Tag: United States of America

In these days of controversy and political wrangling, we seem to forget that America’s woes from an economic standpoint stem from eight straight years of GDP growth hovering around an average of 2.1 percent. In the 1950s and ’60s, the average growth rate was about 4 percent. In the past ten years, it’s been around 2 percent. Our economy is dependent on 3 percent growth to continue to thrive and to keep the national debt manageable and to move in a downward trajectory. We have reached the point where it’s become critically important that, as far as economic growth goes, we at least get back to the 1970s and ’80s. It’s been 12 years since America has had the opportunity to prosper economically. It shouldn’t be about Democrats and Republicans fighting for their pet projects or the lobbyists. Unfortunately, we have reached the place where America’s prosperity and best years are behind us. This soon-to-come tax reform plan will be the cornerstone of everything positive that happens in this economy as we move forward through the next decade. Sure, politicians have justified in their own minds that they know what’s best for the American people.

US warns of military option if North Korea nuclear and missile tests continue. Play Video 1:16 The US has warned it could revert to military options if new sanctions fail to curb North Korean missile and nuclear tests, after Pyongyang fired a missile over Japan for the second time in two weeks. The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, and the national security advisor, HR McMaster, told reporters that the latest set of UN sanctions – imposed earlier this week after North Korea’s sixth nuclear test – would need time to take effect, but they suggested that after that, the US would consider military action. Now, it’s not what we prefer to do, so what we have to do is call on all nations to do everything we can to address this global problem, short of war.” Haley said the North Korea issue could soon become a matter for the Pentagon and the defence secretary, James Mattis. In a unanimous statement late on Friday, the UN Security Council said it “strongly condemned” the missile launch, but did not threaten further sanctions on Pyongyang. The US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, put the onus on Beijing and Moscow to implement the agreed sanctions to the limit. “China supplies North Korea with most of its oil. Japan has warned North Korea it risked having no “bright future” and called for an emergency meeting of the UN security council after Pyongyang launched a ballistic missile over Japanese territory for the second time in just over two weeks. “China is not the focus. And China is not the key to resolving the issue,” Hua said.

From Ex-Googlers’ Job Tips To U.S. Politics: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories. This week we learned what recruiters are really thinking when their hands are tied from explaining why they passed on a certain candidate, how former Google employees first landed their positions, and which phrases to avoid on job interviews. Some got it the old-fashioned way, through connections. Others played up aspects of their resumes or came to their interviews armed with knowledge of Google’s lesser-known products. As Brown sees it, our common tendency to deny how lonely we may feel makes us turn to fear and suspicion, which only exacerbates the us-versus-them mentality that seems to dominate American politics today. These 13 Phrases Can Make Or Break Your Job Prospects At a job interview, there are certain things you say that seem innocent, but can make or break your chances of being hired. While recruiters like to see passion from the people they’re interviewing, they probably don’t want someone who sounds desperate. Here’s What Happened To My To-Do List When I Embraced Procrastination Most of us see procrastination as a bad thing–a terrible, lazy, and unproductive habit. Here’s how Sterf claims he made that happen himself.

Send a Tax Cut Bill to Trump and Watch Our Economy Soar. The federal agency, which compiles economic statistics throughout the country, reported Tuesday that U.S. median household income climbed to $59,039 in 2016. However, the bureau said the poverty numbers were “not statistically different from the 2007 rate (12.5 percent), the year before the most recent recession.” Large numbers of Americans are still at or below the poverty income line, and a number of cities are still losing jobs. View Cartoon Lagging job growth was clearly evident last month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the economy produced a lower-than-projected 156,000 jobs. Average hourly wages increased a mere 3 cents in August. The Obama economy limped through his presidency at an average two percent growth rate, because he raised taxes that crippled new business creation and investment, and unleashed a tidal wave of suffocating regulations on businesses large and small. Throughout the first half of this year, Trump has been pushing Congress to give him a sweeping tax cut reform bill, without offering any detailed specifics. President Reagan won that fight against a Democratic-run House by appealing to a small, pro-growth group of Southern conservative Democrats. But over a century or more of trade deals, America has grown wealthier, not poorer, stronger, not weaker. Trade helps U.S. firms to become more competitive in what we make and sell here at home, and benefits hard-pressed consumers with less expensive products.

