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Keystone, jobs, and a president who doesn't get it; an American issue
Topic Started: Nov 10 2015, 11:29 PM (252 Views)
Jim Miller
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Keystone, jobs, and a president who doesn't get it
By Washington Examiner • 11/9/15 12:01 AM


After months of disappointing economic news, Friday's job numbers came as a pleasant surprise. The economy created a net 271,000 jobs in October, a figure that beat low expectations and doubles disappointing job creation numbers of the prior two months. The official unemployment rate also fell to 5 percent, although that number has a different meaning in an era of dramatically lower workforce participation.

Unfortunately, the recovery still hasn't arrived for those most in need of work, civilian adults aged 25-54. These men and women are the backbone of the labor market. They are in the period of their lives when people normally build families, careers and businesses. Instead, since 2008, millions of them have been idle, waiting for their lives to begin.

Eight years ago, there were 100.2 million people in this age range who had jobs. Last month, there were only 97.1 million, a number that has barely budged in 2015. Worse still, the latest Labor Department numbers suggest that most of the net jobs lost by that core age cohort have been full-time jobs. In the fourth quarter of 2007, when the Great Recession began, there were 80.5 million full-timers aged 25-54; it the most recent quarter there were only 77.7 million.

The Baby Boom generation has aged out of this category and its overall population has shrunk slightly, by 700,000 in the last eight years, to 125.2 million. But even assuming that every single person who grew out of that age range took a job with them into the next age range, this would account for less than a quarter of the jobs that have vanished into thin air.

Meanwhile, President Obama chose Friday to announce that he is rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. With his decision, designed to make him look good in front of the international community who will start climate talks in Paris on Nov. 30, he is nixing tens of thousands of jobs and, according to his own State Department, $100 million in earnings for American workers. He made his decision even though his own State Department has concluded that the pipeline, which would bring Canadian and North Dakota crude oil to the Gulf Coast, would emit less carbon than other, more dangerous, methods of transporting it, such as by rail. The final State Department recommendation was that the pipeline be rejected because it would create a "perception" that would "undermin[e] the power of U.S. example as a leader in promoting the transformation to low-carbon economies."

Got that? The Obama administration just prevented job creation to avoid a foreign "perception." Note the timing here, too: Obama has been slow-walking Keystone for more than six years and rejected it only when voters could no longer punish him for flouting the Keystone hopes they have clearly expressed to pollsters.

So the labor market had a decent October, but the man in charge still either does not know or does not care to bring back the sort of dynamism that vanished late last decade. Voters would do well to choose a president who does not represent a third term for this failed ecomonic policy.
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Brewster
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Oh, the President gets the picture just fine.

Too bad the US Right doesn't.
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Neutral
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He gets the political picture for sure.
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Jim Miller
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OUR president is no concern of yours, Brewster. Worry about your end of the pipeline and mind your own business. You have no say on what our failed President does.
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colo_crawdad
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Just a thought. Wouldn't it be ironically humorous if we built our share of the pipeline and Canada chose not to build theirs?
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colo_crawdad
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Would that be called a pipeline to/from nowhere?
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Mountainrivers
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Nov 11 2015, 01:44 AM
He gets the political picture for sure.
Are you suggesting that all politicians don't get the "political picture" about everything?
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Brewster
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colo_crawdad
Nov 11 2015, 02:14 AM
Just a thought. Wouldn't it be ironically humorous if we built our share of the pipeline and Canada chose not to build theirs?
It really is humorous.

The Canadian portion, which overlaps with part of Keystone I, is pretty much done, but along with Keystone I it leaks so bad it's almost useless.

Who pays for the repairs?

Quote:
 
The first Keystone tar sands pipeline, constructed less than a year ago, has sprung its twelfth leak, spilling up to 2,100 gallons of raw tar sands crude oil in Kansas on May 29th when a pipeline fitting around a pressure transmitter failed. This comes just three weeks after a broken pipe fitting on Keystone resulted in a 60’ geyser of tar sands crude, spewing 21,000 gallons in North Dakota. Surely this appalling record of spills should send a message to the State Department as it goes through the permitting process for a second tar sands pipeline – Keystone XL – by the same company that we need better pipeline safety assessments and regulations in place before building another tar sands pipeline through sensitive U.S. lands and waters. We have an agency that handles pipeline safety – the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). They should be making the assessment of the safety of diluted bitumen pipelines a priority.

The brief operating history of the Keystone pipeline provides more evidence that our conventional pipeline design regulations are inadequate for pipelines moving corrosive raw tar sands, or diluted bitumen, at high pressure. After all, the company claims that Keystone I was built with “state of the art” design features and was predicted to spill no more than once every seven years.
Edited by Brewster, Nov 11 2015, 02:41 AM.
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ImaHeadaU
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colo_crawdad
Nov 11 2015, 02:14 AM
Just a thought. Wouldn't it be ironically humorous if we built our share of the pipeline and Canada chose not to build theirs?
Actually, most of the Keystone Pipeline has been built within the U.S. by TransCanada its Canadian owner.

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Berton
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Obama does not care about the middle class and the lack of jobs for them. All he cares about is getting donations from the rich for the Dems and printing money to give to the Gimedats for their votes.

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