Jobs

Stories and reports continue to break about the stimulus bill that was rushed through congress earlier this year and the fact that it has not succeeded in creating more jobs for Americans.

Still, there doesn't appear to be any leadership or a unified voice raising the tenor of outrage about this massive failure by the Democratic leaders in Congress and the Administration.  The more people scratch the surface of the stimulus reports, the more they discover a government boondoggle - with non-existent congressional districts, counting jobs that were created without stimulus funding, double-counting of jobs, and unclear entities that have been credited with creating new jobs. 

All the while, unemployment has reached an unbelievable 10.2%

This upcoming election cycle is about jobs and the economy - plain and simple. Every poll since September 2008 has shown that the number one concern of voters is jobs and the economy. 

Voters are watching family members, neighbors and friends cope with layoffs, and many have lost their own jobs.  People are surviving on smaller paychecks.  Many Americans know someone who has lost their home to a foreclosure and ever increasing numbers believe the stimulus is having no effect on the economy.  There is a sweeping sentiment among voters that the government is getting too large and is not responsive to the people.

Without mincing words, the trillion dollar stimulus the Washington Democrats shoved down America's throat is a debacle and is the clearest example of how they are fundamentally failing the American people in regards to jobs and the economy. 

In fact, David Obey, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and father of the stimulus bill, is now placing blame on the Administration for lack of oversight of his own bill. Even he is running scared from the mess that is the stimulus bill.

This can not be emphasized enough.

Health care reform is important and must debated and a government-run plan should be fought aggressively. However, it appears that while we focus on that, the opposition is getting a free pass on this.  In reality, the healthcare legislation is a distraction to what is most important - the Democratic leadership's big government approach to jobs and the economy has failed...and this is the strongest reason why a big government approach to healthcare is wrong.

Republicans need to begin calling for accountability on this failed stimulus bill that is wrought with inconsistencies and bad numbers...and drumbeat the looming question, "Where are the jobs?"

I point you to a piece by Mike Flynn, editor of BigGovernment.com. Mike wrote a post today, Obama Stimulus Numbers: The Return of Enron-Style Accounting, comparing the reporting of the stimulus bill to Enron's reporting of it's financial reports. He's starting to see where this is heading.

His Mightiness the Empty Suit, in the getting-dingier-by-the-day White House, is constantly holding forth, sagely saying NOTHING in front of gaggles of “journalists”, who dutifully report NOTHING, while the would be NEO-STAZI in the Suit’s administration attack the only news and information outlets that do say SOMETHING about what the President, the administration and that zany and dysfunctional but extremely dangerous Congress, led by Nancy “Stretch” Pelosi and that ever popular Harry “I ain’t got a prayer of re-election” Reid, are up to. While the people of America continue to suffer the throes of a completely jobless “recovery”, with a recession that shows every indication of being worse despite what all the liberal pitchmen in the administration and the media lapdogs are saying. The FACTS are that there are no jobs and the REASON that there are no jobs is that small business is scared to death. The government has a plethora of more than onerous taxation, regulation and punitive laws waiting in the wings, custom designed to destroy the private sector. Job growth does not come from unionized segments of the society and hasn’t since the days of Henry Ford. Trade unionism is a cancer which can destroy. Trade unionism destroyed Great Britain’s economy and it hasn’t recovered to this day. Unions by their very nature are antithetical to GROWING anything…they produce very little other than protecting their own interests. They have a tendency toward protecting the least well qualified as opposed to the most…the government unions are a prime example. The service and automobile industry unions are others. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to show increases in value. WHAT gives? Simply, they are increasing profit margins by laying people off and consolidating operations. Job growth comes from private business…in the larger context of the economy large business does not create nearly as many jobs as the small business entrepreneur. These jobs are not being created specifically because of the anti-business, anti-American policies of the Obama White House and the Marxist Obama administration and Congress. 500,000 new jobless claims is 500,000 JOBS LOST TO THE OBAMA ECONOMY. He can’t blame the Bush administration for this and hasn’t been able to for six months or more. Suspicious minds would conclude that there are more sinister activities and purposes afoot here than our usually trusting minds can easily wrap themselves around…or want to believe…

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2009

This is hard to believe, but hey, it's the federal government's own statistics.

