China is Asshole, II

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How China has amped up its factories and is threatening to crush US industry with a new ‘tsunami’ of cheap products

…. The Communist country of 1.3 billion people has shifted [$1.9 trillion] into amping up its factories in just four years in an effort to overwhelm manufacturers around the world with an influx of cheap goods.

President Trump’s 125% tariff on all Chinese imports into the US — which he announced Wednesday as he paused steep duties on most other countries — is actually just the latest protective measure against China.

The European Union, Brazil, Mexico and Thailand have either imposed new tariffs in the last few months or are considering such measures to protect their own industries from Chinese imports.

…. Overall Chinese exports rose a whopping 13% in 2023 and 17% in 2024. Exports make up about 20% of the country’s GDP.

Meanwhile, American exports — which were higher than ever 10 years ago — are slumping. Exports only account for 11% of the US GDP — down from 13.6% in 2012.

US exports to China in particular fell almost 3% last year, to a total of $144 billion, according to the US Trade Representative’s Office.

Imports from China, however, hit almost $440 billion — up nearly 3% year-over-year after falling dramatically in 2023.

To compete with China’s manufacturing behemoth, many countries are already building their own great walls. Last year, Brazil raised tariffs on Chinese metal and fiber optic cable exports. The EU raised tariffs on Chinese EVs to 45.3% to protect its own auto industry.

Earlier this year, Mexico proposed matching the US tariffs on China. And Thailand proposed amending its free trade zones to impose a 7% duty on low-value goods from China.

Trump’s unprecedented tariff on Chinese goods could similarly shield the US from the coming wave.

Steep levies on cars, for example, have already stopped cheap Chinese EVs from decimating the American auto industry.

But it’s already too late for some local manufacturers. Chinese imports to Thailand have caused manufacturing in that country to plunge by 50%, ASEAN Briefing reported last year.

Excepts from the NYT article that the Post’s article is based on:

‘The Tsunami Is Coming’: China’s Global Exports Are Just Getting Started

By Keith Bradsher

For decades, the world’s largest car factory was Volkswagen’s complex in Wolfsburg, Germany. But BYD, the Chinese electric carmaker, is building two factories in China, each capable of producing twice as many cars as Wolfsburg.

Recent data from China’s central bank shows that state-controlled banks lent an extra $1.9 trillion to industrial borrowers over the past four years. On the fringes of cities all over China, new factories are being built day and night, and existing factories are being upgraded with robots and automation.

China’s investments and advances in manufacturing are producing a wave of exports that threatens to cause factory closings and layoffs not just in the United States but also around the globe.

…. Five years ago, before a housing bubble burst, cranes putting up apartment towers dotted practically every city in China. Today, many of those cranes are gone and the ones that are left seldom move. At Beijing’s behest, banks have rapidly shifted their lending from real estate to industry.

China is using more factory robots than the rest of the world combined, and most of them are made in China by Chinese companies, although some components are still imported. After several years of rapid growth, overall installations of new factory equipment have already jumped another 18 percent this year.

When Zeekr, a Chinese electric carmaker, opened a factory four years ago in Ningbo, a two-hour drive south of Shanghai, the facility had 500 robots. Now it has 820, and many more are planned.

As new factories come online, China’s exports are rapidly accelerating. They rose 13.3 percent in 2023 and then another 17.3 percent last year.

Lending by state banks is also financing a boom in corporate research and development. Huawei, a conglomerate making items as varied as smartphones and auto parts, has just opened in Shanghai a research center for 35,000 engineers that has 10 times as much space for offices and labs as Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

…. China has been rapidly expanding its share of global manufacturing for decades. The growth came mainly at the expense of the United States and other longtime industrial powers, but also of developing countries. China has increased its share to 32 percent and rising, from 6 percent in 2000.

China’s factory output is bigger than the combined manufacturing of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain.

Even before Mr. Trump won a second term, Biden administration officials warned during their final year in office about industrial overcapacity in China. They raised some tariffs, notably on electric cars.

But during their first three years, Biden administration officials mostly focused on tighter export controls for technologies like high-end semiconductors, citing national security concerns. They left in place tariffs of 7.5 percent to 25 percent that Mr. Trump had imposed on half of China’s exports to the United States in his first term.

It remains uncertain how the president’s much tougher approach this time will play out. Tariffs have occasionally slowed China’s growth in exports, but not stopped it. Other nations are on high alert for the possibility that Chinese exports could be diverted elsewhere, threatening the economies of longstanding U.S. allies like the European Union and South Korea.

