Governor Andy Beshear hurts the poor in Kentucky

Steve Beshear, the former Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, has a guesstimated net worth of $1.5 million. Mr Beshear spent almost his entire adult life in politics, and:

is an American attorney and politician who served as the 61st governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1974 to 1980, was the state’s 44th attorney general from 1980 to 1983, and was the 49th lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1987.

He ‘suffered’ through an interregnum when he finished third in the Democratic primary for Governor, and he spent twenty years practicing law with Lexington’s prestigious firm of Stites and Harbison. Briefly put, Mr Beshear led a reasonably privileged lifestyle in the Bluegrass State’s second largest city.

The former Governor’s son, Andy Beshear, wound up leading a similarly privileged lifestyle, able to attend Vanderbilt University, the only private school in the Southeastern Conference, current estimated cost of attendance $80,546 per academic year, and then the University of Virginia School of Law, current estimated cost of attendance for out-of-state students $91,704 per academic year.

In 2005, he was also hired by Stites and Harbison. No ambulance-chasing for the younger Me Beshear.

The younger Mr Beshear was elected state Attorney General in 2015, and subsequently Governor in 2019.

When the COVID-19 pandemic, or panicdemic as I sometimes call it, arose in early 2020, Governor Beshear issued draconian executive orders which shut down much of the ‘non-essential’ businesses in the Bluegrass State. Fifteen days to flatten the infection curve, we were told!

View from Natural Bridge, October 23, 2021. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.

Fast forward to this autumn. The Pico family visited Natural Bridge State Park on Saturday, October 23rd. It wasn’t a long visit, in that we didn’t have much time, so we took the skylift to the top of the bridge, from which I took the photograph.[1]Photos copyright by Dana R Pico. May be freely used with proper attribution.

When one of my Twitter friends replied, “I am surprised more leaves haven’t turned yet!” I resolved to return in two weeks to repeat the photo. So, we returned on Sunday, November 7th, and I got the photo, which will appear further down.

We had more time on Sunday, so while we took the skylift up, we decided to hike down Balanced Rock Trail, which ends not at the bottom of the skylift, but at Hemlock Lodge, the park’s hotel, gift shop and dining room facility.

Signs on the doors to Hemlock Lodge. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.

And Hemlock Lodge is where we found these signs on the doors, requiring masks for entry. Well, we didn’t have masks with us, and entered anyway, quickly discovering that the signs were mostly honored in the breach by park visitors, though employees did wear the infernal things.

What we also found was that the once-thriving restaurant was closed to dining! There were two ladies working therein, who would get carry-out orders. I asked them why the place was closed, and was told that the facility had been shut down due to COVID-19, and that was in March of 2020. Most of the staff had been laid off, and now, twenty months later, they still were not back.

Natural Bridge State Park is located in the Red River Gorge geological area, and straddles Powell and Wolfe counties in Kentucky. These are two very poor counties:

  • Powell County: The median income for a household in the county was $25,515, and the median income for a family was $30,483. Males had a median income of $26,962 versus $18,810 for females. The per capita income for the county was $13,060. About 18.90% of families and 23.50% of the population were below the poverty line, including 31.00% of those under age 18 and 20.00% of those age 65 or over.
  • Wolfe County: The median income for a household in the county was $19,310, and the median income for a family was $23,333. Males had a median income of $23,859 versus $18,952 for females. The per capita income for the county was $10,321. About 29.90% of families and 35.90% of the population were below the poverty line, including 50.20% of those under age 18 and 26.70% of those age 65 or over.

As much as people hear about jobs going begging for people, much of that is in suburban and urban areas; rural eastern Kentucky is not like that. When Governor Beshear — a Democrat, of course — shut down so much of the state parks, he put people out of work that had fewer prospects for finding something else.

View from Natural Bridge, November 7, 2021. Photo by Dana R Pico. Click to enlarge.

For restaurant workers? There’s Miguel’s Pizza, right across State Route 11 from the entrance to the state park, but it offers lower wages and doesn’t have state employee benefits. Governor Beshear, reared in wealthier Lexington, the scion of a prominent family, doesn’t really understand what he has done to rural Kentuckians, or, if he does understand, he doesn’t really care.

This has been the problem with the Patricians all along: they are so wrapped up in their own little worlds that they have lost any concept of what it is like for the plebeians. For the well-to-do, well, heck, two weeks to flatten the curve was nothing, they could handle it!

But for the working class, two weeks without their jobs isn’t nothing; it’s two weeks without bills getting paid. Governor Beshear doesn’t understand that, and doesn’t want to understand that.

References

References
1 Photos copyright by Dana R Pico. May be freely used with proper attribution.

President Biden wants to ‘legalize’ 11 million illegal immigrants, when 17½ million Americans can’t find the jobs they need If you voted for Joe Biden because he was a nicer guy than Donald Trump, then you also voted for this

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,659,000 Americans with jobs in January of 2020, but only 150,031,000 in January of 2021. That’s a loss of 8,628,000 jobs. Despite the “civilian noninstitutionalized adult population” increasing from 259,502,000 to 260,851,000, or 1,349,000 souls, the labor force, meaning people who are either working or looking for work, decreased by 4,295,000, meaning that over four million people got too discouraged to look for work. The “not in labor force” adult population increased by 5,643,000 people, from 95,047,00 to 100,690,000.