Guess how many new jobs the much ballyhooed "stimulus" program has created across the state of Connecticut, a place with a workforce of about 2 million?

20. That's right. TWENTY. Two-Zero.

You know, that's a total of 2.8 additional new jobs for each Democratic vote in the CT congressional delegation that favored the $800 billion boondoggle.

I really do hope this program picks up some more steam. Because based on the fact that CT's taxpayers are responsible for about 2.2% of the total federal tax base; right now we are running a cost to the CT taxpayer of about $900 million per additional job. This even makes Alex Rodriguez look like cheap labor.   

Then again, Joe Biden was in Fairfield last month  touting some big paving and tree cutting program  on the Merritt Parkway.  And we know " no one messes with Joe"

Right?

To continue building its infrastructure, the center-right is going to have to start hiring talent from around the country. I understand the value of having most of your human resources in a dynamic, creative cluster like NoVa/DC, but it’s time to tap folks that don’t relish living in Termite Town. Besides, there are creative clusters in other places.

Telecommuters and remote workers aren’t going away any time soon. To remain competitive while extending their national reach, both partisans and non-profits need to think nationally. Virtual workforces are now possible. (Reason Foundation, for example, has people all over the country.) Novel, immersive conferencing environments like Teleplace are getting less expensive and improving collaboration across geographies. There are trade-offs to distributed workforces to be sure, but the costs are going down and the benefits are going up.

The next time you post a job, open your mind. Your best candidate may be in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, or Research Triangle, NC—and may want to stay there. 

Obama and the Dems credit the recent better job market to the Stimulus bill, but defend the-still-week job market by saying that jobs are a “lagging indicator,” it lags the rest of the economy when it comes to improvements, therefore the Stimulus does not yet fully reflect in the job market.

The Problem is this: February, the month the stimulus was signed and before any stimulus money was dished out, the economy lost 60,000 jobs less than in January, and in March the economy lost even less jobs than in February. If the “logging indicator” excuse is true, why did the economy in March, the month stimulus money merely started rolling out, lose less jobs than it did in each of the two months before it? The March improvement cannot be attributed to the stimulus considering jobs are a lagging indicator. Right? It takes time for the Stimulus to reflect in the market. Aint it so?

Whichever way you will cook it, you are toast: if you use “lagging” is a factor, how/why did we get the March improvements? You will of course have to agree that some (or most) of March happened on its own (just as February certainly did happen on its own because it was before the Stimulus). If so, how much of the general improved job markets since then took place on its own independent of Obama? And if you will say logging is not a factor and the better March number IS a direct result of the stimulus, why is the job market now, a half year later, still not doing better than it is?

Side Note:  if you wonder why February saw improvements even before the Stimulus, go back to Katrina for the answer: the New Orleans waters receded before the Bush team took any action. Why? because there is this much havoc that panic can cause before things get less bad on its own. The same is with the job market: it started getting less bad on its own, back in February.

(This writing was posted here too)

I considey myself sorta a "shot and a beer" Republican so when I see charts like this from Redstate

I feel compelled to try and provide a better visual idea of the futility to date of Obamanomics

Since February the Obama camp claims to have "saved or created" 100,000 to 150,000 jobs

On the other hand, unemployment is up by over 1.5 million. I suspect that when adds in "discouraged workers" no longer seeking work we are well above that number.

So I think there's about a 1 to 12 ratio of new or saved jobs to lost jobs right about now.

So here's the graphic

Jobs Obama saved

Jobs Obama didn't save. 

Any questions?

;

More and more of the details about the proposed $825 billion stimulus from President Barack Obama and the Democrat Congressional majorities are surfacing and it appears more and more that the proposition’s goals are not to stimulate the economy, but rather to reshape it in to socialism on steroids. By the spending proposed in the bill, the United States is going to start looking more and more like Sweden and France and less like the United States that we knew just two or three years ago.

First, let’s start with the tax cuts proposed in the bill. Business is struggling to borrow money from banks, like other private citizens are, and the value of their stock is in decline. All of this is thanks to economic conditions that have made business go from expanding and hiring more employees to consolidations and layoffs. Just today, 75,000 job cuts were expected from Caterpillar, Sprint, and Home Depot just to name a few.

