Jobs Numbers Tank as Obama’s Policies Fail

by Peter Morici 
September 5, 2014

 The economy created only 142,000 jobs in August, down from 212,000 in July, indicating the economy significantly slowed this summer. Jobs creation is well below the pace needed to reemploy all the workers displaced during the financial crisis—the economy is in crisis!

Although official GDP estimates indicate the economy expanded in the second quarter at a torrid pace—4.2. percent—much of that was inventory build, as consumer spending continued to drag along at a nonplus pace and capital investment, especially in manufacturing, remains subpar.

Third quarter growth is likely in the range of 2 percent, and the Obama Administration spin doctors will have a tough time selling these jobs data as anything but bad news.

Simply, the administration’s big spending stimulus policies and the Fed’s obsession with pumping money into a moribund New York financial industry have failed.

Also, now Americans are seeing the real cost of ObamaCare health care subsidies. Employer mandates are not much good to working families if no one in the family is working.

The official jobless rate is down to 6.1 percent but real unemployment is closer to 18 percent, because so many prime aged adults are sitting out the party. For example, one in six adult males between the ages of 25 and 54 has no job, and may have simply quit looking thanks to “compassionate” government policies that reward able bodied men and women to sit at home and watch ESPN NFL reruns or The View.

Since 2000, Congress has beefed up the earned income tax credit, and expanded programs providing direct benefits to low and middle income workers, including ObamaCare and Medicaid, food stamps, and rent and mortgage assistance.

Those buy votes but do little to encourage work.

Benefits phase down as family incomes rise, and often tax additional income as much as 50 percent.

Consequently, government benefits penalize work and encourage one partner in two adult households to be idle.

Also, those programs offer incentives for single people to work only part-time and contribute to skills shortage.

With millions of young college graduates unable to land a professional job and start a career, the president has implemented irresponsible federal student loan policies. And unscrupulous university presidents exploit young people by peddling graduate programs that promise rewarding careers but only deliver a lifetime of debt.

Student loans take disgruntled college graduates off the streets, lower the official unemployment rate and deliver electoral majorities for Democrats but undermine future growth. Simply, too many folks in their late 20s are stuck in dead end jobs, burdened with crippling debt, and are unable to buy a home or comfortably start families.

The root cause of the jobs crisis is chronically anemic growth, whose sources candidate Obama promised to address in 2008 but has forgotten.

These include the purposefully undervalued Chinese and Japanese currencies, which cheapen imports, siphon off demand for American-made products and destroy factory jobs; federal restrictions on offshore oil and gas development, which unnecessarily perpetuate U.S. oil imports and finance terrorism; business regulations more burdensome than necessary to accomplish worthy objectives, which create prestigious jobs for political supporters and create monopolies for campaign contributors; and a tax structure ranked one of the worst in the world for encouraging sound business decisions and supporting international competitiveness.

A second term president should be a statesman looking to the long-term security and prosperity of the American people.

Instead, Obama continues to campaign, blames his predecessor and congress for his disappointments, and will leave Americans poorer and less safe in the bargain.

Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, national columnist and five-time winner of the MarketWatch best forecaster award. He tweets @pmorici1

Big Government

Media's ObamaCurve: Today's Job Creation Pathetic Compared to Reagan-Era

by John Nolte 8 Mar 2013
 

 

***UPDATE: From an email: "Nolte's Reagan-Obama job rate analysis is skewed in O's favor because, since Clinton, workforce dropouts are no longer included."

Below, a commenter accurately notes, as well, that Reagan expanded the workforce and still lowered the unemployment rate. Obama, however, has seen the unemployment rate artificially drop due to a shrinking workforce. For instance, the unemployment rate dropped last month to 7.7%, but that's likely due to 135,000 leaving the workforce. 

It's just fact that if the labor force was as large today as when Obama took office, we would be looking at an unemployment rate closer to 11%.

The great trick Obama's media is playing right now is the manufacturing of a New Economic Normal that makes it possible to pretend Obama's failed economic policies are not. This is done through reporting which purposely excludes any kind of historical context. What the media and White House count on is that we've either forgotten what a real economic recovery looks like, or that we're too young to remember the Reagan Miracle.

