As they don caps and gowns, endure commencement speeches, and take their diplomas, many high school and college graduates face bleak prospects in an economy that grew a dismal 0.5% the first quarter.
The United States added a meager 160,000 new non-farm jobs in April, a paltry 4,000 of them in manufacturing. First quarter 2016 averaged just 203,000 jobs per month. The labor force participation rate remains stuck at an abysmal 63% – meaning 93 million working age Americans are still unemployed.
Many who are working hold multiple jobs to make ends meet, while others are toiling at temporary, part-time or “gig” jobs, at lower pay, with few benefits and little job security.
They and the graduates may be hoping that Donald Trump will “Make America great again,” Hillary Clinton will “revitalize” our 
ailing economy, or Bernie Sanders will “invest” trillions of tax dollars to train and employ millions of young Americans in a 100% clean energy economy.
Like the candidates, they may be blaming our economic woes on China, climate change, Wall Street, the One Percent, Mexico, inadequate supervision of greedy capitalist corporations, unpatriotic companies fleeing to foreign shores, or insufficient tax revenues to support essential government programs.
All are appealing excuses, but the real answer is much closer to home and involves multiple self-inflicted wounds. Most legislators and regulators are loath to admit any responsibility for our economic woes, and most graduates will find it hard to analyze the problem. However, the analytical process is essential.
The difficulty for students and graduates is that most were not taught how to think. Their teachers too often present mostly liberal-socialist ideology as unassailable fact, discourage or prohibit discussion and debate, and shelter sensitive snowflakes via speech codes, safe zones, and bans on verbal microagression.
While raking in millions of taxpayer dollars for climate research, a cabal of RICO-20 university professors has gone even further. It has asked U.S. and state attorneys general to launch racketeering prosecutions of anyone who disagrees with alarmist views on “dangerous man-made global warming.”
World-renowned physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s admonition has been largely discarded in the halls of academia. “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,” he said, “than answers that can’t be questioned.” Sadly, answers that none dare question now dominate classroom life.
And so, as you and graduates in your family or circle of friends leave those institutions of rote learning, and go into the Real World, you will have to undertake your greatest challenge: learning to think.
Examining, questioning, discussing, and challenging hypotheses, assertions, and accepted “facts” are always absolutely essential for scientific, technological, and societal progress. In this election year, it behooves us all to demand details from candidates, honestly assess whether their proposals will improve or worsen our economic situation, insist on and participate in rigorous debates, and cast informed votes.
As you try to understand why our economy has been so anemic, why so few jobs are being created, and why one in three young American voters supports socialism as better than free enterprise – here are just a few realities to ponder.
God gave Moses Ten Commandments. The federal government has given us tens of thousands of commandments, enforced by millions of nameless, unelected bureaucrats who have nearly unfettered discretion to interpret and administer their rules. Complying with them costs American families and businesses $1.9 trillion per year. That’s more than the entire Russian economy, more than the IRS collected in corporate and personal taxes in 2015, and $15,000 in hidden costs for every family.
The Obama Administration has been publishing 80,000 pages of new regulations per year – and is preparing to unleash 3,000 
more rules before it leaves office. Small businesses are hurt most, as they cannot possibly read, comprehend, and comply with this regulatory tsunami. They thus live in fear that any unknown or inadvertent violation will result in massive fines or even jail time. Indeed, more than 4,500 federal rules carry criminal penalties, and lack of knowledge or intent is no defense.
Coupled with the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, new hourly wage and overtime rules, and mountains of state and local regulations, these federal edicts dramatically impair hiring and growth.
This unintended job and economic destruction has shrunk middle class family incomes by more than $1,000 per year during the Obama era, sent 3 million more families into poverty, and added over 600,000 black Americans to the overall poverty number. The intentional damage is even more insidious.
The Obama EPA’s war on fossil fuels has contributed greatly to the loss of nearly 50,000 coal industry jobs since 2008. Mrs. Clinton has made it clear that she will “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” if she is elected. Like Senator Sanders, she also wants to eliminate most U.S. oil and natural gas production – while ignoring the fact that fossil fuels still provide 82% of all U.S. energy.