For all of these pains where the highest taxes on sole proprietors, partnerships, and Chapter S corporations are going to remain at 35 percent. As for Chapter C corporations, they will still pay a 31 percent rate and their dividends will still be taxed again at the same income tax rate as paid by the shareholder. In other words, someone who has pre-tax earnings per share of $2.00 would end up seeing only anywhere from less than $0.90 to $1.17 (using the lowest tax rate of ten percent) per share that could be taken home after corporate and income taxes! That is an end tax rate for a shareholder ranging from 41.5 percent to over 55 percent! No wonder some people are hesitant to buy stock.

Instead, tax cuts are going to be given via Social Security payroll deductions at $1,000 for families and $500 for individuals. Let’s go back to last year when Americans received tax rebate checks for $600 (individuals) and $1,200 (families). Economists have concluded that less than 25 percent of the money from the tax rebate checks of 2008 was spent on goods and services (mostly Chinese made) while the remainder was used to pay down debt. We all know how well that worked out with the current recession.

Where tax cuts work is what Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush did. Reagan dropped the lower rate from 70 percent when he took office to 28 when he left and the economy grew dramatically. Bill Clinton cut the capital gains rate from 28 percent to 20 percent which led to the late-1990’s stock market boom. George W. Bush cut taxes on income, capital gains, and in other places and it led to an economic boom from 2003 to 2006. In every instance, tax revenues and America’s standard of living grew because of the increased economic activity by reducing the barriers of taxes.

What makes matters worse on the tax relief front is that the tax code changes won’t take hold until next year. If we are in such an urgent crisis, let’s do something from a tax standpoint that works and reduce rates going forward and make the tax cuts from the George W. Bush years permanent. However, as you read later, that will not be the motivation.

Next comes the infrastructure spending programs that sound good, but more will lead you to believe that this is not the right way to go forward. We have a nostalgic view about Franklin D. Roosevelt not because of the manner in which he ran the economy, but how he managed the war, mostly thanks to the great generalship of Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and others.

The New Deal that Roosevelt implemented twice government spending programs on infrastructure and blue-collar jobs. It’s “twice” because the first program failed and only government is insane enough to try a sequel (unless you voted Democrat for governor in Michigan and Illinois in 2006). As it turned out, economists at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) determined that the New Deal actually delayed a full economic recovery by seven years.

The result was World War II and around-the-clock mass production for the war effort that ended the Great Depression in 1943. Think about that. The Great Depression, had the New Deal not been pursued, could have ended in 1936, on the eve of FDR’s reelection.

In total, there will be $90 billion in the $825 billion package spent on infrastructure alongside the $275 billion in tax cuts that won’t be realized until 2010. That’s a grand total of $365 billion, or just more than 44 percent of the package being spent to “stimulate” the economy.

The reality is that infrastructure spending programs don’t do the job and the tax cuts are insufficient. In total, the government is putting together a program designed to give window dressing with this package to make us feel as if President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are actually doing something. The reality is that if that something doesn’t do what we have the expectations are (reviving a stagnant economy), they’re toast.

So what happens with the remaining money? The remaining money will go to other projects that won’t be realized until long after Obama is out of office. Education spending, health care spending, and cover state shortfalls on Medicaid are nice, but the purpose of the bill is lost. The purpose is to jump-start the economy and to jump-start it now.

In the end, the American people will be more than $800 billion deeper in debt with no chance of either reviving the economy, creating jobs, or ending the current recession. Instead, the plan is to have enough debt on the books to where Obama and the Democrats can actually terminate all, if not most, of the Bush tax cuts.

In a previous post, I had mentioned that the four stages of the Great Depression were a credit crunch, a stock market crash, price destabilization, and tax increases. As it will turn out, the economic plan of Obama’s will generate more inflation either by increasing debt or the need to print more money (both of which are inflationary) and repealing the Bush tax cuts to result in the largest tax increase in American history.