In January of 1981, President Ronald Reagan inherited an economy every bit as awful as the one President Obama inherited in January of 2009. Before the Reagan Recovery hit, unemployment would peak at 10.8% in December of 1982 (Obama's high was only 10% in October of 2009). Unlike Obama, though, Reagan also had to deal with crippling inflation and interest rates.

Obama certainly inherited some unique problems of his own. But there is no question that it's fair to compare how both presidents handled their respective economic crises, and the results of the individual policies they instituted to get a desperate country out from under.

Reagan's approach was to get government off the backs of the people. He slashed tax rates, cut regulations, and freed Americans to innovate. His wisest decision, though, was to increase the incentive to invest.

Obama did the exact opposite. He intentionally exploded the size of government, passed legislation with crippling regulations (Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare), and rather than freeing the American people to invest and incentivizing risk,  Obama took money out of the private economy through tax increases and decided the government knew better with a "stimulus" of nearly a trillion dollars.

Today, if you look around the media, they're pretending 236,000 new jobs created last month represents some kind of miracle, when the truth is that the number is at best mediocre. But the media have manufactured the ObamaCurve in order to give a failed president a passing grade. It's only through the cynical removal of historical context that the media are able to celebrate economic failure.

At this same time in Reagan's presidency (March of 1985), Reaganomics had decreased the unemployment rate from a high of 10.8% to 7.2%.

From a high of only 10%, Obamanomics has decreased unemployment to a still-high 7.7%.

The comparisons are just as startling when it comes to job creation.

In the last year, Obamanomics has created 1.97 million jobs, or a measly 164k per month.

During this same time in the Reagan presidency (March of 1984 to February of 1985), Reaganomics created 3.34 million jobs, an average of 278k per month.

The comparison between 1983 and 2011 is truly eye opening. Reaganomics created 3.45 million jobs, compared to Obamanomics' 2.1 million.

We are currently living through a kind of Orwellian moment in which the media are turning failure and mediocrity into success through the deliberate memory-holing of history.

Fact: Had Obama swallowed his left-wing pride, looked to the recent past, and used the Reagan Miracle as a blueprint, our economy would be in much better shape today. But the media are so dishonest and so committed to putting Obama on Mt. Rushmore that millions upon millions of American are needlessly suffering.

The media's ObamaCurve is nothing more than a hoax, a scam, a racket, a con, and The Big Lie. What could have been Morning In America is shaping up to be The Lost Decade.

And media's lie of omission is that … it didn’t have to be this way.

NOTE: The numbers of above on the unemployment rate and job creation come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

UPDATE: Some changes were made after a triple-check of the math.

Big Journalism

GAO Report: Obama's Policies 'Not Sustainable'

by Celia Bigelow 19 Feb 2013

 
 For two months, reporters and lawmakers have ignored a devastating report from the federal government itself, which warns that the nation's current fiscal policy will lead to economic collapse. The Government Accountability Office (GAO)—the personal auditor of President Obama and the federal government—released its assessment of the federal government on January 17, 2013. The report's findings illuminate just how dire America's spending problem is and, therefore, how little the current cuts debated by Congress do to fix it.

The findings of the paper include these excerpts (emphasis added):

• “The projections in this Report indicate that current policy is not sustainable... Preventing the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising over the next 75 years is estimated to require some combination of spending reductions and revenue increases that amount to 2.7 percent of GDP over the period.”  
• “It is estimated that running primary surpluses that average 1.0 percent of GDP over the next 75 years would result in the 2087 debt-to-GDP ratio equaling its level in fiscal year 2012, which compares with primary deficits that average 1.7 percent of GDP under current policies.”
• “It is noteworthy that preventing the debt-to-GDP ratio from rising over the next 75 years requires that primary surpluses be substantially positive on average. This is true because projected GDP growth is on average smaller than the projected government borrowing rate over the next 75 years.”  
• “If the primary surplus was precisely zero in every year, then debt would grow at the rate of interest in every year, which would be faster than GDP growth.”
• “The differences between the primary surplus boost starting in 2023 and 2033 (3.2 and 4.1 percent of GDP, respectively) and the primary surplus boost starting in 2012 (2.7 percent of GDP) is a measure of the additional burden policy delay would impose on future generations. Future generations are harmed by a policy delay of this sort, because the higher the primary surplus is during their lifetimes the greater the difference is between the taxes they pay and the programmatic spending from which they benefit.”

