Freedom Line Blog

Earlier this month, I noted that our economy continues to sputter at stalling speed, some four long years after the last recession officially ended:

The U.S. Commerce Department announced second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth of just 1.7%.  That follows first-quarter 2013 growth of just 1.1%, and fourth-quarter 2012 growth of just 0.1%.  Together, that means our economy has grown less than 1% over the past nine months. That obviously provides additional confirmation that Obama’s economic agenda has failed, even as he barnstorms the country demanding more of the same.”  

Yesterday, Macroeconomic Advisers lowered its third-quarter GDP projection to just 1.8%, which would make four consecutive quarters below 2%.  The fourth quarter of 2012 came in at 0.1%, the first quarter of 2013 was 1.1% and growth for the recently-completed second quarter of 2013 was 1.7%.  That’s significant, because growth below 2% on a year-over-year basis has been followed by a recession some 70% of the time according to a Federal Reserve study.  Keep in mind that the average quarterly GDP growth since 1929 has been 3.3%.

Meanwhile, American workers’ wages continue to stagnate, according to the Labor Department.  Since the recession ended all the way back in June 2009, average hourly pay for non-supervisory employees outside of the government sector has declined 0.9%.  It’s one thing for wages to decline during a recession, but another thing entirely for them to fall during a supposed “recovery.”  Obviously, record trillion-dollar deficits aren’t the only unfortunate novelties of the Obama presidency.

In this fifth year of the worst economic recovery in our recorded history under Obama, the situation just isn’t improving like it should, or like it has in every previous recovery.  The latest manifestation of that fact came yesterday, when the Department of Labor announced that the unemployment rate rose in 28 states plus the District of Columbia last month, and only fell in 8 states.

As we noted earlier this month, 240,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month while only 160,000 jobs were created.  Moreover, today there are 2 million fewer Americans working than in 2008, even though our overall population has increased by 13 million during that period.  The last recession ended over four years ago in June 2009, which is more than enough time to conclusively demonstrate the failure of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi economic agenda of higher taxes, more regulation, wasteful spending and record deficits.

In my column this week, I detail how U.S. economic growth has hit stalling speed.  Today’s jobs report from the Labor Department demonstrates that the same is true of the nation’s employment situation in the fifth year of Obama’s economic program.

Only 162,000 jobs were added in July, which was significantly below analysts’ expectation of 190,000.   Even worse, and putting that number in context, 240,000 people dropped out of the workforce last month, while the labor participation rate fell again to 63.4%.  That dropoff explains why the headline unemployment rate declined a bit to 7.4%, which is the number the Obama Administration and sympathetic media will highlight.  But that number only counts people who are actually looking for a job, so those hundreds of thousands who continue to drop out make the surface unemployment rate look better than it actually is.  Moreover, keep in mind that Obama promised at the outset of his administration in February 2009 that his economic policies and trillion-dollar spending “stimulus” would have the unemployment rate down to 5% by now.

The number of part-time workers also amounted to 174,000, showing once again that the approaching ObamaCare mandates are forcing employers to make those they do decide to hire part-time.  All in all, yet another lackluster Obama era jobs report.

IPAB – aka, the Independent Payment Advisory Board – is one of the chief cost-containing elements of ObamaCare. As designed, a presidentially appointed panel of medical experts will convene to decide how much the government will pay for certain kinds of care, and who gets which treatments.

That means that “The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” writes Howard Dean in the Wall Street Journal. “By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”

Dean, who is a licensed medical doctor and spent 11 years as the Democratic Governor of Vermont before running for president in 2004, knows from experience that IPAB is doomed to fail.

“There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting – the essential mechanism of the IPAB – has a 40-year track record of failure,” says Dean. “What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.”

Dean goes on to call for a bipartisan repeal of IPAB, which is great to read and should be acted on. But the logic of including IPAB with ObamaCare’s structure makes perfect sense. Government-controlled health care is centrally-controlled and -planned health care.

If Dr. Dean wants a more patient-centered health care system he should be calling for repeal of ObamaCare in its entirety and greater deregulation of the health care industry. Empowering a new generation of medical entrepreneurs that can leverage advances in technology into boutique health care outlets would drive down costs, increase business opportunities and improve the quality of individualized care.

Dean is right to shudder at the care-killing cost of bureaucracy. Maybe one day he’ll discover the possibilities of a freer health care market too.

Here’s something that might restore some of your faith in popular culture and the evolving American electorate.  According to a new Rasmussen survey, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is less popular than the coal industry that it is trying to destroy:

Voters view the U.S. coal industry more favorably than the Environmental Protection Agency and are closely divided when asked if the Obama administration’s ultimate goal is to kill that industry.  Fifty-one percent (51%) of likely U.S. voters view the U.S. coal industry at least somewhat favorably.  The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 29% hold an unfavorable opinion of it.”

