RUTHFULLY YOURS

The low U.S. labor force participation rate has several causes, but a major one is the disincentive to work created by government programs. The Republican Party’s growth wing has spent years developing ideas for addressing these incentives not to work and rise up the economic ladder, and the results are starting to show.

Last month to almost no attention the House Ways and Means Committee moved a bill from Chairman Kevin Brady that would update the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, known as TANF. This program is the result of the Newt Gingrich-Bill Clinton 1996 welfare reform.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Doar noted recently that TANF on the whole is a success. The program has declined as a share of 1996 spending while Medicaid and food stamps have exploded. One big reason is because TANF is a block grant to states, unlike the Medicaid racket that allows states to draw down more federal dollars for every new enrollee. The program even survived attempts at sabotage by the Obama Administration like expanding waivers for work requirements.

The current system requires states to engage 50% of families in work activities. But that means states can write off some of the tougher cases. And gimmicks like a “caseload reduction credit” allow states to buy down the 50% rate to a much lower benchmark or even 0% of families. Mr. Brady’s bill would require that 100% of recipients engage in work or training as a precondition of receiving benefits.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/economy-jobs-report-more-openings-than-seekers/

The U.S. economy reached a record 6.7 million job openings in April, the Department of Labor stated Tuesday, hundreds of thousands more than the number of unemployed workers.

March and April both saw the number of job openings outstrip the number of unemployed workers.

There were 6.7 million job openings in April and only 6.35 million job seekers. The previous month saw 6.63 million job openings, more than the 6.59 million unemployed workers.

The number of openings has never been higher than the number of job seekers since the government started counting employment opportunities in 2000.

May saw 223,000 jobs added to the U.S. economy.

Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential.’ Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens.

Donald Trump blusters nonstop. He offers contrasting messages about whether, on any given day, he might fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. His tweets are certainly not presidential, at least as the adjective is usually understood.

At perpetual campaign rallies, Trump mocks his critics, caricaturing their voices and slamming them with adolescent epithets like “Cryin’ Chuckie Schumer.” He accuses House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of being an enabler of M-13 gang members after she chastised him for calling such psychopaths “animals.” Trump has defined his own uncouthness, which so incenses his opponents, as “the new presidential.”

Yet so far, after over a year of intense investigation, Special Counsel Mueller has found no evidence that Donald Trump — or even his low-level subordinates — had ever colluded with Russian government interests to hijack the 2016 election and defeat Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Mueller has shown himself desperate to indict almost anyone connected with the Trump campaign with almost any charge he can think of — other than colluding with the Russians to warp an election, his original mandate.

Call the Trump paradox “crass lawfulness.” What drives Trump’s critics nearly crazy is not any evidence that Trump has broken federal laws per se. Instead, their rub is that there are somehow no criminal statutes against a president boorishly acting “unpresidential” in his loud quest to supercharge the economy, while undoing the entire agenda of his predecessor, who was so dearly beloved by the media, universities, Hollywood, and identity-politics groups.

Certainly, President Obama’s teleprompted speeches were mellifluous. As some sort of postmodern preacher, Obama often sermonized to Americans about the predetermined “arc of history” that purportedly bent all of us inescapably toward his own just moral version of the universe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/masterpiece-cakeshop-setback-liberty/

This was a straightforward free-expression case, and the Court could have resolved the dispute in favor of liberty.

I must respectfully disagree with the editors regarding the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop.

Professor Steve Vladek is right: The decision is “remarkably narrow.” One cannot help but be struck by the majority’s reticence from the outset: “Whatever the outcome of some future controversy involving facts similar to these, the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause.” Mind you, this is from the pen of Anthony Kennedy, a judicial supremacist who ordinarily interrupts his liberty bender only to scold the People — formerly known as the sovereign — to pipe down and quit grousing once the Robed Nine have spoken.

On this one, though, Justice Kennedy assures the Left it can grouse away. This ruling, in grudging accommodation of religious conviction, will not necessarily bear on the outcome “of some future controversy involving facts similar to these.”

To be sure, I am all for a Lincolnian construction that reduces Supreme Court rulings to a duly narrow resolution of the dispute between the litigating parties, leaving it to the republic to govern itself accountably. But that is not what’s going on here. This case is a one-off. The justices, manifestly pained, side ever so ambiguously with religious liberty, a founding principle of the nation, over gay marriage, a trendy progressive cause that would not remotely have been threatened in Colorado had Jack Phillips been left in peace to honor his convictions.

Kennedy’s sweet-mystery-of-life jurisprudence is all about exploring the exotic contours of liberty to discover heretofore unknown substantive safeguards. Not in this case, though. Confronted by a liberty twofer — an attack on free-expression rights that also burdens religious liberty — the justices punt on substantive protections for traditional religious exercise and speech (the latter liberty that could and should have decided the case in Mr. Phillips’s favor); they agitate, instead, over procedural flaws in the state’s adjudication of the conscience question.