Today’s jobs report from the Labor Department shows that unemployment has now exceeded 8% for 35 consecutive months, the most since the federal government began keeping records.
The reason that 8% number is important is that the Obama Administration promised in January 2009 that unemployment would not exceed it under his $1 trillion spending “stimulus.” They also projected that unemployment would peak in October of that year, and be down to approximately 6% today. Instead, the jobless rate ascended past 10%, and has never come in below 8% since. Moreover, the incremental decrease from November’s 8.7% rate was due to a decline in the size of the nation’s workforce. Further, the 200,000 jobs added is barely sufficient to tread water with population growth.
By this point in our cyclical recovery, employment growth should be much stronger, and unemployment much lower. To compare alternative economic strategies, Ronald Regan dealt with even higher unemployment than has Obama (not to mention far higher inflation and interest rates back then). But Reagan’s tax-cutting and smaller-government policies slashed unemployment from 10.4% on the effective date of his tax cuts to 7.0% in the same 35-month span Obama has had. The answer to the Obama jobs freeze is clear. It’s simply up to the American electorate to demand it.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the increasingly destructive drumbeat of class warfare rhetoric coming out of the White House of late and urges President Obama to stop it and focus on economic growth for all Americans.
Media figures, often suggesting hope as much as sober analysis, counter Barack Obama’s terrible standing in opinion polls by pointing out that Congressional Republicans are even less popular. The first problem, of course, is that Obama’s opponent in November 2012 won’t be named “Congressional Republicans.” Secondly, animosity toward Congress is typically uncentered, as illustrated by the fact that incumbents maintain phenomenal reelection records even in anti-incumbent years. In other words, people walking into the voting booth seem to think, “Congress is full of bums, but my Representative is OK.”
But here’s another point nobody seems to highlight. If Congressional Republicans are so unpopular, or constitute such a nice foil for Obama, why is it that they consistently outperform Congressional Democrats in public esteem? Take a look at this accumulated record of Rasmussen polling on the matter. Since January 2010, the earliest date Rasmussen lists, Congressional Republicans have not trailed Congressional Democrats in voter preference even once. Obama can’t seek a job extension based upon his performance record, but the reality is that this particular strategy might not be any more promising.
When Barack Obama entered office and proposed his nearly $1 trillion spending “stimulus” bill, his administration promised that unemployment would peak at 8% in the fall of 2009 if we passed his plan. They also predicted that unemployment would be down to approximately 6% by now.
Instead, following today’s latest report from the Department of Labor, unemployment has now exceeded Obama’s promised 8% ceiling for a record 34th consecutive month. Although some will focus on the decline from 9.0% to 8.6%, most of that statistical decline is due to people giving up and dropping out of the labor force, rather than from sudden job creation. That is illustrated by the fact that only 120,000 net jobs were added, less than the anticipated number. That’s also fell far below the 200,000 new jobs needed each month to reduce the unemployment rate by just 1% over the span of a year. Additionally, the broader labor participation rate again declined and now stands at 64%.
In contrast to the destructive effects of Obama’s borrow-and-tax-and-spend agenda, Ronald Reagan’s tax-cutting agenda saw unemployment plummet from 10.4% to 7.1% over the same period of time. As the old Latin saying goes, “res ipsa loquitur” – the fact speaks for itself.
I am so glad Ashton posted this latest outrage from the flagrantly corrupt, thuggish, Obama/Holder (In)Justice Department. If a Republican administration had done this, every editorial page in the United States — EVERY ONE — would have been yelling bloody murder about the trampling of the public’s right to know, etc. Every major newscast would be lead with this story. Cue the dramatic music about the cover-up indicating that a crime MUST have been committed, and cue the race for someone to append the most clever “-Gate” ending as a name for the scandal. But if Obama does it…. yawn.
This is serious. It appears criminal. And it must not stand. Go back and read Ashton’s post and the backup documentation. It’s an outrage.
Remember the alleged “crisis” that demanded ObamaCare? To hear Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their minions, that crisis demanded that we do something, anything, even if it meant passing a bill before finding out what was in it.
The overwhelming majority of Americans apparently never got the memo. According to Gallup, fully 82% of Americans rate their healthcare “excellent” or “good,” while 11% of the remaining 18% rate their care “fair,” and only 5% say “poor” (2% said “no opinion” or “not applicable”). As Gallup notes, “That combined excellent/good percentage has remained fairly steady at around 80% since 2001,” when polling on this question began.
After a stunning recitation of the facts of the Bin Laden raid culled from interviews with Seal Team 6 members who participated in it, a former team leader (Pfarrer) says that the reason the Seals are breaking their customary code of silence is the gross misrepresentations propagated by the Obama Administration.
What infuriated the Seals, according to Pfarrer, was the description of the raid as a kill mission. “I’ve been a Seal for 30 years and I never heard the words ‘kill mission’,” he said. “It’s a Beltway (Washington insider’s) fantasy word. If it was a kill mission you don’t need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades.”
Add military terminology to the litany of policy subjects the president and his liberal cohort are jarringly unfamiliar with. “Beltway fantasies,” indeed.
Note: A previous version of this post contained a broken hyperlink. Google “Bitter Seals tell of killing ‘Bert’ Laden.” Great stuff.
The nation’s unemployment remained at or above 9% again last month, and has now exceeded 8% for 33 consecutive months since February 2009. That’s the longest stretch since the federal government began issuing monthly reports in 1948.
