Jobs, Political Power and Upcoming Elections
“Beer don’t keep, love’s not cheap,
And trucks don’t wreck themselves.
Mama ain’t a shrink, daddy ain’t a bank,
And God ain’t a wishing well.
Money ain’t rich, everybody sins,
And nobody wins in a fight.
And sometimes, wrong is right.
Some of it you learn the hard way.
Some of it you read in a page.
Some of it comes from heartache,
Most of it comes with age.
And none of it ever comes easy.
A bunch of it you maybe can’t use.
I know I don’t probably know what I think I do.
But there’s something to some of it.”
Today, I’m going to take a step back from the day-to-day of shutdowns and other nonsense, and look at three issues from a broader perspective.
Jobs: We read that the employment market is “weakening.” OK. But the national unemployment rate is still only 4.3%. When I was an Economics major at UCLA, we were taught that 5% was “functional full employment” because there are always at least 5% of workers in between jobs for whatever reason. Any unemployment rate less that that was considered “over-employment.”
Maybe technology has changed that calculus now, but any way you slice it, the jobs market is not bad. What I do think is happening is that there is rotation occurring in the jobs market where some types of jobs are going away and others can’t find enough workers. This sort of rotation is nothing new, of course, with the most obvious example being when the mechanization of farm labor reduced agricultural jobs as manufacturing jobs were increasing.
We have all read how recent college graduates, even from the so-called “elite’ universities, are having a hard time finding jobs. The sort of desk jobs are declining where you work remotely part of the time and get avocado toast delivered as a snack when you are in the office and have no real accountability for anything. Budget woes are shrinking government jobs and AI is replacing code writers and various other forms of employment.
Even if AI makes an appointment and diagnoses a problem, you need a human to come install the part in your car or air conditioner. AI cannot replace that. The US Navy, in conjunction with its 1100 suppliers, is running an expensive marketing campaign called www.buildsubmarines.com. Why? Because the construction of new submarines for the Navy is being hugely delayed because they can’t get enough workers to build them. And this is not something you outsource to China.
I know of hotels that have to limit rooms because they don’t have enough people to staff and restaurants that aren’t open because they can’t find servers and kitchen workers.
For decades, our society has sent a message that you are worthless if you do not have a four year college degree. That was a lie then and it is a lie now. We got rid of shop and various other programs to teach skills in high school and replaced them with gender studies majors in college. The result is a lot of kids with huge debt and no marketable skills and a lot of skills for which no one is trained and the young people think the job is beneath them.
This rotation is in front of us right now. The jobs market is not bad. It is changing. As a society, we are unprepared for this change. Will the avocado toast eating sociology major decide they need to weld submarines in South Carolina and make double what they are currently making at Starbucks?
They may have to.
Political Power: Mark Twain famously said “I’m in favor of progress. It’s change I don’t like.” Rarely do any of us like change if we were comfortable and understood the way things were. The jobs market is changing. So is politics.
Politics has always been a “contact sport.” But now, it has become a brutal contact sport. In many of these missives, I have pointed out the decline of the influence of the classical liberal. However, I have failed to point out the decline of another group on the right. Libertarians. Liberals and libertarians shared a view that government’s power should be limited in application and approach.
The Democrats were the first to change, using the heavy-handed club of government to cudgel their opponents into submission be it through direct or indirect methods using the media, the education cabal or entertainment. The examples of this over the last 16 years are too numerous to mention here. We all know how conservatives were fired, arrested, silenced or sidelined for opposing the woke/leftist/socialist message.
Now, Republicans are fighting back with similar tactics.
I always considered myself a “libertarian-leaning” Republican and conservative. But we were losing. Badly. We were basically taking a butter knife to a machine gun fight.
I will be the first to admit that I am not thrilled with everything my side is doing right now. But we didn’t start this. They did. We either fight back hard or we submit. Submission is not in my DNA.
I always considered one of my better talents was as a deal maker. I left Congress over 10 years ago now because the opportunity to do deals was already shrinking. I knew it was going to get worse. But, I had no idea it would get as bad as it has.
We can lament the change. But we cannot turn it back now. The policy proposals on both sides (watch what Mamdani will do in NYC) will be harder and more disparate. You all know how I have zero respect for Gavin Newsom. But his political instincts are quite good. He tried talking to Charlie Kirk and suggested that maybe men shouldn’t be in women’s sports. That got him nowhere. So now on X (formerly Twitter) he swears more than a drunken sailor. And his poll numbers in the Democratic primary are going up.
The political violence is almost entirely on the left. They will likely keep that up because the violent rhetoric by major Democrats is not abating.
We won’t do that. But we have to fight back as hard as we can with rhetoric and policy using government and every tool we have.
While he was president, Bill Clinton once declared that the “era of big government was over.”
He was wrong.
Upcoming Elections: Few people pay attention to off-year elections. But they are better than any poll at indicating the mood of the electorate. Whichever side loses always claims that there were “special circumstances” and it really doesn’t mean anything. But that is hardly ever true.
Next month, we have two gubernatorial elections in two blue states - New Jersey and Virginia. The Democrats should win both races. If the Republicans win, that’s very good news for the GOP. If the Democrats win going away, that’s good news for Dems. Democrats eeking out a win is the neutral result.
We also have the elections in New York City and Minneapolis. Both of these are miserable, deep blue, screwed up cities. Republicans are irrelevant. But it may tell us where the Democratic Party is since both elections appear to be headed towards electing Muslim Marxists.
There is also the election for the Gerrymandering proposal in California. The ads for it don’t say what it is about. Merely that it is to “stop Trump.” Polling shows it will win. Elections in California are completely rife with fraud, which is legal there. So, I put little stock in that result since it is unlikely to be a true measure of actual voting citizens’ views. If the no side were to win by some miracle, that would be a gigantic message that Democrats are in trouble. If the yes side wins, that will merely show that California has not yet hit bottom and must decline further before there is any change.
The lyrics in country music are about real life and enduring values. That’s why leftists don’t like them. The left promotes brand new values cooked up at Columbia and Berkeley. This week’s song is basically about wisdom and perspective.
We need both of those things as we all maneuver ourselves and our families “through the chaos.”
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free
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