That would mean vastly more land-intensive, heavily subsidized wind, solar. and biofuel substitutes. It would send electricity and motor fuel prices skyrocketing to levels now found in California and New York, or even in Britain and Germany: double, triple. or quadruple what most Americans now pay.
For hospitals, factories, school districts. and other major energy users, that would bring thousands to millions of dollars per year in higher costs – and thus countless more lost jobs and closed doors.
President Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Sanders, most Democrats and even some Republicans justify these self-inflicted wounds by saying they are necessary to prevent catastrophic global warming and climate change. But even if plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a primary culprit – and thousands of scientists say it is not – even shutting down all U.S. fossil fuel use would bring no benefits, amid tremendous pain.
China alone accounts for 80% of the entire world’s increase in coal consumption so far this century. It now consumes as much coal as the rest of the world combined. The 155 new coal-fired power plants it is currently planning to build will burn twice as much coal as all of Germany’s existing plants do. Coal generates 67% of China’s electricity, oil and natural gas 23%, hydro 10%, and wind and solar combined only 2%. Nearly a billion Chinese still exist on less than $5 per day, and the Middle Kingdom will be burning fossil fuels for decades to improve their living standards.
India, Indonesia, the rest of Asia, all of Africa and much of Latin America are in the same situation. All are burning coal, oil, and natural gas to lift billions out of abject poverty – and will continue doing so.
America’s political classes always protect themselves. It is poor, minority, middle-class, and blue-collar families that will suffer – along with most of you graduates – from these all pain/no gain climate policies.
Politicians always like to show they care, by giving other people’s money to worthy causes, their favorite voting blocs and their campaign 
contributors. They are far less charitable with their own money. Joe and Jill Biden raked in $333,182 in 2009 – and gave just $4,820 to charity; during the previous decade, they averaged $369 annually. Between 2007 and 2014, the Clintons “earned” $139 million; they gave $14,959,450 to charity – but 98.7% of that went to the scandal-ridden Clinton Family Foundation.
Socialist and anti-energy policies boil down to strangling jobs and wealth creation … making the economic pie smaller and smaller … taking money from hard-working taxpayers and giving it to “less fortunate” people who aren’t working but will likely vote for politicians who promise them “free stuff” … and ensuring “more equitable sharing” of ever greater scarcity, poverty and misery (for non-ruling elites).
As to telling poor countries to stop using fossil fuels, it is an unconscionable crime against humanity to impose policies that pretend to protect Earth’s poor, malnourished, and energy-deprived masses from hypothetical climate chaos – by perpetuating poverty, malnutrition, and disease that kill millions of them every year, right now.
Think about all of this as you take your diploma, evaluate candidates, and head to the polls.
Employment depends on being seen to be correct politicly. I pray an open and questioning mind will be held by our new graduates, but rather doubt it after the years of mind bending that passes for education these days throughout most of the Western World. The Frankfurt School have been very sucessful since the first convening in the 1920’s. Blast the Common Purpose brigade.
I don’t consider the Left to be “liberal.”
Bertrand Russell’s liberalism in the 1950s meant an open mind, a
receptiveness to disfavored ideas and minority views. It is still,
I think, a faith the collective wisdom of individual choices.
Whatever liberal instincts the Left once had are buried within its
last three (and counting) decades of political correctness.
It’s gone from disagreeing with opposing views to suppressing them
outright.
Progressives on the other hand, George F. Will observed, believe
history has a destination, known only to them. And that’s where
they intend to take us.
But as Satchel Paige said, none of us is smarter than all of us.
World-renowned physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s admonition has been largely discarded in the halls of academia. “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,” he said, “than answers that can’t be questioned.” Sadly, answers that none dare question now dominate classroom life led by liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, Marxists, “social sciences” professors, Democrats, union goons, and other such low-lives, slime, and scum of this once free country. The main vehicle for this war on dissent is the Global Warming hoax which, – after 20 consecutive years of GLOBAL COOLING, – had to be renamed as the Climate Change scam by that coterie of government-paid drones under the supervision of the UN socialist panel. In preparation for that Paris Conference last December the fakers had to “recalibrate their instruments”, and to “refine their computer models” to “demonstrate further warming” retroactively. A number of our socialist Marxist attorney generals are getting ready to sue those doubters; well – there are some 32,000 such scientists and professionals to be sued: find their names on the Internet under “Oregon Petition” and “Manhattan Declaration”. And I am one of them: MS, PhD, Engineering, UCLA, with specialties in Heat & Mass Transfer and in Thermodynamics. Hello creeps – sue me! A growing number of our universities are preparing to forbid access to their students by those “criminal doubters and deniers”. That is just a sick repetition of those medieval religious inquisition courts against “the non-believers”.