China’s automakers were preparing a push into the American car market in 2017, when Mr. Trump first took office. GAC Motor in Guangzhou, China, brought dozens of U.S. car dealers to the city’s auto show that November. The company announced plans to sell gasoline-powered sport utility vehicles and minivans in the United States by the end of 2019.

But GAC and other Chinese automakers canceled their plans after Mr. Trump included cars in his initial 25 percent tariffs several months later.

Chinese companies still sell almost no cars in the United States. That is unlikely to change: With Mr. Trump’s latest moves, Chinese carmakers now face U.S. tariffs as high as 181 percent.

Blocked in the United States, Chinese automakers have continued building factories and have pivoted their export campaigns elsewhere. Their sales have soared in Australia and Southeast Asia, taking market share from Japanese and American brands. In Mexico, Chinese carmakers held just 0.3 percent in 2017; by last year, it was over 20 percent.

Rapid sales gains in the European Union, and evidence of Chinese government subsidies, prompted E.U. officials last October to impose tariffs of up to 45 percent on electric cars from China.

China is not just building car factories. It has built more petrochemical refinery capacity in the past five years, for example, than Europe, Japan and South Korea together have created since World War II. And China is on track to build these refineries even faster this year. Petrochemicals are then turned into plastics, polyester, vinyl and tires.

Robert E. Lighthizer, who was the United States trade representative in Mr. Trump’s first term, said that the latest American tariffs “are long overdue medicine — the real root cause is decades of Chinese industrial policy that has created breathtaking overcapacity and global imbalances.”

China is exporting so much partly because its own people are buying so little. A housing market crash since 2021 has wiped out much of the savings of the middle class and ruined many wealthy families.

China’s huge investments in the chemicals industry extend beyond petrochemicals to include this factory in Zibo, China, which uses a rare earth metal to make chemicals that control pollution in gasoline-powered cars’ exhaust.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Tax revenues are falling, but military spending is rising rapidly. That has left the government wary of spending on economic stimulus to help consumers. China has offset its housing debacle instead with its export campaign, creating millions of jobs to build, outfit and operate factories.

Some Chinese economists have recently joined Western economists in suggesting that the country needs to strengthen its meager social safety net. At the start of this year, the minimum government pension for seniors was just $17 a month. That barely buys groceries, even in rural China.

The country’s best-known economist, Professor Li Daokui of Tsinghua University, publicly called in January for raising the minimum monthly pension several fold, to $110. The Chinese government could afford it, he argued, and extra spending by seniors would stimulate the entire economy.

Chinese officials rejected his advice. When the budget came out on March 5, it had an increase in monthly pensions — but it was just $3, bringing them to $20 a month.

The same budget included $100 billion for investments, including ports and other infrastructure that help exporters. And there was a new program to upgrade technology used in manufacturing across 20 Chinese cities.

Fiends of the Earth

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Here’s a typical story that could have been written in any year, in any state, although this one comes from 2019 in Colorado. For what it’s worth, the first Trump administration let this pass; the smarter, wiser version this time probably wouldn’t.

Forest Service rescinds chain saw use in Colorado wilderness

DURANGO, Colo. (AP) — The U.S. Forest Service has canceled a decision to use chain saws to clear trees killed by bark beetles in two wilderness areas in southwestern Colorado.

The Durango Herald reports Rocky Mountain Regional Forester Brian Ferebee announced the decision in a letter to forest supervisors Monday, citing reports of avalanches blocking trails in the Weminuche and South San Juan wilderness areas.

The agency in May authorized the motorized equipment, prompting a lawsuit by conservation groups that claimed chain saws in wilderness areas would violate law.

San Juan Citizens Alliance Executive Director Mark Pearson says they will dismiss the lawsuit following the announcement.

For decades now, this pattern has repeated itself: timber companies are blocked from salvaging dead trees killed by bark beetle infestations, hurricanes, whathaveyou, so the trees lie on the ground, wasted, until a wildfire springs up, consumes the dead trees, and then moves on to the still healthy areas of the forest and burns up an area 100X larger than the original site. This is declared a triumph by the tree huggers; go figure.

Under every rock that's overturned

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It’s perfectly understandable why our politicians and the Democrats’ media branch are so intent on distracting the public’s attention from what’s being revealed; it’s infuriating that so many are falling prey to the manufactured panic and letting them get away with it.

DOGE reveals bizarre findings of unemployment insurance claims survey: 'This is so crazy'

'I had to read it several times before it sank in," Elon Musk noted

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) account on X shared eyebrow-raising findings from a survey of unemployment insurance claims.

