On the jobs front, the Labor Department said initial claims for unemployment insurance fell to a seasonally adjusted 550,000 from an upwardly revised 576,000 in the previous week. The number of people continuing to receive benefits fell by 159,000 to nearly 6.1 million, the lowest level since early April.

via The Associated Press: Trade, jobless claims figures show recession fades.

Us American’s really appreciate the fact that now for 35 months straight new jobless claims have top 500,000 mark.   At this rate another 2 years from now the rate might actually dip below the half a million mark.  Usually people look at the the results of their work to determine if they’re doing any good.  Not American politicians they look at the words they speak if they say loosing 500,000 jobs is  a good thing then it is a good thing.  So, hooray only 500,000 jobs were lost this month.

Yet, I don’t feel happy? And why do I get an ominous feeling?

Reports have indicated that Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) plan to introduce a bill that would limit the ability of companies to hire H-1B employees.[1] Arguing that H-1B visa recipients are a threat to American workers, their proposal would add new layers of regulation and procedures making it more difficult for companies to hire foreigners.

by James Sherk and Diem Nguyen

via Restricting H-1B Visas Is Bad for Business and the Economy

This weekend I’m off to Tennessee to see  a good friend.   He is graduating from graduate school with an MBA.  He’ll be returning to his country of birth to create value there not here.   He is a smart, hardworking, well-educated, and recently a family man.  He came to the states for college, returned to his country of birth to serve the required military service, and then returned here for graduate school. 

Because of Republican and Democratic politicians like those mentioned in the article above he will not be adding value to our economy because the rules are to cumbersome for a company to be able to hire a bright talent like my good friend.   Even though they have tried, even though he worked hard in his internship, even though he is just as qualified as many American’s, it’s treated like a zero-sum game. 

And on top of the ignorance of the zero-sum game mentality we let millions of uneducated Mexican’s just walk across the boarder use our hospitals and suck up our social services without benefit to this country.  But let a foreigner come over here legally, help him get a good education at a state school where he works hard, and then force him to leave. 

Yes, America that is what is thought of as “good policy” by Republican and Democrat alike.  We might as well just outlaw higher education altogether it would do the job much quicker then this slow painful process that everybody pretends is “good policy”.

But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years, and it’s not that different from the unsustainable nature of what was happening during the dot-com boom, where people in Silicon Valley could make enormous sums of money, even though what they were peddling never really had any signs it would ever make a profit.

Um, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and the list goes on end up making a profit.  Oh, and nobody propped up the poorly run companies.  Obama is actually sustaining what has happened.   How he can say this with a straight face is beyond me?

We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design.

Now, Obama is talking about decideing what people study in college!!!  Jeez and right in the NYTimes???

Now, the fact that we had such poor regulation means — in some of these markets, particularly around the securitized mortgages — means that the pain has been democratized as well. And that’s a problem. But I think that overall there are ways in which people have been able to participate in our stock markets and our financial markets that are potentially healthy. Again, what you have to have, though, is an updating of the regulatory regimes comparable to what we did in the 1930s, when there were rules that were put in place that gave investors a little more assurance that they knew what they were buying.

Updated regulations (i.e. more regulation), yep that’s the solution.  Because all of the last centuries worth of regulations hasn’t been enough.  While your at it why not raise taxes some and spend more government money.  Yep, that’s the solution…

We set out a goal in my speech to the joint session that said everybody should have at least one year of post-high-school training. And I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.

 Great, I was hoping my kids would have a choice in the type of education and career they wanted.  I guess they’re going to be to stupid to figure it out on their own.  Good thing the State has a plan for them

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting. And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

Even Obama admits the problem.   What’s his solution?  Private pay like he mentioned he’d have done for his Grandmother…

Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Oh, he doesn’t have a solution.  I guess this issue then is a sideline issue?  Nope, it’s more like a top priority!

From dictating our children’s educations, to increasing legislation, to helping the “doctors, scientists, ethicists” decide the fates of our grandmothers it’s pretty interesting stuff.