@MarkJ: Great comments. If you can answer this without being fired, what have you experienced at UCLA in terms of ridicule etc. If you can not answer this, I understand. I enjoyed your repeat of Richard Feynman’s statement about having a preference for questions asked that can’t be answered than answers that can ‘t be questioned. You have interested me in knowing more about Feynman which I intend to do. Like many people , I read and heard about AGW in the initial phases some years ago and naturally believed that the statements were true that CO2 was the driver of the warming. That belief changed as the “hockey stick” scandal became known and as Skeptical scientists and others began a process of countering the so called settled science. I have watch with interest and unbelief on how just changing the name of the AGW scam to climate change has brought more believers to the side of the Al Gore and warmers.. I am impressed with what Cfact has done and other scientists in the battle to reeducate the masses. Keep up the good work.
Thanks – I appreciate your kind words.
let me say for the record that I have a grade 10 education.. that being said I can see that the whole “global Warming” campaign is a farce. Firstly the seas are not rising as a result of melting polar ice.. Sea levels are about 3 mm higher than 100 years ago. At the turn of the 20th century the polar ice was melting at an alarming rate so much so, that krill was seen much further than previously, then it got cooler again.. As I watch the weather each year, I notice that there has been a migration of weather patterns and a shift in weather events. Areas that once were covered in snow now get less snow, other areas are getting snow where previously there wasn’t. In Australia some places are getting well above the regular rain falls and other areas are now receiving well below the annual average. Yes it is climate change.. the climate has been changing for millennium some times it is warmer and other times it is cooler.. more to do with the WOBBLE of the earth as it rotates on it’s axis I believe than to do with the levels of CO2. Could I suggest that the increase of CO2 would actually improve plant life, and cool the earth? We had the Freon 14 scare that was destroying the Ozone.. it’s actually heavier than air so cant rise up to the outer atmosphere, followed by the CFC scare, Mt Erebus emits CFC constantly (but Du-Pont did manage to find a replacement both times and patented it to safeguard the environment) and I thought that melting ice reduces the water displacement anyway, so sea levels should be retreating? I actually do remember being told to Question everyone as a kid going to school so now they have to shut up and listen? Amazing.. sounds like a Catholic mentality. By the way, look at what the pope said in his recent address to the US Congress.. and Obama’s response! He said ” I welcome His Holiness Pope Francis’s encyclical, and deeply admire the Pope’s decision to make the case—clearly, powerfully, and with the full moral authority of his position—for action on global climate change … I believe the United States must be a leader in this effort … ” (White House Press Release, June 18, 2015). Who is behind this push?
There is more to this than meets the eye!
Pope Francis has been and still is a “social justice” street preacher no different that any such other Marxist – says this lapsed Roman Catholic and a former refugee from a communist hell.
The principal aim of the world’s “environmentalists” is to reduce the planet’s population presently about 7.5 billion souls down to the “sustainable” level of about 1.5 billion. In that endeavor the Climate Change hoax is just the latest chapter. Previous attacks have been:
1) Elimination of DDT by totally false accusations that it kills birds and fish; DDT has never damaged a single bird nor fish;
2) Elimination of CFC as a cooling agent to preserve food, accused to rise into the stratosphere where it kills the protective layer of oxygen; any leaks of CFC fall heavily to the ground where the hungry earth microbes gobble it fast as a delicacy.
3) Renaming the swamps as protected “wetlands”; these produce swarms od deadly mosquitos and methane from rotting vegetation (methane is a much more powerful warming agent than CO2).
“Draining the swamp” must not only apply to Washington DC but also to the left wing politically correct professors who have been indoctrinating America’s youth and turning them into the ‘snowflake generation”