The "initial survey of Unemployment Insurance claims since 2020" found that thousands of people with future birthdates claimed benefits.

The survey also indicated that thousands of supposedly very young and very old people had claimed benefits.

The DOGE post states that the survey found, "24.5k people over 115 years old claimed $59M in benefits," "28k people between 1 and 5 years old claimed $254M in benefits," and "9.7k people with birth dates over 15 years in the future claimed $69M in benefits."

"In one case, someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k," the post also notes.

Fox News Digital reached out to the Department of Labor for comment: "This is another incredible discovery by the DOGE team, finding nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment payments," Department of Labor Sec. Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement. "The Labor Department is committed to recovering Americans’ stolen tax dollars. We will catch these thieves and keep working to root out egregious fraud - accountability is here."

On the state Level too; this report from Maine is, I’m sure typical of what’s happenig in all fifty states:

In a scathing audit of Maine’s 2024 spending, Maine’s Office of the State Auditor [a Democrat] has revealed systemic financial mismanagement, cronyism-friendly contracting practices, and multiple material weaknesses across state agencies—leaving taxpayers exposed to legal risks, unnecessary costs, and outright corruption.

The audit, published Friday, reveals a shocking lack of practical and ethical guardrails for government spending after the Democrat-controlled legislature just passed an $11.3 billion budget and is prepared to spend another $300M-$600M — all funded by new taxes on tobacco, streaming entertainment, ambulances, and more. 

At the center of the audit’s most troubling findings is the state’s rampant abuse of the non-competitive bidding process. Maine’s centralized procurement agency, the Office of State Procurement Services (OSPS), was found to have routinely approved contracts without conducting required cost analyses, bypassing rules meant to safeguard public dollars. This raises serious red flags about favoritism, nepotism, and possible corruption within the process for handing out state and federal cash.

The competitive bidding process, which ensures that potentially large government contracts are awarded according to an open and transparent process, has been regularly circumvented in violation of state and federal law, according to State Auditor Matt Dunlap.

The result? 

More than $2.1 billion in FY2024 contract payments were made under a system the audit describes as lacking basic supervisory oversight and controls​.

The audit tested 45 contracts and found that 16 of 31 “sole-source” contracts—those exempted from competitive bidding—lacked any documentation of a required “reasonable investigation” by the Director of the Bureau of General Services. 

In one case, a sole-source contract was approved after the work was completed, a blatant violation of state procurement law. 

In another instance, the OSPS failed to prevent “stacking” of Low-Cost Service Contracts (LCSCs)—contracts under $5,000 designed to avoid bidding—allowing one department to award sevenconcurrent LCSCs to the same vendor in a year, a maneuver clearly intended to dodge oversight​.

…. The report also found that OSPS failed to ensure that the state was securing fair prices, a lack of effort that could have cost taxpayers untold millions.

“Documentation to support performance of a cost analysis as required by State policy could not be provided for any of the 45 procurement actions tested,” the auditors wrote. In other words, in 100 percent of cases, the state agency responsible for handing out government money failed to perform a cost analysis. 

Despite the legal requirement to obtain and verify cost reasonableness, the auditors noted: “While OSPS claims that there are often rigorous cost analyses in place, OSA requested documentation for cost analysis related to all 45 of the procurement documents selected in our test, and none were provided by OSPS.”

[RELATED: Maine Awards State House Landscaping Contract to Brother of Guy in Charge of Awarding State Contracts…]

In a potentially related development, the man who would have been in charge of conducting a “reasonable investigation” into non-competitive contracts resigned last year after the Maine Wire reported exclusively on an $812,776 taxpayer-funded contract he signed for his brother’s landscaping company.

[RELATED: Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ Brother Helped Transfer Nine-Acre Black Market Cannabis Grow to Chinese National “Mother” Living in Guangdong Province…]

The failures flagged in the audit ultimately fall on DAFS Commissioner Kirsten Figueroa, a longtime friend of Gov. Janet Mills (D). But the failures related specifically to technology may also point toward Douglas Birgfeld III, Figueroa’s husband, whom she hired in a controversial display of nepotism shortly after taking her own job.

According to state payroll records, Figueroa and Birgfeld pulled down a combined $365,954 in taxpayer-funded compensation in 2024.

Who are they protecting at the expense of their own citizens? More accurately, why?