The total number of unemployed, even by the BLS U-3 measure, leapt from 5,796,000 to 10,130,000, or 4,334,000.

The “official” unemployment rate was reported to be 6.3%, which doesn’t sound too bad I suppose, but, quite frankly, I see U-3 as a way to under-report to the American people just how bad the economy is. Former Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnunchin thought that U-5, “Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force,” was the better number to use.[1]Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work … Continue reading I prefer U-6 as the best number, which includes everyone in U-5, plus those who are employed part-time, but want full-time work and cannot get it.

U-5 currently stands at 7.4%, while U-6 is a whopping 11.1%.

Doing the math, U-5 reports 1,768,000 people who want jobs, but have been too discouraged to look hard, while U-6 tells us that there are roughly 5,950,000 people who are working part-time only because they can’t find full-time work.

And that’s why this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer pisses me off so much:

Biden, Democrats unveil bill that would overhaul path to citizenship for millions

by Alexandra Jaffe, Associated Press | February 18, 2021 | 3:48 PM EST

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats proposed a major immigration overhaul Thursday that would offer an eight-year pathway to citizenship to the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally.

The legislation reflects the broad priorities for immigration changes that Biden laid out on his first day in office, including an increase in visas, more money to process asylum applications and new technology at the southern border.

It would be a sharp reversal of Trump administration policies, and parts are likely to face opposition from a number of Republicans. Biden has acknowledged he might accept a more-piecemeal approach if separate major elements could be approved.

“We have an economic and moral imperative to pass big, bold and inclusive immigration reform,” said New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the lead sponsors of the bill, in unveiling it Thursday.

There’s more at the original, but the obvious question is: if we have roughly 17,850,000 Americans who want full time jobs but either can’t find anything but part-time, or can’t find work at all, why would we ‘legalize’ 11,000,000 illegal immigrants to compete with them?

Is there any way that isn’t utter madness?

President Donald Trump probably never saw the economic collapse over the COVID-19 restrictions coming, but he had what he called an “America First” policy. He would never have agreed to make it easier for non-Americans to compete with actual American citizens for jobs, but that’s what his successor is doing. Under President Biden, we will have more Mexicans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans getting jobs that would otherwise have gone to people born in this country, to people who are real American citizens.

And if you voted for Joe Biden, because Donald Trump was an [insert slang term for the rectum here], and Mr Biden was such a nice guy, then you also voted for this!

References

References
1 Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

President Biden acts like he cares about working Americans, but that’s all it is: an act.

This is the kind of thing that pisses me off about Joe Biden being President. Looking at the January unemployment numbers, he said:

The unemployment numbers are from data collected in the middle of the month, normally before the 20th, meaning before he signed the executive order that threw 11,000 people out of work on the Keystone XL Pipeline!

The Biden Administration has no idea what poverty is like Warning: a nasty story is included

The Washington Post and Fox Business both had stories about the confirmation hearings of former mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-South Bend) to become Secretary of Transportation. Fox Business noted that Mr Buttigieg acknowledges Keystone Pipeline workers, thrown out of jobs due to President Biden’s cancellation of the border crossing permit into Canada, may need to get ‘different’ union jobs, while the Post omitted that part.

Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan (Ala.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) challenged Buttigieg over an order Biden signed Wednesday halting construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The project’s supporters say the order will cost thousands of jobs.

Buttigieg said the administration’s climate agenda ultimately will create jobs and stressed the importance of curbing the use of fossil fuels.

Note what Mr Buttigieg said, that the administration’s climate agenda ultimately will create jobs. Meaning, in a time of high unemployment, those to be created jobs don’t exist yet! Perhaps some of those Keystone XL Pipeline workers will get some of those newly created jobs, but what do they do between today and then?

Oops! For the left, that doesn’t really matter, does it? Mr Buttigieg never got his manicured hands dirty trying to weld two sections of pipeline together, or excavating material in the pipeline’s path. The sheltered son of University of Notre Dame professors, he never had to worry whether there’d be food on the table or a roof over his head.

This is the problem for the left elites: they claim to be all for the poor and the working class, but they have no concept about how the poor and the working class actually live. It’s nothing for Democratic Governors to issue shutdown orders that throw millions of people out of work, because they have no idea what missing even one paycheck can mean for people.

The Federal Reserve noted, in May of 2019 — before the economic dislocations caused by COVID-19 — that 61% of Americans could cover an unexpected, $400 emergency through cash, savings or a credit card that they could pay off at the next billing date. And that means that 39% could not cover such an expense.

And how would that 39% take care of that bill? Borrowing, selling something, or putting off paying something else. But Mr Buttigieg apparently thinks nothing of throwing those unionized workers out of a job; they’ll just have to get ‘different’ union jobs.

If they exist, that is.

