I though the stimulus was working.
Sean Hannity brings us some video of Joe Biden this week contradicting everything we have heard from the White House so far. According to Joe Biden, the American economy is not in a recession, but a depression.
We’ve got the video. And we owe Hannity a big thanks because you and I both know everyone else would bury this but for Sean and Fox News. No wonder the White House has declared war on them.
H/t to Justin Hart too.
The Administration’s mismanagement of the economy continues to take a heavy toll. In August the economy lost 216,000 jobs, roughly equivalent to the population of Reno, NV, just in case Harry Reid is interested. Over 5 million Americans had been out of work for over 6 months. Over 9 million were working at part time jobs because that was all they could get. Another three-quarters of a million were no longer bothering looking work. If workers who have accepted part time employment and discouraged workers were included with the unemployed, the unemployed rate would now be in Jimmy Carter country at 16.8%.
Speaking of Hope and Change, the Change came through in August with average hourly wages increasing by six cents, or $124.80 a year. Woo hoo, time to party like it was 1979.
Thanks to the glories of YouTube, we can watch as the government mandates the destruction of perfectly good automobiles to “help the economy.” Here is a very nice 1990s Dodge Dakota 4X4 being destroyed. It is a much better vehicle than my pick up truck.
This is a Corvette that looks to be in pretty good condition. Black, pretty sharp car. I’m sure there are a lot of young men crammed into 2001 Nissans who would have liked this car.
In this video, a ‘98 Cadillac DeVille with less than 80,000 miles meets its end. Just 68,000 miles on this Chevy Caprice wagon.
A nice looking 2001 Mazda light truck with 75,000 miles bites the dust here. Here’s a good looking Volvo prematurely destroyed. This SUV would look at home in any tony U.S. suburb.
Really, you ought to look at at least a couple of these videos, and the hundreds more like them on YouTube. Are these “clunkers?” Can it really help the economy to destroy perfectly good assets? Are the people running the government the most economically illiterate bunch since FDR ruled the roost? Or are they dumber?
Promoted from the diaries by Jeff.
Is “make up your mind” really all that much to ask of President Obama?
Evidently so. At yesterday’s townhall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Obama’s oft-repeated “money line” was that tax raises are “painful” and unneccessary, and that tax cuts were awesome.
Take, for example, the following quotes from the transcript, accompanied with video.
Tax cuts are awesome:
That’s why we acted as fast as we could to pass a Recovery Act that would stop the freefall. And I want to make sure everybody understands what we did.
One-third of the money in the Recovery Act went to tax cuts that have already started showing up in the paychecks of about 500,000 working families in New Hampshire — (applause) — 500,000 families in New Hampshire. We also cut taxes for small businesses on the investments that they make, and over 300 New Hampshire small businesses have qualified for new loans backed by the Recovery Act.
Tax increases are bad:
There is another problem with the Democrats’ healthcare legislation that hasn’t been talked about much. It makes a heck of a tradeoff.
In exchange for universal healthcare under a government run plan, Donald Luskin points out an independent analysi that says we’ll see wage stagnation.
That’s right — in exchange for healthcare, don’t expect to ever get a pay raise.
If we expanded health insurance coverage but our current health cost inflation rate continued unabated, the higher overall costs would result in falling wages at the bottom of the earnings spectrum and very slow wage growth on up the earnings distribution. These dismal wage outcomes would persist over at least the next couple of decades, possibly longer.
In other words, only the rich will benefit. The poor and middle class will see their earning power reduced, their disposal income cut, and their potential to rise up from the lower and middle classes cut off.
All of this will be thanks to Obamacare.
(Back in June, while I was in Washington, “Green Hell” author Steve Milloy graciously agreed to sit down for an interview. You can find my review of “Green Hell” here.)
Q: At what point did you realize that you had accumulated enough material for a book?
A: Having run JunkScience.com for 13 years now, I started to realize that on this issue someone really needed to issue a tough message to the public. So during the 2008 hysteria, I started to simply collect newspaper clippings. After just two weeks of accumulating such clippings, I realized that it would soon accumulate into a book – something that was basically indeed the case after about three months.