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Connecticut bill would (further) protect immigrants, target companies aiding deportations


HARTFORD — The Democrat-dominated Judiciary Committee on Tuesday approved legislation aimed at protecting Connecticut [illegal] immigrants from deportation at the hands of federal immigration agents. And in a late redrafting of the Trust Act legislation Tuesday morning, companies that assist in deporting residents — such as Avelo Airlines — could see subsidies revoked.

Republicans warned that the proposal would attempt to usurp the role of the federal government's role in overseeing immigration.

… Building on a 2019 law, this year's proposal, which passed along party lines and next heads to the House of Representatives, would apply to all law enforcement as well as state prosecutors and the Board of Pardons and Paroles as well as local governments, prohibiting them from helping U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. [bolding added]Towns and cities not in compliance with the proposal, if it becomes law, could be forced into obeying it through orders by the state superior court.

"The bill also works to address a rising issue we've seen of unsafe encounters in front of our courthouses between individuals arriving either for their own court date or to accompany a loved one or to serve as a witness or even victims of crimes showing up for a court date and then being chased down the street by ICE officers," Stafstrom said. "This bill also works to ensure that those who are receiving state funds, those state contractors and those state recipients of grants and state funding are not engaging in or assisting in immigration activities with those funds." (I don’t think he means illegals on welfare “engaging in immigration activities” by living in this country.)

Sanity speaks, but will be ignored by this Democrat-ruled state:

"We agree, as being part of the United States of America, to come together under the federal Constitution," said Rep. Craig Fishbein of Wallingford, a ranking Republican on the panel. "The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over immigration because our federal government has the whole border of the whole country. It's key and it's important that our federal law enforcement is able to cooperate with local law enforcement with regard to enforcing federal law. Any action by anybody — especially by the state — to impede that, to hold that back, slow it down, is in my mind unconstitutional and unAmerican. If you don't support the United States of American, you're unAmerican."

State Rep. Patrick Callahan, R-New Fairfield, a former state probation department worker, recalled helping the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service and later ICE remove criminal immigrants. "These were people that were becoming an impediment to the good people of the legal immigrant community living a good life," he said, stressing that at the time, before the first Trust Act in 2013, they were able to seize those offenders in a more "controlled" environment of a prison, probation office or court house. 

"I worked cases with the Secret Service, the FBI, local police, State Police, all in the name of community safety, public safety," Callahan said, adding that the original Trust Act prevented him from even communicating with ICE after 2013. That led to federal agents becoming more public, going into people homes or encountering undocumented immigrants outside a court house, including an incident in Danbury where a person fleeing ICE was hit by a vehicle and hospitalized in 2018.

"I don't understand why we want to keep people who are convicted of crimes and are subject to deportation off the radar, because those are people I'm sure that the good people that we live alongside in the immigrant community would prefer they aren't there either," Callahan said. "This is the wrong thing to be doing, ignoring federal law. If people are here illegally and don't want to be subject to deportation, don't commit crimes. Live peacefully and no one's going to bother you, for the most part."

And leave it to Billy:

In recent public hearings on the proposal, Attorney General William Tong warned that immigrants are afraid to interact with public agencies that can help them contribute to the economy through such things as mundane as car insurance and drivers' licenses. They may get discouraged from reporting criminal incidents. Tong stressed that the proposed law would not shield violent felons from ICE; protect those on terrorist watch lists; nor restrict federal immigration authorities from enforcing the law within Connecticut. Yes it will; in fact, that’s the precise purpose of this law.

Understand, this latest is an expansion of what the Democrats have already done:

2019: CT Senate passes bill restricting cooperation with ICE

Connecticut jumped back into the contentious national debate over immigration enforcement as Senate Democrats voted early Wednesday to pass a bill that would further restrict how police and court personnel can work with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants.

The bill would expand the Trust Act, a measure that effectively rebuked President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement policies when passed six years ago by prohibiting the detention of undocumented immigrants in the absence of a threat to public safety, an outstanding arrest warrant or a final order of deportation.

With one Democrat absent due to a family emergency, the Senate voted 20-15  at 1:50 a.m. after nearly an  eight-hour debate to pass and send the measure to the House of Representatives. Sen. Joan Hartley, D-Waterbury, voted with all 14 Republicans against the bill.

“It is a very scary time for a number of people in this country. We’re seeing an unprecedented attack on immigrants in this country. Our state is better than that.”

Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk

Democrats are already rushing to his defense

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“Hang tight, we’re coming!”

Previous incident(s)

Sexual assault charged related to February 2024 incident

The assault charge against Garcia-Aquino, who had no reported criminal history until now, is in connection with an alleged sexual assault that occurred on Feb. 22, 2024, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna confirmed.

