Thread: Lou Dobbs: Trump White House has 'lost its way'

Lou Dobbs: Trump White House has 'lost its way'


BY AVERY ANAPOL - 03/07/19 08:32 AM EST

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, normally a staunch supporter of President Trump, on Wednesday said he fears the administration has “lost its way.”

Dobbs made the comments on his show following a White House meeting of Trump’s American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.

Dobbs called the meeting, which included CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook, shows the Trump White House taking a “disastrous policy turn.”

Dobbs aired a clip of Trump saying that the U.S. will have a “lot of people coming in” through legal immigration to give workers to large companies. The Fox Business host said that the meeting shows Trump valuing the interests of “globalist elites” ahead of other Americans and feeding into the “establishment.”

Dobbs called Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Tom Donohue, who was present at the meeting, an “enemy” of the Trump administration.

“That Mr. Trump would advance the interest of the globalist elites ahead of our citizens would be a tragic reversal on any day,” Dobbs said. “But today, on the same day the Commerce Department reported the United States had the largest trade deficit in our history ... it all means the White House has simply lost its way.”

The longtime host concluded by saying that the path Trump is on will break “the nation's heart” by siding with the same people who have “fed the swamp for decades.”


“The nation’s heart will be, after all, broken by the very same people who brought 50 years of consecutive trade deficit and the export of millions of middle-class jobs and who have fed the swamp for decades,” he added.

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4...s-lost-its-way


TAGSDONALD TRUMPLOU DOBBS TONIGHTFOX NEWSAMERICAN WORKFORCE ADVISORY BOARDECONOMY

“What I fear is a new direction for the president and his administration and what could very likely be a catastrophe for the working men and women, small business and entrepreneurs, our middle class, the American family, the very people this president has represented from the moment he announced he would run for the presidency,” he said.

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https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432993-lou-dobbs-trump-white-house-has-lost-its-way

Economics

America's Job Market Is Defying Employer Labor Shortage Reports

By Jeanna Smialek
March 6, 2019, 12:01 AM EST

• Hiring has bucked scarcity complaints in Beige Book for years
• Fed is scrutinizing labor market for signs of wage pressure

Job seekers wait in line to speak with representatives during a career fair in Los Angeles, California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/BloombergLISTEN TO ARTICLE
3:34

Interpreting job market anecdotes in the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book survey of regional businesses is more art than science -- and it’s the kind of art that demands a skeptical eye.

Employment was still tiptoeing back from the depths of the Great Recession when reports of worker shortages began to surface in the study, the latest edition of which comes out at 2 p.m. Wednesday in Washington.

“Finding skilled workers continued to be a major concern,” companies in the Richmond region reported in November 2011, when the unemployment rate was 8.6 percent -- more than double the current level. A North Carolina manufacturer reported “having a tough time hiring good people.”

Employers have since managed to hire another 18 million workers, underscoring the disconnect between the anecdotes and overall labor availability. Companies unsurprisingly compare present conditions with their recent experience, and relative to the worst years of the recession, workers were difficult to find in 2011 -- but not impossible. What’s happening in one industry or region may fail to reflect the broader reality.

That’s why Fed officials distinguish between anecdotes and data, and they didn’t say the job market was hot back in 2011. But today, data are sending conflicting signals about worker availability: the unemployment rate is very low, but applicants are coming back in from the labor market’s sidelines.

At junctures like this one, officials would ideally turn to their regional contacts for help in understanding what’s happening. The trouble is judging what hiring complaints really mean.

“Businesses love to say we’ve got shortages -- it’s this historic worker shortage. Well, show me the money,” Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said last year, an often-repeated refrain of his. Kashkari wants to see faster wage gains as a sign that businesses are putting their money toward the issue, and he said on Tuesday he still sees labor market slack.



The Beige Book, published eight times a year, isn’t the only window into the employer psyche. Surveys like the National Federation of Independent Business small business optimism index also track how hard jobs are to fill. Such gauges have been suggesting worker shortages for some time -- but there’s an interesting disconnect there as well.

While employers widely report that they can’t find workers to fill open jobs, a stubborn gap remains between the share that cite trouble hiring and the share hiking pay. That may be on the cusp of closing, but it’s too early to judge.
Importantly, if employers can’t find workers, one might expect hiring to slow. Instead, payrolls grew by 304,000 in January, the most in almost a year, bringing the 12-month average to 234,000. The February report is set to come out Friday, and economists project around a 180,000 gain. For context, Fed officials for years expected monthly hiring to slow to a 50,000 to 110,000 pace.