While President Obama and his media allies boast from their ivory towers that America “doesn’t have a spending problem” but rather a “health-care problem,” they are sweeping reality under the rug and spouting lies to the American people.

This is the reality: when President Obama’s personal auditor says the federal government has a spending problem, it indeed has a spending problem—and one that is growing rapidly.

The most devastating part of the report is the fact that the federal government must run surpluses over the next century to keep the same debt-to-GDP ratio it has today. Meanwhile, Congress and President Obama are throwing a fit over the looming sequester—which will cut a mere 1.2 percent of total deficits (not total debt) over the next ten years—and the Senate has not produced a budget for close to 1,400 days.

A balanced budget will not be enough to cover the rapid growth of interest payments owed on U.S. national debt in the future. The federal government currently pays $223 billion—roughly $3,000 per taxpayer—in annual interest payments. This number is expected to increase to $857 billion by the end of the decade, a 290 percent increase. 

If the federal government does not fix the spending problem detailed in this report, it will have to take out more and more loans to pay for the already-outstanding interest payments on the federal government—loans to pay off loans. 

Thus, the question remains: what happens when no one will grant Congress more loans?

Big Government

After 'No Budget, No Pay,' Will GOP Cut Spending?

by Matthew Boyle 23 Jan 2013

 

 Facing the passage of the House GOP's "No Budget, No Pay" bill Wednesday, Senate Democrats, including Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Sen. Patty Murray, have promised they will draft a budget for the first time in four years. “I’ve been discussing this path with my colleagues in the weeks since the year-end deal before I officially became chairman of this committee, and now that Congress is back in session, we are ready to get to work,” Murray said, according to the Washington Post.

Murray promised what she calls a “balanced approach” and said Senate Democrats “are eager to contrast our pro-growth, pro-middle class budget priorities with the House Republicans’ [Rep. Paul] Ryan budget that would end Medicare as we know it, gut investments in jobs and programs middle-class families depend on, and cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations.”

“We know that when our priorities are laid out next to Republicans’, the public stands with us,” Murray proclaimed.

The question now becomes whether House and Senate Republicans will force Murray to draft a balanced budget with actual spending cuts. Now that the House has passed the No Budget, No Pay plan, over the coming weeks and months the House and Senate will work on their budgets. It's unclear as of yet what the Senate budget will look like.

In a lengthy statement on Wednesday, Senate Budget Committee ranking GOP member Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama signaled Republicans would be able to fight for a fiscally sound budget.

“I am gratified that Chairman Murray has announced that the Senate majority has relented and will offer its first budget in four years,” Sessions said. “Majority Leader Reid had previously said it would be ‘foolish’ to do a budget and his party cancelled the legally required Senate mark-up in 2011 and 2012—even after former Chairman Conrad had explicitly promised to bring up a budget in committee. I have repeatedly and emphatically called for an end to the Senate Democrats’ brazen legal defiance in this time of national fiscal emergency. I was frankly stunned that our new Chairman would say that Republicans ‘have time and again pulled budget negotiations out of the Budget Committees,’ when Senate Democrats alone control whether committee meetings occur. They alone decided to cancel them. The House, on the other hand, met its legal obligations.”

“To compel Senate action I have introduced legislation, blocked recess, and encouraged the use of the debt ceiling as leverage,” Sessions added. “Now, with their pay threatened, and long-simmering public anger growing, Senate Democrats have suddenly seen the light. Even just a few days ago, they were not willing to commit to doing a budget. The sooner the majority allows the budget process to move forward, the sooner meaningful debate can occur and the sooner the Senate can at last meet its legal and moral obligations. Secret meetings are an affront to popular democracy.”

Sessions added that it “certainly won’t be easy to put this nation on a sound financial course, but it is essential. Needed fiscal changes will not only prevent an economic nightmare but they will reduce growing poverty, dependency, and joblessness and help more Americans live free and prosperous lives. Republicans are eager to work on this important endeavor and look forward to the commencement of committee activity.”

Big Government

NYT Attacks North Dakota Oil Town as Sexist Nightmare

by John Nolte 17 Jan 2013

 

 As some of you may have already heard, the state of North Dakota is currently experiencing a politically incorrect and politically inconvenient economic boom in the midst of Obama's national economic program of stagnation. Thanks to the discovery of oil and a government's willingness to get out of the way so industrious, risk-taking individuals can go after it, North Dakota is now a working, breathing, real-life repudiation of everything Obama and his media worshipers stand for.  