As a former youth travel soccer coach in the Sylmar neighborhood who worked with different age divisions, Garcia-Aquino befriended a family to allow their 16-year-old son to stay at his home in Palmdale, Luna said. The family later filed a criminal report alleging their child had been sexually abused.

Due to the nature of the offenses, Luna said the sheriff's office's Special Victims Bureau had reason to believe there may be other victims. He urged other victims to come forward, even if they are in the U.S. without legal permission.

What can you use AI for, besides recipes and designing atomic power plants? Well, just about anything, but here's a mundane example.

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it’ll even come up with a picture of the situation, although why it felt that two wrenches were called for is a puzzlement.

Self-explanatory question, and one I was pretty sure I knew the answer to, but it’s kinda neat that GROK not only confirmed my suspicions, but even provided suggestions on how to address the problem.

Question posed: “I've just begun hearing water gurgling in the pipes of my hot water baseboard heating system. This is a new phenomenon, occurring after air was discovered in the system and, supposedly, bled out Could there still be air in the system, and could that be causing the gurgling sound?”

Ans: “Yes, it’s quite likely that there’s still air in your hot water baseboard heating system, and that could definitely be causing the gurgling sound you’re hearing. When air gets trapped in the pipes or radiators, it can create noises like gurgling, bubbling, or even banging as the water tries to move past those pockets of air. Even if the system was bled recently, it’s possible that not all the air was removed, or new air has somehow entered the system.

Bleeding the system involves opening the bleed valves (usually located on the radiators or at high points in the piping) to release trapped air until water flows out steadily. If the gurgling started after an initial bleed, it might mean some air was left behind, or the system wasn’t bled thoroughly enough. Another possibility is that air is being reintroduced, perhaps due to a small leak, low pressure, or an issue with the expansion tank.

Here’s what you could check:

  1. Re-bleed the system: Go back to each radiator or bleed point, starting with the lowest floor and working your way up, and see if more air comes out. Hold a cup or rag under the valve and open it slowly with a bleed key or screwdriver until you hear a hiss of air, then wait until water flows out without sputtering.

  2. Listen for patterns: If the gurgling happens mostly when the system starts up or shuts down, it’s a classic sign of air moving around.

  3. Check system pressure: If you have a pressure gauge on your boiler, make sure it’s within the recommended range (usually 12-15 psi when cold for a typical home system). Low pressure can allow air to get in.

  4. Inspect for leaks: Even a tiny leak could be pulling air into the system as it cools and contracts.

“If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself or the problem persists, it might be worth calling a technician to check for underlying issues like a clogged circulator pump or a malfunctioning air separator. But yes, air is the most likely culprit for that gurgling!”

His spelling needs work, but at least he's honest about what he does for a living

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From this gentleman’s LinkedIn profile:

Jeff's Scraping

Self-employedSelf-employedJan 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 4 mosJan 2023 to Present · 2 yrs 4 mos Greenwich, Connecticut, United States · On-siteGreenwich, Connecticut, United States · On-site

  • Acquiring Scrape metal at demolition sites, ECT.

It’s that “scraping” and “ECT” that seems to have landed him in trouble.

From today’s Greenwich Time:

Greenwich man accused of stealing copper pipes from local home, charged with burglary


GREENWICH — A Greenwich man is facing charges of burglary after he was allegedly seen inside a vacant home where significant damage was later observed and copper pipes were found missing.

Jeffrey Caviola, 42, of Greenway Drive, was charged with third-degree burglary and first-degree criminal mischief, felonies, and possession of burglary tools, a misdemeanor.

A real estate agent who was visiting the property on Riversville Road where the alleged burglary took place noted suspicious activity there, and took a photo of the truck that Caviola was driving, according to his arrest report. Police were able to track down the suspect from the photo of the license plate.

Officers made contact with the suspect a short time later.

"Officers found multiple burglary tools, including a Milwaukee Sawzall, a Milwaukee grinder, wire cutters, snips and a red bag containing a Milwaukee drill in Caviola’s vehicle," according to the police statement on his arrest on the afternoon of April 1. 

The pilgrims solved this: don’t work, don’t eat

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We’ll give the old man in the middle a break; he’s retired, thank god

Time for ‘shock therapy’ — how to get our 7 million dropout men back to work

President Trump wants to get America’s vast army of “dropout” men back into the workforce. Attention to this problem is long overdue.