So how can anyone get a handle on what’s going on? Nick Bunker at hiring site Indeed.com suggests looking at the prime-age employment rate. It’s a more comprehensive alternative to the unemployment rate, which fails to account for people who have dropped out of the labor market but who might be drawn back. And while it’s recovered to 2008 levels, it remains below its all-time high.



Bunker says he’s also looking for slightly higher pay gains as a sign that the job market is chugging along at full capacity. And for that, Beige Book anecdotes are useful.

“They’re not the main narrative,” Bunker said. “They’re important for color -- for employer perceptions of how readily they’re going to increase wages. Understanding, for lack of a better word, the reaction function to labor market tightness.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ntent=business

Email received from NumbersUSA today, 3/8/19.



THIS ISSUE: President Trump had a meeting with the CEOs of some of America's largest corporations. Their consensus was that America needs more foreign workers.

FRI, MAR 8th

There were conflicting messages coming out of the White House this week. On Thursday, the White House put out a news release entitled "Ivanka Trump calls on American companies to invest in our workers." This was to highlight a meeting this week in the White House with top business leaders, and Ivanka's appearance on Fox News touting the Administration's work to retrain unemployed Americans and prepare the workforce for increasing automation.

The first paragraph reads:

For decades, American workers were neglected and forgotten as Washington stood by idly. While corporate America pushed for cheap labor abroad, our leaders let communities in the heartland crumble instead of fighting for blue-collar employees.

This statement is in-line with candidate Donald Trump's promise to put American workers first, and is the main reason he is now in the White House. This message cut across partisan lines and remains a winning one with voters.

The problem is that President Trump appears be backing off his campaign pledge in favor of placating the business lobby clamoring for an increase in foreign workers.

The White House goes on to describe the meeting with "some of the country's top CEO --including Apple's Tim Cook and Walmart's Doug McMillon."

Employers were coming to us and they were saying, 'We're optimistic about America, we want to invest here and a constraint for growth is the lack of a skilled workforce,'" Ms. Trump told The Wall Street Journal this week. "We don't have people to fill the jobs.

The President has strongly indicated he no longer supports immigration reduction, including at the White House meeting this week.

'We want to have a very strong border, but we want to have a lot of people coming in,' Trump said during a White House meeting with more than 20 CEOs and officials from state and local governments.' A lot of people don't understand that. They think we're shutting it out. We're not shutting it out. We want people to come in, but they have to come in through a process.

President Trump's rhetoric is not far removed from U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donahue, who said last October that "The United States is fundamentally out of people."
When there are still 50 million people in the United States between the ages of 18 and 64 who are not employed, the problem is not a lack of workers.

If there was a genuine shortage of available workers, wages would rising be much faster. The problem too many employers have is that wages are rising at all.

The White House call for more foreign workers comes upon the heels of an anemic February jobs report that found employers added only 20,000 new jobs, while 200,000 more people dropped out of the labor force. Hiring in many occupations was flat, or even negative, with construction sector losing 31,000 jobs.

On that same day the President argued for the need for more immigrants to fill open jobs, the Lordstown GM plant in Ohio announced it was ending operations, laying off 1,400 assembly-line workers.

DHS also announced this week that illegal border crossings in February were at a ten year high and total crossings for the year were likely to approach 800,000, close to "historic highs."
Building barriers on the border with Mexico is not going to stop this surge, since most illegal crossers being apprehended are taking advantage of asylum loopholes and gaining admittance to the United States.

ERIC RUARK, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH

We have PLENTY of workers. Get them off welfare and food stamps!

Implement a "Seniors 2 Work" policy. Give them tax breaks, allow them to work more hours without penalty to supplement their SS.

They are an asset to employers, they have job skills, work ethic, are dependable and would work without the penalties!!!

They will also keep their earning on our soil, spending money here, and not send billions overseas!

NO MORE FOREIGN WORKERS...YOU ARE LIARS...WE HAVE PLENTY OF PEOPLE TO GET TO WORK!

CUT OFF THE FREE STUFF AND MAKE THEM WORK!

NO MORE LOADED UP EBT CARDS! MAKE THEM FILE A WEEKLY "JOB SEARCH" BEFORE ANY BENEFITS ARE GIVEN...JUST LIKE FILING FOR UNEMPLOYMENT!

PARTNER EMPLOYERS WITH WELFARE OFFICE AND POST THOSE JOBS!