This of course makes news outlets like the New York Times uncomfortable. After all, should the news get out that doing the exact opposite of ObamaNomics actually creates prosperity -- good heavens, the entire charade might crumble!

What to do? What to do?

Ahh, attack the culture!

Like we saw during this last presidential election, the Left and the media are now hoping to win it all based on divisive cultural issues. If you can't defend Obama's dismal economic record, scream RAPE, right? And now, since ND's economic boom is not only mocking most every Left-wing economic idea out there, and doing so with something as evil as oil, the NYT has obviously decided it needed to pretend that all this success is bad for -- you guessed it -- women!

 Here's the headline:

An Oil Town Where Men Are Many, and Women Are Hounded

Here's the anecdotal evidence:

WILLISTON, N.D. — Christina Knapp and a friend were drinking shots at a bar in a nearby town several weeks ago when a table of about five men called them over and made an offer.

Christina Knapp said she and a friend received a degrading proposition from some men in a bar.

They would pay the women $3,000 to strip naked and serve them beer at their house while they watched mixed martial arts fights on television. Ms. Knapp, 22, declined, but the men kept raising the offer, reaching $7,000.

“I said I make more money doing my job than degrading myself to do that,” said Ms. Knapp, a tattoo artist with dark streaks in her light brown hair, a bird tattoo on her chest and piercings above her lip and left cheekbone. …

Many said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

Here are the cryptic statistics:

Prosecutors and the police note an increase in crimes against women, including domestic and sexual assaults.

In other words, it's a total hit job by an effete news outlet terribly uncomfortable with all this illiberal, oily, Red State, manly-man oil-working going on. Bottom line: If the government isn't subsidizing cosmopolitan metrosexuals, it simply can't be a good thing.

What I decided to do was something the NYT didn’t, and that was to look at actual statistics. And what I discovered was why the NYT didn't report them: because those statistics blow this Red State hit job right out of the water.

First off, that "increase in crimes against women" mentioned above? In the town of Williston, the town in the piece's byline and ground zero in this boom, the incidents of rape per 100,000 have increased from 14 to 15 between 2008 and 2011. In 2003, the year the oil boom began, it was 11.

But here's the kicker: An apples to apples comparison of Williston and the NYTs own home city reveals that your chances of being "hounded" with a forcible rape are almost exactly the same in both.

However…

Without an influx of manly men working for the evil oil industry,  the rape rate in New York City has increased dramatically over the last four years: from 10.7 per 100,000 in 2008 to 13.3 in 2011.

So I guess a city buried in Obama-worshipping metrosexuals is where the real nightmare for women is expanding.

Funny that.

Big Journalism

Median Household Income Down in Nearly Every Battleground State

by Tony Lee 9 Oct 2012

 In yet another sign of how poorly the economy is doing under President Barack Obama, the median household income declined last year in every key battleground state except for Iowa and Wisconsin. The American Community Survey compiled the data. Nevada and Florida were the hardest hit, seeing declines of 6% and 3%, respectively.  New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, New Mexico also saw their median household incomes decline, mirroring national trends.

The median household income in 2008 for the United States was $54, 197. In 2010, it was $51, 114. In 2011, it declined even more to $50,502.

Here are the figures from the most crucial swing states:

Virginia: 2008: $63,956  2010: $62,173 2011: $61,882

Florida: 2008: $49,793  2010: $45,609 2011:  $44,299

Ohio: 2008: $49,793  2010: $46,275  2011: $45,749

Colorado:  2008: $59, 720 2010: $55,580 2011: $55,387 

If Romney is able to either solidify a lead in any of these states or remains within striking distance of Obama, these numbers indicate voters in these states may be less inclined to give Obama a second term.

Big Government

Fact Check: Labor Secretary Solis Misleads on Jobs Revisions

by Joel B. Pollak 5 Oct 2012

 Suspicion about the federal government's September jobs report has fallen on Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who appeared on CNBC this morning and defended the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), claiming--falsely--that upward revisions of 86,000 jobs were from the private sector. In fact, the new number is entirely accounted for by upwards revisions to state and federal government payrolls. The BLS reported that while only 114,000 jobs were created in September--which would have translated into a rise in unemployment from 8.1% to 8.2%--the unemployment rate fell dramatically to 7.8%. That unusual drop is the fastest in nearly three decades, and was unexpected even in the rosiest predictions.