Katherine M. Gehl, former CEO and political innovation activist, and Harvard’s Michael E. Porter reveal how the U.S. political system is no longer designed to serve the public interest, and how it has been reconfigured over time to benefit our major political parties and their industry allies. Report lays out a strategy for reinvigorating our democracy. BOSTON— At a time of high dissatisfaction and distrust with the U.S. political system, Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter today released new research that illuminates the root causes of why competition in politics is failing to serve the public interest. The parties focus on serving their partisan supporters and special interests, not the average voter, ” said Katherine Gehl, a former CEO, who has also worked in government and is now dedicated to driving political innovation and reform. “This report is not about adding to the depressing national dialog about politics, but about how to understand how the political system actually works and change it through reforms that will matter.” “I was drawn to analyze the U.S. political system as an industry when our research found that our political system is the biggest impediment to U.S. competitiveness,” said Harvard’s Porter, who is based at Harvard Business School and co-chair of the School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project. “Our dysfunctional political outcomes are a competition problem. Our political system will not be self-correcting. For nearly six years, the U.S. Competitiveness Project has conducted in-depth research to identify the necessary steps policymakers and the business community must take to improve U.S. competitiveness. As co-chair of the multiyear, non-partisan U.S. Competitiveness Project at Harvard Business School over the past five years, it became clear to him that the political system was actually the major constraint in America’s inability to restore economic prosperity and address many of the other problems our nation faces. Working with Katherine to understand the root causes of the failure of political competition, and what to do about it, has become an obsession.

Open Skies Enforcement: A Key Test Of "America First" Policy. When it comes to our trade agreements with foreign nations, President Trump has pledged to prioritize defending American workers and standing up to countries that seek to take advantage of them. A key test of this “America First” trade policy will be whether the Trump administration chooses to enforce our Open Skies agreements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. Open Skies agreements are bilateral treaties that allow airlines to fly freely between countries without government interference. The United States currently has Open Skies agreements with 121 countries, 119 of which are operating as agreed upon. Two countries are violating the agreements and putting American aviation jobs at risk in the process: the UAE and Qatar. Since U.S. airlines are subject to the fluctuations of the free market and cannot fly money-losing routes the same way the subsidy-backed Gulf carriers can, they are forced to compete on an uneven playing field – putting the jobs of the 1.2 million American workers who rely on a strong domestic aviation industry at risk. Despite a saturated market, the three Gulf carriers continue to dump capacity with new planes, their losses appearing only on paper thanks to their access to lucrative government subsidies. History has shown what this could lead to. “Steel dumping” was rampant as foreign countries both directly and indirectly subsidized their domestic steel industries, “dumping” the excess on to the U.S. market, which artificially depressed prices and closed down mills.

But they are more than that: They are a near term worry for all Americans now, as North Korea continues to test missiles capable of hitting the United States. In reality, Russian-made rocket engines, in this case the RD-250 – whether made in Russia or Ukraine – appears to be the answer. Both the Russian-made RD-180 engines, which America uses to launch our Atlas V rockets and the RD-250, implicated here – are heavy lift, Russian-made rocket engines.They are generally reliable, and until recently not sold abroad. If not controlled by Russia, Ukraine or America, they are the ultimate enemy of ICBM non-proliferation. Put differently, if Russia or Ukraine cannot prevent the illicit sale of these rocket engines to countries like North Korea, the United States should be seeking to buy them. These should be promptly lifted, not to help Russia – but to prevent Russia or Ukraine from selling or allowing the theft of these engines, preventing them from getting to a black-market that apparently includes North Korea. The reality is that these engines are not only valuable for US launches of satellites requiring “heavy lift,” since we do not yet have our own heavy lift engines, but permitting them to reach the black market is a double loss: Countries like North Korea can come into possession of them, and then directly threaten all Americans. The way forward must be to lift limits on American purchases, stop the black market from gaining access to these heavy lift engines, and doing all in our power to immobilize the heavy lift Russian-made rocket engines that, by all appearances, have already reached North Korea. As the New York Times reported, not only is North Korea now testing “an intercontinental ballistic missile that appears able to reach the United States” and affirming that this “was made possible by black-market purchases of powerful rocket engines” with a Russian or Ukrainian origin, but the future will be defined by what policy makers do now. Instead of demonstrating foresight, Congress has been feuding internally about how many heavy lift rocket engines made by Russia NOT to buy.