Here’s why that 8% benchmark and February 2009 are important. When Obama passed his nearly $1 trillion “stimulus” bill that same month, his administration projected that unemployment would never exceed 8%, and be all the way down to approximately 6% today. Instead, unemployment quickly climbed to 10.1%, and has remained above 9% for all but four months during that record 33-month span. Moreover, the economy only added a disappointing 80,000 jobs for September, less than the expected 100,000 and far below the estimated 200,000 necessary each month to reduce the rate by just 1% over the course of a year.
It’s instructive to compare the real-world results of Obama’s economic agenda with Ronald Reagan’s. In the same 33-month stretch following the effective date of Reagan’s tax cuts, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.1%. The comparison speaks for itself, yet now Obama tells the nation that what we need is more of the same – more “mini-stimulus” government spending. Obama’s agenda has demonstrably failed, and it’s time to return to what demonstrably works.
So the government reported tepid 2.5% gross domestic product (GDP) third quarter growth yesterday, and the market celebration it triggered says a lot about the bleak nature of the Obama economy.
First of all, that reading fell below consensus expectations of 2.7% growth. Second, 2.5% falls almost a full percentage point below the post-war historical average of 3.3% quarterly growth. Third, GDP should be growing even faster than that 3.3% long-term average during a period of so-called “recovery” – recall that the most recent recession officially ended nine quarters ago in June 2009. At a similar point during the Reagan recovery in 1984, GDP grew at a 7.1% rate following consecutive quarters of 9.3%, 8.1%, 8.5% and 8.0% growth. And at the same point during the Bush recovery from the Clinton/Gore tech bubble downturn and 9/11, GDP grew 3.7% following a previous quarter of 6.7% growth. Fourth, 2.5% growth is insufficient to significantly improve the nation’s festering unemployment problem.
A 2.5% rate certainly beats the 0.4% and 1.3% readings for the preceding two quarters of 2011, but America’s desperate need for new economic leadership becomes clear when such a lackluster result is seen as “good” news.
Jimmy Carter lives, but he has big jug ears and he can’t talk without a teleprompter. This is about the fourth time in recent weeks that Barry O has sounded like Carter complaining about national malaise (yes, I know Carter himself never used the word, but Carter did describe it). (For instance, see item number two, about Americans getting “soft,” in Ashton’s story.) The One says we have lost our ambition and our imagination. Well, no… but his heavy layer of government and his insistence that government do all our thinking and choosing for us has certainly made it hard for us to exercise the ambition and imagination that remain central facets of the American character. We have not lost them; they’ve just been somewhat smothered under Obama’s boots. If he wants us to get our ambition back, he might want to consider taking a permanent vacation, and taking all his rule-by-(illegal)-fiat administrative commissars with him.
In an ominous sign, the nation’s consumer confidence plummeted in October to lows not seen since March 2009, three months before the last recession officially ended. After improving to 46.4 in September, the measure fell 7 points to 39.8, well below what economists expected. That reading is also far below the 90 level that economists generally agree indicates a healthy economy.
So along with the cyclical recovery following the last recession, consumer confidence rose but has now returned to lows not seen since that time. It will therefore be interesting to watch Barack Obama and liberals attempt to once again scapegoat the Bush Administration for this, almost three years since Bush departed office, and five years since his party last controlled Congress.
In our commentary this week entitled “While Federal Spending Hit New Record in 2011, Washington, D.C. Became America’s Wealthiest City”, we highlight the interrelation between federal spending reaching a new record high in 2011 and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area becoming the nation’s wealthiest. Among other facts, we pointed out that wages of federal employees themselves are over 1/5 higher than comparable private-sector employees, and that federal benefits stand 20%-40% higher than those of private counterparts.
Today, Senators Jeff Sessions and Olympia Snowe sustain our point in their commentary within The Wall Street Journal entitled “An End to Budgetary Trickery.” Advocating the Honest Budget Act they’ve introduced to end “the most blatant and dishonest” overspending gimmicks, they highlight “Fake Federal Pay Freezes”:
In November 2010, the president promised to institute a ‘two-year pay freeze for all civilian federal workers.’ He explained that ‘getting this deficit under control is going to require broad sacrifice.’ But 70% of civilian federal workers have continued to receive 2%-3% automatic ‘step’ increases just for showing up – costing taxpayers an extra billion dollars every year. The Honest Budget Act, in keeping with the president’s pledge, would simply make the federal pay freeze real by legislative mandate.”
Senators Sessions and Snowe also seek to end false “emergency” spending, phony “rescissions” and timing shifts in their legislation. As they summarize, “No more gimmicks, tricks or shell games.” We agree, and urge you to take a quick moment to contact your two Senators in support of the Honest Budget Act. Let’s get this done.
So Warren Buffett, who falsely claims that the wealthiest Americans pay lower tax rates than their receptionists, finally got around to disclosing (some) of his tax information.
It turns out that he paid approximately $7 million in federal income taxes from a taxable income of approximately $40 million. That’s approximately 17.5%, substantially more than the 12% rate paid by the middle quintile of taxpayers in America, according to the Tax Policy Center. Interestingly, Buffett’s $40 million taxable income was also significantly smaller than his total $63 million in gross income, but he apparently didn’t bother to explain that $23 million gap.
On top of all that, Buffett also apparently didn’t explain why he took any deductions at all, or why he didn’t simply pay more to the federal government if he felt that he was undertaxed. Nobody is stopping him from putting his money where his mouth is, after all. So the evidence suggests that Buffett is not only incorrect, but hypocritical.
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