One reason for the rise was an upward revision of 86,000 to the July and August jobs numbers--all of which came from a 91,000 increase in the estimate of public sector jobs. Private sector job estimates were actually revised downward by 5,000.

In addition, the BLS reported a large rise in the number of part-time jobs, adding 600,000 jobs to the total--a dramatic increase of 7.5%, not explained by any other economic indicators--and raising questions about whether the government had changed the way it counted part-time workers.
Solis was adamant today in defending both the revisions and the BLS's methodology for counting part-time workers--relying largely on the upwards revisions for July and August jobs (emphasis added):

CNBC: We're getting bombarded by people who do not believe the number. They believe this number was fixed and typed to coincide with Election Day. What do you say to them?...I'll rephrase the question. A lot of people do not believe the 7.8 number. They believe that somehow BLS fixed this to coincide with the election cycle. What is labor's response?

Solis: You know, I'm insulted when I hear that because we have a very professional, civil service organization where you have top, top economists that work at the BLS. They've been doing these calculations. These are -- these are our best trained and best-skilled individuals working in the BLS, and it's really ludicrous to hear that kind of statement, and I say that because just look at the -- we have to look at what happens across the board, not just in one month, but look what happened in the last two months. We also saw revisions there upwards of 86,000 additional jobs added and this brings us now to 5.2 million private sector jobs across the board, we saw 104 private sector jobs created....

CNBC: Before I let you go, you say skepticism over the numbers are ludicrous. You say you're insulted. Is there a danger, you believe, when large sections of the country don't believe the data. Not that it's ever been considered gospel, but when you have disbelief how much danger is embedded in that?

Solis: I will tell you that we look at each report differently. We just saw revisions for the last two months and this happens. I mean, these are estimates that obviously, the BLS puts out. They do the best calculation, using the best measurements and tools and we've been using them for the past 70 years. We haven't changed anything and the information that I received is given to me by our professional, civil service staff in the BLS.

Note that Solis describes the 86,000 upward revision as if it were an increase in private sector jobs, though in fact the increase came entirely from revisions to public sector payrolls by cash-strapped federal and state governments. Instead of shedding jobs, as previously claimed, governments have been adding jobs.

Big Government

Jobs Report: Obama Taking Us Back to the Carter Years

by Mike Flynn 7 Sep 2012
 

 The Obama campaign is based on a foundational myth that the Democrats have the policies to move America and its economy forward. They are the party of fresh, innovative ideas while the GOP wants to "turn back the clock." This is used often in the context of social issues, which is simply daft. But, it's also used in an economic context which is ludicrous. Obama may call his policies ideas for the future, but, for the American workforce, they've only succeeded in turning the clock back 30 years. Today's jobs report showed that the American workforce has shrunk to its lowest level since September 1981.  That month, the labor force participation rate stood at 63.5%, exactly where it is today. This measures the percentage of working age adults (16-64) who are employed or are unemployed but actively looking for work. This was just a few months after Reagan took office and just as he was winning approval for his economic reform policies. Over his two terms in office, as economic growth exploded, the participation rate grew to around 66%.

This is important, obviously, because increasing the number of workers in the economy helps, in part, to create a self-sustaining growth curve. More workers increases products and services, income and consumer spending. It also provided significant opportunities for women to enter the workforce, giving them greater economic independence. Over the twenty years after Reagan, the participation rate was around 67%.

In the aftermath of the recession, the participation rate had dipped back to around when Reagan left office.

When Obama was sworn into office, the rate was 65.5%, about where it was after Reagan's eight years in office. In less than four years, Obama's policies have driven the participation rate to where it was right after Reagan took office. In other words, in 3 1/2 years, Obama wiped out all the workforce gains achieved in the eight years of the Reagan administration.

This is forward?

Remember, the recession ended in June 2009, just a few months after Obama took office. Unfortunately, we have lost ground ever since. There are still more unemployed people--those actively looking for work--then when his term began. Considering that the working age population has grown by around 10 million since then, this is dismal. The only reason unemployment isn't higher is that people have given up and left the workforce.

In fact, if we had the same participation rate as when Obama took office, unemployment would be 11.2%, a level America hasn't seen since the depths of the depression. Obama borrowed trillions--around 10% of our total GDP--to try to boost growth. It hasn't worked. It will never work.