Nearly 7 million men in the prime of life — over a tenth of the 25-to-54 age group — are neither working nor looking for work these days.

But Team Trump is trying to fix the problem with the wrong tools.

They argue that trade policy (tariffs) and industrial policy (special treatment for manufacturing) will reverse the long-term flight from work by men, by creating high-paying jobs to lure them back to work.

This approach may sound sensible to some. Unfortunately, it is likely to fail — even though the White House could succeed through other pro-work policies.

Once upon a time in America, working-age men without jobs were unemployed laborers.

Nearly 7 million men in the prime of life — over a tenth of the 25-to-54 age group — are neither working nor looking for work these days.Johnny Joo / Barcroft Media

But that’s ancient history: Today, for every “prime age” man who is actually unemployed — out of a job but looking — there are three who are neither working nor looking for work.

That means the overwhelming majority of jobless men nowadays are NILFs (for “not in labor force”). And unemployed men differ fundamentally in both mindset and behavior from NILF men.

The former consider themselves part of the labor force; the latter do not.

The former generally respond to labor market incentives; the latter generally do not.

Thus, while unemployed men tend to be out of work for just a few weeks, NILF men tend to be long-termers — often lifers.

Furthermore, only a tiny minority of NILF men say they are jobless because they could not find work. Even during recessions, most give other reasons.

Incentivizing helplessness

Millions of NILF men live work-free existences financed by an array of disability programs and their associated “poverty” benefits.

This disability archipelago incentivizes helplessness, and at a terrible cost in human potential.

America’s disability system is so dysfunctional that no one in DC can tell you just how many people are currently getting benefits from its crazy-quilt of subcomponents (SSDI, SSI, Social Security, veterans’ benefits, state-level disability programs, worker’s comp programs — and more).

Before the pandemic, however, I estimated that over half of America’s prime-age NILF men were getting benefits from one or more of these programs — and that over two-thirds lived in homes taking in at least one ­disability benefit.

‘Disability’ programs

That would have been over 3 million direct recipients and over 4 million indirect beneficiaries, of roughly 7 million NILF men ages 25 to 54.

The Social Security Administration’s disability programs, SSDI and SSI, are the one part of the greater disability archipelago we know the most about. According to their numbers, working-age beneficiaries on the disability rolls grew sevenfold from 1965 to 2023.

….. It is a critical error to treat the NILF problem as an unemployment question. It will not be solved by more jobs or better workplace opportunities, the way unemployment would.

Six decades of rising dropout rates for prime-age American men attests to this.

Unlike the unemployment rate, which follows the business cycle, the prime male NILF rate has risen with eerie regularity through boom and bust alike for decades — almost wholly unaffected by national economic conditions.

Remember 2022? After the COVID pandemic, America was in the midst of an unprecedented peacetime labor shortage.

Yet with nearly 12 million positions open, and employers almost begging for applicants, NILF rates for prime-age men barely budged.

Millions of those unfilled jobs during the “Great Resignation” did not require high school diplomas, only the “skills” of showing up at work, on time and sober.

But the NILF men did not come — even though close to half had at least some college.

Consider, too: Back in 2022, about 800,000 of those unfilled slots were in manufacturing.

If idle dropout men did not flock to available factory jobs then, why should we expect them to be lured to future factories built under tariff threats?

The miracle of the market does not cure social pathologies. All too many male workforce dropouts are detached (from society), dependent (on government benefits and pain meds), and ­defeated.

These men will not be tempted to rejoin the workforce by good paychecks alone.

We need other approaches.

Try ‘shock therapy’

Instead of continuing to pin hopes on obviously ineffective labor market “pull,” how about instead trying “shock therapy push”?

Back in the 1990s, a “welfare ­reform” worthy of the name brought millions of single mothers back into the workforce, a win-win for their families and for society.

Why not try the same now for our NILF men?

A disability system overhaul that protects the truly needy while promoting a work-first principle might do wonders for America — not least for a great many dispirited men on the couch.

Washington manifestly lacks the will to reform a long-broken disability system.

So why not let Elon Musk try to DOGE it?

Reclaiming our dropout men will require other measures, too. But fixing disability will be a big step in the right direction.

Very much related:

Democrats Deploy Disability Dodge. “Dozens of administrative law judges grant disability payments to almost everyone who appears before them, overriding Social Security staff who determined the people were not entitled to payments.”

I've been posting this same statistic for years, every time to plastic straw/shopping bag loonies screech for more controls, but it never hurts to remind ourselves

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Now do the same thinking about CO2 emissions and the deindustrialization of the west