(More below the fold.)
You might have noticed that Al Gore has recently been saying some very immodest things about anyone who dares to disagree with his views. Of course, when someone like Mr. Gore says things like that, it tells us more about his views than about those of his opponents.
And what is the real agenda of Mr. Gore and his fellow-traveling greenshirts?
If you want to find all of that scary information in one place, read “Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do To Stop Them,” by Steve Milloy.
More below the fold.
Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave his semi-annual report on monetary policy and the economy to the Senate Banking Committee. With the hot Beltway topic being the health care overhaul President Obama is so desperate to get passed and signed before more people find out what the effects of such a policy will really be, a few Senators had questions for the Chairman about the fiscal implications of the three dueling health care bills being written in the House and Senate, all of which have been criticized by elected Democrats and the director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office alike for being costly expansions of government that will do nothing to reduce the cost of health care or to cover the millions of American uninsured.
At that hearing, Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison made this spot-on comment:
[O]ne thing we’re trying to do is just slow this down enough that we can find the information and have the best facts that we can. And setting an arbitrary August deadline seems to many of us to be very unwise because so much could happen that would be irreversible if we really do change our health care system to this extent with the costs and in a hard economic time, anyway.
And many of us are concerned, as well, that employers are going to be encouraged to just drop health care coverage, pay the fine, and let people go into the public system, which then becomes a bigger burden on the government, but also the beginning of rationed health care, in many views.
So I thank you for saying that we ought to be very careful before we do add more entitlements to our health care system, and I hope you will work with us, as we are able to get more and more information about the — the real long-term consequences.
Below the fold, a couple more noteworthy points from Hutchison and Evan Bayh (D-IN), as well as Bernanke’s noteworthy answers.
We’re out of the economic woods. Things are looking up. Unemployment is rising. Manufacturing is moribund. Foreclosures are at all time highs. Foreigners are getting nervous about our bonds… and currency. But the crisis is over.
How do we know this? The Google Index.
Of all the statistics pouring into the White House every day, top economic adviser Larry Summers highlighted one Friday to make his case that the economic free-fall has ended.
The number of people searching for the term “economic depression” on Google is down to normal levels, Summers said.
Searches for the term were up four-fold when the recession deepened in the earlier part of the year, and the recent shift goes to show consumer confidence is higher, Summers told the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
One of the amazing things about this Administration is the way some really smart people will say disturbingly dumb things to defend it. One is uncertain of their motivation but the phenomenon is undeniable.
I can think of a lot of reasons why searches for “economic depression” might fluctuate that have nothing to do with predictions of the economic condition of the nation. Maybe they remembered the concept after one search? Maybe they’ve been evicted and longer have access to a computer? I can’t imagine there is a significant number of people out there who repeatedly search for “economic depression” because they remain worried about their jobs and being able to pay the mortgage.
Back in 2005 when Larry Summers launched into his ill-fated exposition on why women are inferior to men in math skills (and measuring distance, for that matter), MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins walked out of his talk later saying that if she hadn’t left, ”I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” I know how she feels. Right now I’d know I don’t know whether to crap or go blind and I can’t leave.
Want to see a full list of the earmarks in the Energy and Water Bill that the House is about to begin debating? Well, I hope you have some stamina because there are 1,866 of them to read.
You’ll notice that many of them are being requested by “the President.” That would be the Barack Obama 2012 re-election campaign project you are seeing there.
For some reason, my list is causing trouble with the code here, so the full list was posted by Jamie Dupree.
Anyone who remembers, say, his campaign pronouncement that a Kansas tornado had left “ten thousand dead” and “an entire town destroyed” (the 2007 storm actually killed twelve people) knows that President Barack Obama (D-IL) hasn’t been one to worry about playing fast and loose with a few facts or numbers.
However, his dogged refusal to deviate from his standard talking point of “150,000 jobs created or saved” by the $787,000,000,000.00 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the “stimulus package,” or, my personal favorite, “Porkulus”) is beginning to lend itself to more than a little head-scratching by observers.