So, Obama has gotten us, in terms of the American workforce, to about where we were when Reagan first took office. Or, rather, when Carter left office. Might actually be time to "turn back the clock" and spark anyone Reagan-style rebound.

Big Government

Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and American Insolvency

August 7, 2012
By Steve McCann

The Obama re-election campaign tactics are now approaching near-hysterical levels with the unleashing of the White House's pawn Harry Reid accusing Mitt Romney of not paying any taxes over the past ten years, claiming some anonymous source as the author of that charge.  He and the other re-election mouthpieces claim that it is up to Romney to prove the charges false in an obvious ploy to force him to release 10-plus years of tax returns so their "truth squads" can rummage through to find any nugget they can demagogue into portraying Romney as a out-of-touch rich guy not paying his fair share.

This and many more attempted smears are on the horizon, as Barack Obama cannot win re-election without destroying his opponent, as he has done in virtually all his previous campaigns for public office.  This is particularly true this year, as the facts underlying his stewardship of the economy are devastating.

It has been said, quite accurately, that the United States is going down the road taken by many European social democracies now facing imminent economic insolvency and societal upheaval.  But America is further down that road than many realize.

A snapshot of the present-day health of any nation can be ascertained by reviewing two factors: annual government budget deficits as a percent of Gross Domestic Product and the annual unemployment rate.  An accelerated level of deficit spending, except in times of a major war (such as World War II), is indicative of a lack of fiscal discipline and tax revenues sufficient to finance those expenditures.  These revenues can come about only from a growing economy and near-full employment.  When high deficits are coupled with a dramatic increase in unemployment for more than two or three years in a row, that country has embarked on a dangerous road that will lead to insolvency if not addressed quickly.

Some governments run extremely large annual deficits which place an even greater emphasis on raising revenues for ideological reasons, while others simply do not wish to confront reality and reduce spending for political gain. The knee-jerk, but erroneous, solution is to increase the tax burden and pay out ever-increasing unemployment and social benefits, thus stifling economic growth.  This is the start of a death spiral unless spending is dramatically curtailed and the GDP grows, creating more jobs and thus tax revenues.

If a nation wishes to maintain its solvency and continue to expand its economy, it should not experience deficits higher than 3% of its GDP and, in today's quasi-welfare societies, unemployment rates above 6% to 7%.  On an aggregate basis, a combination of these factors should always remain below 10.  The higher the index above 10, the greater the problems that country is experiencing, and viable solutions for these dilemmas will be increasingly difficult to enact -- particularly if the index remains above 10 for a prolonged period of time.

When viewed on this basis, the "Solvency Index" (a combination of the budget deficit as a percent of GDP and the unemployment rate) of various nations in Europe and the United States would be as follows over the past four years: 

	2009	2010	2011	2012
Greece	24.8	20.2	26.4	31.0
Spain	26.1	29.7	28.0	29.8
Portugal	19.8	20.2	21.7	23.4
Italy	17.3	15.9	18.0	18.8
United States	20.7	19.3	20.5	18.0

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (U-4 Unemployment rate--unemployed plus discouraged workers); CIA World Book; usgovernmentspending.com; indexmundi.com; Wall Street Journal; Investor's Business Daily

Other notable U.S. historical Index highlights:

1983 (the peak of the last major recession and the previous highest index since 1947):15.5

The Bush Years (2001-2008): 7.4

The Obama Years (2009-2012): 19.6

From 1947 through 2008, the U.S. experienced only three individual years with an index above 12.2.  The average index of the 61 years prior to 2009 was 6.9; it was during this period that America experienced the greatest era of wealth-creation in the history of mankind.

Per the House Budget Committee's analysis of the Obama budget as submitted in February, the index never falls below 12.5 over the next ten years and averages 13.7.  The reality will be much worse, as the Obama budget calls for significant tax increases and no real spending cuts, and it assumes unreasonable GDP growth rates.

Barack Obama has nearly succeeded in remaking the country into the worst of European socialist states.  

With deficits that will total over $5.3 trillion from 2009 through the end of 2012 coupled with high unemployment over such a prolonged period, the United States is facing insolvency -- a word that is being more frequently bandied about in various international financial circles, particularly as the Obama administration and the Democrats show no inclination toward promoting policies to stimulate economic growth as a means of job-creation and deficit-reduction and are obstinate in their refusal to initiate significant spending reductions while demanding higher taxes.