I grew up poor, and while not quite as badly off as some other folks in eastern Kentucky, things were tight.

I’m going to tell you a story, a kind of nasty story, but a true one nevertheless. Sometime when I was in high school, the water pipe in the basement froze, and burst. My mother — my father was long gone — did not have the money to afford a plumber to repair it. In high school at the time, I was able to figure out how to shut the water off in the basement where it came out of the foundation wall, but repairing the burst pipe was beyond my knowledge.

We went without running water for at least two months! My mother worked hard, every day, my long-gone father hadn’t contributed a dime in years, and she just didn’t have the money to get it repaired. Our house was in town, so there was no outhouse. I don’t know how my mother and sisters took care of things — as a teenaged boy, I really didn’t want to know — but with no working toilet, when I had to urinate, I pissed out the attic window.

It wasn’t too bad: my bedroom was in the (barely heated) attic, and there were no houses across the street, because there was a ravine there, so I was able to just open the dormer window and let fly. The roof extended under that dormer window, and the urine went into the gutter.

Of course, urine isn’t the only bodily waste. “Number two”? That was at school, or anyplace else I could find on the weekends.

Bathing? Showers in the school gym locker room.

Yeah, that’s a nasty story, but that was my mother’s unexpected $400 expense, backdated fifty years. But that’s an experience which taught me what it was really like to be poor, and we weren’t the poorest people around.

Joe Biden knows nothing about this, Pete Buttigieg knows nothing about this, nobody in the whole damned Biden Administration has any flaming idea what poor people go through, and they are willing to keep adding on and keep adding on and keep adding on more ‘little’ expenses and more ‘sacrifices’ for the good of all.

We’re not poor now, thanks to a lifetime of hard work, but even at my advanced age, my memory is still good, and clear. Mao Zedong once sent the urban elites in China out into the fields, so learn how the peasants lived, and while I would never advocate that kind of totalitarian action, but at least those elites learned — if they survived it — how the other 90% lived. It would be nice if someone in the Biden Administration had some experience, some concept of what the President’s policies will do to people in this country.

Right now, it doesn’t seem as though they give a damn.

It’s so easy for state Governors to order other people to lose their jobs The Democrats always claimed to be the party of working people, but they don't seem to understand that working people need to work!

COVID-19 is serious, and can be fatal. But there are other things which can be fatal as well, homelessness for one, especially if you have minor children. And eventually, the no evictions and no foreclosure orders will have to be ended.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

As Beshear closes dining in, restaurant owners say ‘This is the breaking point’

By Janet Patton | November 18, 2020 | 4:37 PM EST | Updated: 6:31 PM EST

Gov. Andy Beshear’s new capacity restrictions on Kentucky restaurants and bars could not have come at a worse time, Lexington restaurant owners said Wednesday.

Pushed to the brink by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic hardships it has brought, many were facing a tough holiday season already with just 50 percent capacity and waning outdoor seating.

Beginning Friday, they will be limited to takeout and outdoor seating until Dec. 13. Beshear announced Wednesday that all indoor restaurant seating will be closed.

“This is the breaking point,” said Heather Trump, co-owner of Shamrock Bar & Grille and the Cellar. Most were hoping to hang on to the beginning of college basketball season, when business was expected to pick up.

Limited just to carryout, she said, “you will see 30 percent of restaurants never come back.”

There’s more at the original.

So, what happens to all of the people employed at restaurants and bars, people once again being laid off, and with a large percentage of those businesses never to reopen? If the businesses fail, the workers can’t be called back to work. And while restaurants fail all the time, and are normally replaced by other restaurants — I remember one building in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, which had a new restaurant every year for four straight years — who’s going to decide to take the risk to open a new restaurant under these conditions?

Of course, the Governor has ordered the halt of all in person classes in the Commonwealth, both public and private, meaning layoffs for many education employees — teachers’ aides, school bus drivers, custodians, security guards, guidance counselors and the like — and will force many working parents, primarily women, to either miss work, because they have to stay at home to care for their children, or pay for all day day care, if they can find it, leaving them working for nothing.

When these people eventually wind up on the streets, some of them are going to be just as dead as if they had died from COVID-19.

And now His Excellency the Governor wants to close the churches as well:

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear asked religious leaders across the state to immediately suspend all in-person gatherings at their houses of worship for the next three or four weeks, the president of the Kentucky Council of Churches said Thursday.

“This is a request from the governor, not a mandate, and it seems perfectly reasonable given the situation we are in with COVID-19,” said Kent Gilbert, who is also pastor of the historic Union Church in downtown Berea.

Gilbert was not certain if the request was until Sunday, Dec. 13 or through Dec. 13. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to questions about Gilbert’s comments.

If the Governor simply requested that churches ‘suspend’ services, then he was acting within his own First Amendment rights, his freedom of speech. If he attempts to order churches to close, then he is violating our free exercise of religion. His order restricting weddings and funerals to 25 or fewer guests, that we noted yesterday, is obviously unconstitutional, but the truth is that he got away with an order closing churches last March.