Mr. Obama and his administration have been making the claim for several weeks now. On May 27, “White House economic advisers” announced the “stimulus” had “created or saved 150,000 jobs” since its inception 100 days before — an average increase (or savings) of about 1,500 jobs a day. Twelve days later, on June 8, Vice President Joe Biden (D-DE) made the same proclamation on a conference call with reporters: the stimulus had “saved or created 150,000 [jobs]” to date.
Theoretically, there should have been about 18,000 more jobs than that, given the twelve day interval between the May 27 announcement and the June 8 call, but never mind that. Just for good measure, despite the fact economists and simple observers who had the virtue of being awake alike were throwing up their hands in disbelief that a presidential administration would actually make such a claim about something as obviously incalculable as a “saved” job, Biden added the assertion that there had been “no ‘reasonable’ challenges to the estimates.”
Last Wednesday, July 8 — a full 30 days after the Biden conference call, and 42 after the initial 100 day claim of “150,000 jobs created or saved,” Mr. Obama’s deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget announced the “stimulus” had — you guessed it! — “created or saved 150,000 jobs since its inception in February.”
This is just disgusting.
According to CongressDaily, Tim Geithner testified before “a joint House Agriculture and Financial Services hearing on the regulation of derivatives.”
Noting the rising unemployment, Geithner said what the economy “is going through is a very necessary and healthy adjustment as [Americans] go back to living within their means.” He added: “We do not have an economy that is growing again.”
It’s a “necessary and healthy adjustment”? Seriously? 9.5% unemployment is necessary and healthy how exactly?
How is “an economy that is [not] growing” necessary and healthy?
This is the guy so needed to get our economy going again that Congress overlooked his tax evasion.
And this is the man who, having never worked in the private sector, thinks you losing your job is “necessary and healthy.”
That’s Barack Obama’s America.
I’ve written before about the glowing coverage Barack Obama receives despite the consistently terrible economic news. Today provides yet another example:
Fewer than expected file for unemployment
The number of Americans filing initial unemployment claims fell sharply last week, while those filing ongoing claims rose to another all-time high, according to government data released Thursday.
There were 565,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended July 4, down 52,000 from a revised 617,000 the previous week, the Labor Department said.
It was the lowest number since January and was below the consensus estimate of 603,000 from economists surveyed by Briefing.com.
Once again, Barack Obama gets a favorable headline: rather than stressing the all-time high in ongoing claims, it emphasizes a surprising fall in new claims. Eventually they reveal one reason that new claims have fallen:
Initial claims typically spike in July as automakers idle certain manufacturing plants, and the Labor Department adjusts its data for such seasonal factors.
However, many plant closures occurred early this year, said Mark Vitner, an economist at Wacovia Economics Group.
On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, initial claims were 577,506.
“The improvement in first week of July was exaggerated by the timing of plant closures,” Vitner said. “This is something we’re going to be dealing with throughout the month.”
Thank goodness America’s auto companies have been failing! Without that, new unemployment claims would have been much worse!
Why? For writing this.
Employers in the U.S. cut 467,000 jobs in June, the unemployment rate rose and hourly earnings stagnated, offering little evidence the Obama administration’s stimulus package is shoring up the labor market.
The payroll decline was more than forecast and followed a 322,000 drop in May, according to Labor Department figures released today in Washington. The jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent, the highest since August 1983, from 9.4 percent.
Unemployment is projected to keep rising for the rest of the year just as the income boost from the stimulus package fades, undermining prospects for a sustained rebound in household purchases, analysts said. As companies from General Motors Corp. to Kimberly-Clark Corp. cut costs, the lack of jobs will limit any recovery.
Most media outlets have started engaging in pro-Obama “it’s not that bad” spin. But this is a harsh reality. Unemployment will keep going up. Wages will stagnate. The Obama stimulus plan is not working.
Sadly, we all knew that before the stimulus passed Congress. But it still passed and now we’ve added trillions of dollars to the deficit for nothing.
