House of Eratosthenes

The American economy shed another 345,000 jobs in May as the unemployment rate spiked to 9.4 percent, but the losses were far smaller than economists expected, amplifying hopes of recovery.

“It supports the idea that before the end of the year and maybe even by late summer we could be at flat employment,” meaning no more net job losses, said Alan D. Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price in Baltimore. “During the course of next year, we’ll probably start to feel better.”

Wow, we should keep democrats in charge all the time, if for no other reason than to keep a spirit of exuberant optimism around our failing newspapers. After all, we know from experience that when the other guys are in charge, a slowdown-in-job-losses isn’t nearly enough to keep ’em in such chipper spirits…since they’re so balanced, and objective, and all.

Well, I’m sure Obama’s patented two-step universal strategy of “wonderful speech, gobs of money” is going to work out just great. That is, if Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer’s response to The O’s tax plans is the exception, rather than the rule:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

Obama on May 4 proposed outlawing or restricting about $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Such business groups as the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have denounced the proposed overhaul.
:
Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, said many software companies such as Microsoft have exploited tax and trade rules in the U.S. and other countries to achieve a low overall tax rate.

Typically, he said, a company like Microsoft develops a product like Windows in the United States and deducts those costs against U.S. income. It then transfers the technology to a subsidiary in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are lower, without charging licensing fees. The company then assigns its foreign sales to the Irish subsidiary so it doesn’t have to claim the income in the United States.

“What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate,” Bosworth said. “Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”

So our new proposals — hope and change, remember — are going to recover some of these lost jobs…how?

Pelosi Car It’s a little peculiar, isn’t it, that software companies somehow aren’t “too big to fail.” I find it doubly odd, since I have some personal experience looking for work that puts Microsoft, in my eyes, in the position of the goose at the apex of the “V” that is responsible for breaking the turbulence for the rest of the flock. My experience showed that when Microsoft wasn’t terribly interested in creating new technology — their most recent operating system was a disaster that did next-to-nothing called “Vista” — nobody else was too interested in new technology either. Creating it or consuming it.

Now, auto companies don’t do too much innovation. Not when you compare the new features offered, against the number of years we need to wait for those offerings to come out. And what innovation they have been doing, for the most part just became the job of the federal government. Is that an exaggeration? I hope so. Time will tell.

But anyway…nobody is saying the technology companies are too big to fail. Savings and Loans that are artificially required to extend loans to people who would otherwise be found to be un-credit-worthy…newspapers that print up liberally-biased dreck we don’t want to read…car companies that sell oversized upside-down goldfish bowls for us to tootle around in, or are just about to…they are too big to fail.

What does the world need the United States for, anyway? Our lending power…with all this free cash we have lying around? Heh. Our cars? Double-heh. Our newspapers? Nope. Our ideas, that go into the software we write…well, after this revolution of “Technology Equals Portable Personal Tunes Plus Dogs-in-Purses,” we’ve lost our toehold there as well. But that one, we just might have a shot at getting back. Doing something to commercially justify our existence on the big blue marble. Wouldn’t that be a win-win? We design, other countries mass-produce.

But it would appear not to be in the cards. Our young people who would be going into software engineering, are far more interested in putting together music collections so they can stick those white earplugs in their ears, and be admired in awe by their friends, as they ignore everybody and listen to tunes. And carry artificially tiny dogs, with artificially tiny bladders, around in artificially expensive leather purses, every hour of every day just asking for a REAL mess when $600 designer handbags fill up with real dog shit.

Such fake children grow up into fake grown-ups. They see something they want and they don’t have yet…their impulse is not to go out and get it, or render valuable services to others to earn the material wealth needed to acquire whatever it is. Nope. Their impulse is to invent some new “human right” that has been violated because they don’t have it, and hold some micro-revolution to force someone to give it to them.

And Obama’s tax plan is motivating Microsoft, and God knows how many other companies, to relocate the last truly cerebral jobs to other countries, or at least seriously think about doing so. Creativity finds a welcoming home nowhere else. Our home design is done on assembly lines. Our accounting and lawyering is done on assembly lines. Our doctoring is done on assembly lines. Everything is proceduralized, except for that once-promising field of telling a computer exactly how it should be working on a problem. We’re getting rid of that now. Obama’s tax plan leaves us no other option.

Nation of veal calves.

Update 6/6/09: I was hoping someone would pipe up about this. The credit goes to the always-excellent Iowahawk for the graphic. Thanks to the loyal reader who tossed me an offline, for the information and for the kind remarks.

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More Jobs Whacked; NY Times Sees HopeFriday, June 5th, 2009

More Jobs Whacked; NY Times Sees Hope
Friday, June 5th, 2009