I am not alone on a looming depression. There are a number of other economists, including Harry Dent, who accurately predicted the 1990’s economic boom. I guarantee that the Obama program will fail. I wish it weren’t true for the sake of this country because we need help. However, this isn’t the help we need but rather a shell game disguised as a push towards socialism that has been proven to fail in every instance it has been tried.

Two days ago, Jon Henke posed the question, "What policy should Republicans be advocating and pursuing to limit government and regain popular support?"

With Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress proposing new bailouts and a significant amount of additional government spending to create jobs and restore the economy, Republicans have a phenomenal chance to reinforce our earnest belief in limited government.  I propose a simple policy that will allow us to both "limit government and regain popular support": Republicans must fight Democratic efforts to build a nanny state to solve the economic woes. Instead, our policy should be offering solutions to revive the economy that are rooted in free market principles.

Indeed, Thomas Sowell points out that government intervention may actually be harmful to the economy:

Even in the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, increasing numbers of economists and historians who have looked back at that era have concluded that, on net balance, government intervention prolonged the Great Depression.

I recently had a unique chance to discuss the economy with renowned economist and monetary policy expert Dr. Allan Meltzer (which you can read at length here).  Meltzer and other leading economists have observed that the big problem plaguing the economy is the housing crisis, and that the government's efforts to breathe life into the economy have neglected this issue.  Meltzer proposes a free market solution to the housing crisis that could be immensely effective as a step toward getting the economy back on track:

To address the housing problem, Congress and the administration should take actions that increase the current demand for housing. For a limited time, say up to the end of 2009, allow buyers to use the value of their down-payment (or some part of it) as a tax deduction. Or, reduce the tax rate for qualified buyers who purchase a house between now and January 2010. Or do both. Give the benefit to all home buyers, including those buying a second or third house.

The bottom line is that the battle of free markets versus government control is one Republicans can – and should – win.  Dr. Meltzer noted that he often says, "Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin."  Yes, the free market will inevitably fail on occasion – and Republicans, as champions of capitalism, must pursue a policy that ensures that the free market is given the chance to fix itself as it has many times before.  If Republicans can identify innovative free market solutions to the economic woes like the proposals outlined by Dr. Meltzer, we can help ensure limited government while making real progress toward economic recovery.

My friend and colleague, Patrick Ottenhoff, had an interesting analysis of Virginia back in June that could be on the money:

Major federal contractors set up shop in Northern Virginia and, in turn, subcontracted work to technology firms that hired accountants and lawyers. The young professionals who work at those firms in Tysons Corner, Reston and Ashburn are part of Obama’s core constituency. But the ideology and lifeblood of many of these firms is rooted in continued defense spending — one part of the Bush legacy that McCain would be sure to continue. In an election in which Republicans’ Iraq policy will hurt McCain in almost every state, his bullish foreign policy could actually help him in some quarters of Virginia.

Let's forgive Pat for missing the economic crisis and improvement in Iraq and focus on the basic economic point for a moment. When Barney Frank said that he would cut defense spending by 25%, both resonating with an image of Barack Obama and particular statements, an opportunity was created.

Significant defense cuts have the opportunity to creat massive economic dislocations for people and communities. And they know it. Just look at the terror in Northern Virginia over BRAC. John McCain's campaign figured this out. This is basic paycheck issue for a lot of hard-working people. Suddenly, Barack Obama's "radicalism" means something to real people. Let's look at some numbers.

The key thing to realize hereis that you can cut ads in these states and people will get it. Imagine scripts like these:

Barack Obama doesn't just endanger our national security wtih his untested ideas, he  endangers [state]'s economic security.  In [state], that means [jobs] jobs. And it just starts there. When you remove those jobs from [state] everyone suffers from even lower house prices to the damage done to small businesses.

These can be supplemented with statements by local politians who, inevitably, fell over themselves to talk about BRAC and the damage that removing even one office at one military base, or even civilian office, would do to the community.

This is an issue that, when tied with Joe the Plumber and whatever crazy ACORN or whatever else stuff pops over the weekend can resonate with John McCain's underlying message. These are real issues. Barack Obama is talking about "change", while John McCain is talking about what's in your pocket-book. That's something that people understand and that we need to nail the last 5 days of the campaign.