George Bush would have killed for coverage like this. Considering the surprising strength of the economy in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he’d be posing for Mount Rushmore if the press had treated him the way they are treating Obama:
Job market shows some improvement
…Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-processing firm, said private-sector employers cut 473,000 jobs in June, a 2.5% improvement from the revised 485,000 drop in May.
The June job cut total was more than expected. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a loss of 394,000 jobs last month.
However, the May tally was revised lower. ADP originally reported a loss of 532,000 private-sector jobs in May…
Promoted from the diaries by Neil Stevens
One of the lamest arguments in favor of the passage of Cap and Tax was that it was good “energy policy”. Rep. John Larson (D-CT 1), among others, went off at length in this direction. You might suspect from the title that I may take exception with this assessment.
Before we go further, a couple of definitions:
Policy: A governmental plan (contrast with “program”), generally formulated within the executive branch which has the purpose of solving a particular problem facing the nation.
Elasticity: The percent change of the quantity of a good/service supplied or demanded for a unit percent change of price. This definition can be confirmed in any undergrad microeconomics text.
So we see “energy policy” thrown out there as an argument. What problem facing the nation does are we trying to solve? In this case, it is the inelastic demand for fossil fuels (primarily oil) combined with the inelastic supply of the same fossil fuels. The supply is inelastic in that the nation imports a sizable percent of its oil and thus does not have direct control over supply quantity.
Given the definition of the problem, it seems that there is a two part solution:
In today’s “Weekly Republican Address,” House Republican Leader John Boehner asks, “Where are the jobs?”
It’s a good question. After all, to justify spending trillions of borrowed money on President Obama’s so-called stimulus, energy and health care bills, Obama and the Democrats promised the unprecedented spending would create jobs:
The president and Democrats in Congress claim this spending binge is necessary to put Americans back to work. They promised unemployment would not rise above 8 percent if their trillion-dollar stimulus was passed.
But our nation has lost nearly three million jobs this year. Unemployment has soared above 9 percent. And now the president admits that unemployment will soon reach double digits.
After all of this spending, after all of this borrowing from China, the Middle East, our children and our grandchildren, where are the jobs?”Where are the jobs?”
You can watch Leader Boehner’s address in the following video:
Here’s another question. Why do Congressional Democrats continue to pursue economic, health care, energy, and environmental policies that will destroy more American jobs and drive future generations into deeper debt?
Ed Frank created an interesting little video that serves as a stark reminder of how harsh the Old Media was on Bush’s “faltering” economy in comparison to today’s hearts and flowers style of reporting during the age of Obama, even though the stats are far, far worse under Obama than they ever were under Bush.
Frank’s video is shocking for its revelation of how Bush was slapped around and how every economic indicator during his tenure in the White House was deemed as obvious proof of the supposed though times we then faced. Yet now, every dismal indicator is celebrated as if recovery just around the corner. Under Bush the Old Media was sure the economy was a wreck, now the wreck proves we will surely be saved by Summer!
With the federal deficit spiraling out of control, with unemployment approaching 10 percent, and with confidence in the Obama economic plan waning, it might be useful to go back and look at what team Obama promised if the porkulus passed:
Moe has already pointed this out. It is worth reiterating and paying attention to.
Below is a chart prepared by the Obama administration — at least the blue lines were prepared by the Obama Administration. The light blue line shows what unemployment would be like if Barack Obama’s stimulus plan had not been passed.
The dark blue line shows what unemployment would be like with Barack Obama’s stimulus plan.
The assertion was that with the stimulus plan, the growth of unemployment would slow dramatically during the second quarter of 2009, taper off in the third quarter, then begin heading back down. Without the stimulus plan, unemployment would continue skyrocketing well into 2010.
There is some additional data added to the chart. Some red dots showing where unemployment is now that Barack Obama’s stimulus plan has passed. The result?
Actual unemployment has risen faster and higher than Barack Obama said would happen even without his stimulus plan. In other words: Barack Obama’s stimulus plan has failed to do what he claimed it would do and we are in greater debt and greater unemployment than if we had done nothing at all.
