionaires control more wealth than the poorer half of humanity, some 3.6 billion people. Six of those eight are Americans, and nowhere is the conflict between the needs of working people and the insatiable appetite of the financial aristocracy so great as in the United States.
One mega-billionaire alone, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world’s richest man, has seen his fortune rise nearly $50 billion in 2018—enough to pay a bonus of $100,000 to each of the company’s more than half a million workers.
The proposal for another massive tax handout is the latest expression of a bipartisan agenda of wealth redistribution, which has proceeded over the course of the past several decades under both Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, the greatest transfer occurred under the Obama administration in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, with trillions allocated to inflate the financial markets—the principal mechanism for engineering the bailout of the rich.
A recent report by the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project reveals the staggering level of financial parasitism that characterizes the American economy. The report examined stock buybacks overall, and in detail for three major industries: restaurants, retail sales and food manufacturing.
Under the financial deregulation pushed by both Democratic and Republican administrations over the past 25 years, stock buybacks have soared from less than 5 percent of earnings in the early 1980s to 54 percent of earnings in 2012, and nearly 60 percent today.
Such figures put paid to the pro-capitalist mythology suggesting that high corporate profits will “trickle down” to the masses because companies will invest those profits in new machinery and hiring new workers. Actually, they spent well over half of their profits enriching big shareholders and top management, who hold the lion’s share of stock.
Remarkably, the restaurant industry spent far more on stock buybacks than it made in profits, 136.5 percent. That means that companies in this sector went into debt, borrowing money to give payouts to investors. The top five restaurant chains for buybacks included McDonald’s, YUM Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut), Starbucks, Restaurant Brands International (Burger King, Tim Horton’s) and Domino’s Pizza. If the same money had been divided among the workers, it would have raised wages by 25 percent.
The retail industry spent 79.2 percent of net profit on stock buybacks, and companies like Walmart, CVS, Target, Lowe’s and Home Depot could have given workers across-the-board raises of 63 percent instead. For food manufacturing (Pepsico, KraftHeinz, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland, among others), the comparable figures are 58 percent of net profit going to stock buybacks, but the profits were larger and could have financed raises of 79 percent to workers.
Stock buybacks particularly enrich CEOs, who generally take the bulk of their income in stock, and thus benefit when the buyback drives up the price. CEOs reaping the most spectacular returns, named in a report this week by Politico, included Safra Katz of Oracle ($250 million), Thomas Kurian, also of Oracle ($85 million) and Ajay Banga of Mastercard ($44.4 million).
Another fact exposes the enormous sums being looted by the corporate and financial aristocracy. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that 350 Goldman Sachs executives and board members who received stock options in 2008, at the height of the global financial crash, will have accumulated $3 billion dollars by the time these options expire this year.
The flood of stock buybacks has been triggered by the mammoth $1.5 trillion tax cut pushed through by Trump and the Republican Congress last December with the complicity of the Democrats. Corporate America is funneling $2.5 trillion into the pockets of shareholders through buybacks, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, and other financial manipulations.
There was evidently some resentment in sections of the super-rich that the tax cut applied mainly to corporate and personal income taxes, and left the capital gains tax rate unchanged. In response, the Trump administration has indicated that it is preparing to reverse previous precedent and is considering an executive action to change the rules for taxing capital gains—the profits made from the buying and selling of stocks, bonds and other financial assets—so that the wealthy can deduct the effects of price inflation.
This will cut the capital gains tax by one-third, or $102 billion over ten years. Two-thirds of this sum, or $66 billion, would accrue to the top 0.1 percent of Americans.
Previous administrations had determined that adjusting for inflation would require authorization by Congress, meaning that a change by executive fiat would be illegal. But Mnuchin said, “If it can’t get done through a legislation process, we will look at what tools at Treasury we have to do it on our own and we’ll consider that.” 
This is an administration that demonizes millions of working people who come to the United States seeking safety and a better life, calling them “illegal aliens” because they are undocumented. But when it comes to the interests of the billionaires, there’s no concern over what is legal, only over how best to fatten their portfolios.
What sustains the Trump administration, in the face of mounting popular hostility to its retrograde social policies, flagrant attacks on democratic rights and unbridled militarism, is the character of the nominal opposition. The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, no less dedicated than Trump to defending the interests of the corporate and financial elite.
There is not a single social problem that can be resolved so long as the corporate and financial elite rules over American and world economy. An end to the domination of these social parasites means an end to the economic system, capitalism, that exists to maintain and expand their wealth and power.
Patrick Martin

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