It just ain’t happening, Joe.
Posted on August 26, 2010 - Filed Under Economics, Featured Articles, Recession
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Correction: The original post of this piece contained a statement that employer-provided health insurance will be counted as taxable income to employees. That information is incorrect. We regret the error.
Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, Aug 27, 2010.
Remember this howler from Vice President Joe Biden?
“The recovery package – everybody’s talking about it having – it’s over. The truth is, now, we’re spending more now, this summer, than we, – I’m calling this the recovery – the summer of recovery.”
Stammer away there, Joe. The fact that you can’t spit it out clearly makes me think that you don’t really believe it, which is, in an odd sort of way, a relief. Given a choice, I prefer a vice president who is ridiculously political to one who is completely delusional. Which is what you’d have to be if you thought in late July when Biden said this, or if you think now, that any sort of meaningful economic recovery is underway.
According to a Reuters-Ipsos poll from this week, 72 percent of Americans say they are “very concerned” about jobs. And why not? It’s hard to imagine doing more to kill off economic recovery and job growth than the Obama administration has done since taking office. Let’s just look at a few examples.
Thousand of employees that once worked at profitable auto dealerships across the country lost their jobs when the Obama administration effectively nationalized most of the American auto industry. That’s because under government supervision, GM and Chrysler shuttered hundreds of hitherto profitable dealerships. Meanwhile, commercial lenders were given a cautionary tale when Obama rolled over secured bond holders in order to minimize pain to, and thus curry favor with, union auto workers.
Millions of families that make their mortgage payments on time are watching the values of their homes decline in part because the federal government refuses to quit monkeying around in the home mortgage business. The administration’s Home Affordable Mortgage Program, known as “HAMP”, is an unqualified disaster that isn’t helping delinquent borrowers but is putting off the reckoning that must come in the housing market if values are ever to stabilize and start rising again.
Employers are figuring out that ObamaCare is filled with landmines. We talked about one of them, the tax filing mandate that will have every business owner in America issuing thousands of 1099 forms to essentially every vendor with whom they do business.
Then there’s the 23,000 oil field workers idled in the wake of the BP oil spill because of Obama’s arbitrary moratorium on deepwater drilling.
Space precludes a more thorough listing but you get the point. And yet while this is all happening in plain sight, we all get to hear good old Joe Biden yammering on about jobs that have been “created or saved” and his “Summer of Recovery.”
Some very smart economic historians have said that the Crash of 1929 would not have become a decade-long depression if it hadn’t been for the horrendous interventions of both Hoover and Roosevelt.
Similarly, the miracle that is the American economy will recover and prosper on its own if only those with the power to do so in Washington, will get out of its way.
The ‘Summer of Recovery’ that wasn’t.
Posted on August 26, 2010 - Filed Under Politics, Recession Print This
On the third Sunday of July, Vice President Joe Biden appeared on ABC’s This Week with Jake Tapper and declared that the summer of 2010 is the Summer of Recovery. Jump ahead five weeks and the front page of this morning’s Dallas Morning News trumpete the story that a “double-dip” recession is increasingly likely.
Even if we avoid a slide back into recession, no one believes that a real recovery is underway. Not with nagging unemployment and a cratering housing market dominating the headlines. Therefore, the question I wrestle with is this. Do Democrats like Joe Biden actually believe what they say, in which case they stand at a remove from reality measured in light years – or do they think we are such unsophisticated rubes that we cant’ spot a complete presposterosity when one pours out of their mouths? Either way, it’s a problem.
On the one hand, if the politicians running the show believe what they are saying despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, then our leaders are incompetent. On the other, if they think we are so stupid that they can just say whatever they want, we no longer have a representative government.
What is to come is epilogue.
Posted on August 19, 2010 - Filed Under Barack Obama, Featured Articles Print This
Click here to listen to the broadcast of You Tell Me on KTBB AM & FM, Friday, Aug 20, 2010.
Look up the word “epilogue” and one of the definitions you will find says, “the final scene of a play or story that comments on or summarizes the main action.” The word epilogue, thus defined, now applies to the Barack Obama administration.
Of the seven presidents that have come since I have been voting, three have suffered terms with long, unpleasant epilogues. By that I mean that after a certain point, everything that happened in the remainders of their terms constituted little more than unhappy commentary.
For Richard Nixon, the epilogue began when the Watergate story completely took over the daily narrative of his presidency. Once the 18-minute gap in the White House tapes was revealed, everything that happened in Nixon’s remaining months in office was nothing but commentary on his malfeasance with respect to the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Nothing that Nixon tried or accomplished mattered after the Watergate story reached critical mass.
For the next elected president, Jimmy Carter, the epilogue began on November 4, 1979, a year to the day before he would be voted out of office. The event was the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Iran by a group of so-called “students” and the taking of 66 embassy personnel as hostages. For 444 days, the entire narrative on the Carter presidency revolved around the fact that the United States was apparently impotent in the face of what amounted to an act of war by the extremist regime that had taken over Iran. Fifty two of the 66 original hostages were held until minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office on January 20, 1981. Nothing Carter did from November 4, 1979 on, including a botched rescue attempt, mattered.
Our current president now finds his administration in epilogue. When historians write the text, the epilogue of the Obama administration will begin with the ‘Summer of Recovery’ that wasn’t. The narrative will report the fact that the American people woke up and angrily noticed that a mind-wrenching increase in federal spending and a hitherto unimaginable explosion in federal debt accomplished nothing, save for the impoverishment of generations yet unborn.
The summer of 2010 marks the turning point for President Obama. Henceforth, nothing he does will matter. Everything will revolve around the fact that the post-partisan, bridge-building pragmatist that millions of Americans thought they were voting for was finally and irrevocably revealed to be nothing but a tone-deaf, left-wing ideologue who is incapable of changing course in the face of terrible results.
Epilogue presidencies are not pleasant and this epilogue will be a particularly long one. The last months of the Nixon and Carter administrations were chaotic and unsettling. Such will be the case, I fear, with the Obama presidency.
We here at street level, the men and women who make the economy work, are thus left to run out the clock on this prince of fools, all the while hoping that the fools who made him their prince have learned a hard lesson.
Ideology is one thing. Results are another.
Posted on August 19, 2010 - Filed Under Barack Obama, Debt & Deficits, Economics Print This
I read a staggering statistic yesterday. According to former Reagan budget director David Stockman, since the third quarter of 2008, the nation’s gross domestic product has grown at the rate of only $4 billion per month while the federal debt has at the same time grown by $100 billion per month.
In other words, federal debt is growing at a rate 25 times greater than the American economy. Much of this debt has been taken on in the name of stimulating the economy yet little stimulation has taken place. Unemployment remains near ten percent and the economy is growing so slowly that the growth is barely perceptible.
Yet Obama and the Democrats cling to the idea that their economic policies, born of left-wing ideology, are working. This illustrates the biggest difference between business and government. Business is driven by results. Government can be, at least for a while, driven by ideology.
Lacking sovereign borrowing power and the ability to expand the money supply, when faced with poor results, business must quickly change course in order to survive. No business can afford to borrow at 25 times its rate of growth. No government can either. But nobody in our government has ever been in business.
And that’s the critical difference.
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