Will The Far-Left Even Burn Our Founding Documents?. For the 20 or so years I worked in and around Washington, D.C. – be it at the White House, the Pentagon, or in the private sector – once every few months for those two decades, I would set aside a few hours of my time to visit the National Archives and simply stare in wonder at the founding documents of the United States of America. Not surprisingly, the removal or destruction of our “Founding Documents” is now the ultimate target of a growing number of anarchists on the left. For some on the far-left it’s because many of our Founding Fathers who authored these documents were slave owners. For others on the far-left, it’s because many of our Founding Fathers were wealthy for their time. Knowing that to be the truth, does viewing that time period through the prism of 2017 invalidate the genius of our Founding Fathers? If a time machine were available, who would not want to go back to right the wrong of slavery and so many others? A dangerous and truly totalitarian reality created by some on the far-left – and encouraged by the silence of those who know better – which literally now screams at the top of its lungs with faces twisted by hate that the monuments, statues, names, and founding documents which catalog and memorialize the history – good and evil – of our nation, must now be torn down, sand-blasted, burned and never spoken again. Where does it stop? Which men and women of reason will speak up to stop this madness before it spirals out of control?

Politics has turned some off from pro football, but it's still America's favorite sport. Washington (CNN)Professional football is the most popular sport in America, according to a Washington Post-UMass Lowell poll released Wednesday, which found that 60% of adults say they're fans. But politics, and moments like Colin Kaepernick's kneeling protest during the national anthem in 2016, has turned some off from the sport. Kaepernick or players protesting the anthem was specifically cited by 17%. "I'm going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed," he said, speaking to the press in August 2016. "To me, this is something that has to change." Responses to Kaepernick's protest in the NFL have ranged from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who said last month he feels "very strongly that everyone should save that moment for the recognition of the flag in a positive way," to other players who have also knelt, including the Seattle Seahawks' Michael Bennett and members of the Cleveland Browns. The poll also found professional baseball and college football are America's second-favorite sports, with 45% identifying as fans for each. The poll was conducted August 14-21 among a random national sample of 1,000 adults on cellular and landline phones. The overall results have a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points, and 4.7 points among the 598 football fans who were sampled.

Nothing's inevitable," he said at a White House news conference, adding that he "would prefer not going the route of the military, but it's something certainly that could happen. The difficulty collecting and interpreting intelligence on North Korea is one reason why different spy agencies often reach different conclusions about North Korea's capabilities — and have been caught off guard repeatedly, including reportedly by the test earlier this week of a thermonuclear bomb. But this summer, a military intelligence analysis of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs had to be revised, concluding Pyongyang could place an atomic bomb atop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States by the end of 2018 — two years sooner than previous estimates. And each is especially difficult in North Korea for various reasons, say those with direct experience. It’s far more restrictive certainly than pre-war Syria or Iran, more restrictive than China or Burma,” said Andrew Peek, a former Army intelligence officer and fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Texas at Austin. There’s very little osmosis in or out.” Gathering intelligence through electronic means — in military parlance, signals intelligence — is also restricted because of the limited technology, internet access and cellphone use inside North Korea. "Their broadband is extremely limited," Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, told a Senate panel in May. Surveillance images are also difficult to collect because many North Korean military and storage facilities are located underground, both for security reasons and because the mountainous country lacks large open spaces. A reminder of the difficulty tracking North Korea's secret military activities was the recent underground test of what North Korea claimed was a hydrogen bomb, which caught many observers by surprise. That is because we don’t have great links inside their nuclear test program, and they have gotten good at ensuring nothing leaks from their test site.” Others agreed that the fact so many of North Korea's missile and nuclear assets are underground in caves or tunnels shuts off many options that might otherwise be available to military planners.