Thus, the Obama re-election team, with the active assistance of the mainstream media, must do all they can to distract the American public from the disaster that is the economy and the long-term implications thereof.  

Expect Mitt Romney to be accused of most anything and the lies and demagoguery to increase by geometric proportions.  But none of this will hide the reality that the United States is technically insolvent and well on the road to becoming the next Greece or Spain unless Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress are dispatched in November.

American Thinker

Malaise: In Jobs Response Obama Aspires to Bring Back the Nixon Years

by John Nolte 6 Jul 2012

 If Republicans are looking for a way to compare Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, look no further than the President's bizarre and dispiriting speech after today's devastating jobs numbers were released. A turning point in Carter's presidency is what came to be known as the "malaise" speech, where the one-term president seemed to blame the country's problems on the American people and revealed his own troubling pessimism about the future of the country. Carter told Americans that the overall problem was our  crisis of confidence and his subtext was that things were not going to get better:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Fifteen months later, American would prove that the problem wasn't us but Jimmy Carter, for we had no confidence problems under Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan.

Today in Ohio, lost in all the flurry of the news about the jobs numbers, was a speech almost as strange and depressing given by our current president, Barack Obama, as he talked about his own childhood. This way of life and standard of living, he appeared to say, is the American ideal and what people should be prepared to settle for:

Nobody expected to get fabulously rich, although it was great if people got rich. But when I think about my family and Michelle's family, what made us rich was spending time together, and the idea was that if our families were of good character and had good values and you we willing to work hard, then you could find a  job that paid a decent wage. And eventually if you saved enough you could own a home. And you knew that you wouldn't go bankrupt if you got sick because you had some health insurance. And maybe you took a vacation every once in a while. And it wasn't necessarily some fancy vacation at some fancy resort.

Best vacation I had when I was a kid was my grandmother, my mom and my sister -- we traveled around the country on Greyhound buses and on trains and we stayed at Howard Johnson's.

Yeah, that's right, aspire to a job with a "decent" wage and vacations at the Howard Johnson's. Now that's living.  

Even MSNBC wasn't buying it. Here's Ron Insagna's reaction, which was the exact same as mine:

I found the President’s comments neither inspirational nor aspirational. He described a childhood that I very much can relate to. From an economic perspective, it’s effectively, for lack of a better description, a lower middle class existence. If that’s the aspiration that he’s suggesting we all return to, it’s not the type of thing that excites voters.

Obama's message effectively is that things are not going to get better and that he's going to fight to make sure we all have enough to take a vacation on a Greyhound bus.

What the hell kind of talk is this from a sitting president?

Americans don’t dream of Howard Johnson's and a "decent" wage. We dream of aspiring to the very limits of our personal potential and effort.

We don’t settle -- we fight and aspire and push and work and struggle and fail and dust ourselves off and try again and never stop trying. Some of us make it. Some of us don't. But because we live in the United States of America, we know one thing is for sure: we just might be able to escape that "decent wage" and those Greyhound bus vacations and  "get fabulously rich" so we can vacation at a "fancy resort."

There's nothing wrong with enjoying the simple things in life. But Barack Obama certainly doesn't. He owns a million dollar home in Chicago and regularly vacations at some pretty fancy places we call Martha's Vineyard and Hawaii. He's not satisfied with a decent wage and a HoJo, but I guess the rest of us should be.

Who wants a president eager to turn back the clock to when he was 11 in 1971 in Nixon's stagflation America? America wants and needs a president who tells us he's going to do everything in his power to ensure America is always the place where you can go as far as your hard work and God-given talents will take you.

I appreciate the President is frustrated and that in moments like these it's easy to look back to what seemed like simpler times. But it's not a president's job to burden us with his hang ups. If Obama wants to believe the standard of living in 1971 is the ideal then he should feel free to live like that. Just don't condemn the rest of us.

What Obama is doing here, quite literally, is fighting for an America Americans rejected forty years ago.

Laughably, in the very same speech, Obama accused Romney of wanting to take us back to the Bush years when -- gasp --  unemployment was 5%.

Well, I'll take 2005 over 1971 any day of the week, and I'm guessing at least 51% of the country will agree with me. 

 Big Government