Along with Obama himself, it appears that his administrative agencies are paying a price for their continuing lawlessness.

Lois Lerner impliedly waived her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, according to a party-line vote in the House Government Oversight Committee today.

Lerner entered a brief statement declaring her innocence before invoking the Fifth Amendment during a May 14 appearance before the committee to discuss her role in the IRS scandal targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny.

Soon after, Lerner was placed on administrative leave from the IRS.

The resolution is the first step in a process that could result in a Contempt of Congress citation against Lerner. If so, she would be the second Obama administration political appointee to receive the highest form of censure by a congressional chamber.

The other person: Attorney General Eric Holder.

H/T: Washington Post

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Jeffrey Goldberg says debate is white-hot inside the Obama administration over whether to use U.S.-led airstrikes against Syria’s airbases.

According to Goldberg’s sources, Secretary of State John Kerry is calling for immediate and sustained airstrikes to punish Bashar Assad’s regime for using chemical weapons against rebels. Earlier, President Barack Obama had said that such use would justify an increased American response to the rising number of deaths in the war.

But Kerry’s airstrikes idea was shot down in a tense Situation Room exchange by Army General Martin Dempsey, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Pentagon estimates that at least 700 sorties would be needed to effectively destroy the airfields. That increases the probability an American pilot would be shot down, killed or taken as a prisoner of war.

The dilemma on Syria is this: No one wants the conflict to turn into another occasion of genocide like Rwanda or Darfur, but no one is eager to get involved in a fight where the choice of ally is either the Hezbollah-aligned regime or the al-Qaeda-aligned rebels.

So far, the Defense Department is winning the argument. The absence of a clear definition of victory means the Obama administration likely won’t do much else than send small arms and ammo to the rebels – a symbolic gesture that won’t do much to change the course of the war.

Considering the information available, that’s probably the best move to make.

The Obama Administration, Congressional Democrats and liberals generally may claim that the IRS scandal is essentially resolved, that “there’s no there there.”  The American people disagree, and in growing numbers.

According to a Rasmussen survey released today, some 70% now believe that the unconstitutional and criminal targeting originated in Washington, not some insular Cincinnati cubicle:

While the controversy over the National Security Agency surveillance program has dominated the news recently, concern about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations remains high and is inching up.  Despite the large number of controversies engulfing official Washington, the number of people following the IRS scandal has actually increased in recent weeks.  A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 82% of voters nationwide are now following the IRS targeting story, including 44% who are following the story ‘Very Closely.’  The overall number of voters who are following is up from 74% a month ago.”

It seemed as though the cascade of Obama Administration scandals might paradoxically mitigate the gravity of any one of them individually.  But from this poll and Obama’s plummeting approval numbers, it appears that a healthier sense of sobriety prevails, at least for now.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In this week’s Liberty Update, we mark the fourth anniversary of the end of the last recession in June 2009, noting that the subsequent years have been the most dismal recovery since we began keeping records after World War II.  Today’s unemployment report only served to confirm that reality, as unemployment rose to 7.6% and we only added 175,000 net jobs, which is just treading water.

In an excellent commentary entitled “These Are the Most Important Numbers from the Latest Jobs Report,” American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain brilliantly captures the lackluster nature of today’s release.  Setting aside the headline 7.6% and 175,000 numbers, he says, “I encourage you to pay attention to three other numbers which, to my mind, are much more important than 7.6 and 175,000.  They are 2.4, 4.4., and 0.4.”

“We still have 2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago. Relative to previous downturns, this performance is quite bad.

We still have 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer. This is a very large number. Outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s. Over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed. The previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%.

When the Great Recession began in December 2007, 62.7% of the working-age population was employed; today it is a staggeringly lower 58.6%. The share of the working-age population with jobs has increased by only 0.4 percentage points since its low point in the official recovery. Though it doesn’t get much attention, many labor economists prefer the employment-to-population ratio as the best measure of the broad health of the labor market. That this measure has improved so little indicates that the economy is creating just a few more jobs than are needed to keep up with population growth. But this is not enough. We need to create enough jobs to handle the growth of the working-age population and to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. To put it simply, we are not succeeding.”

So more of the same.  The Obama Administration and its dwindling number of defenders will attempt to characterize today’s numbers in a positive light, but that’s simply not accurate.  A broad economic policy change toward the free-market principles that we know work is necessary, the sooner the better.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Benghazi…  The IRS…  The DOJ snooping on the AP…

Boy, those Second Amendment advocates and skeptics of sweeping federal background check legislation are a real bunch of paranoid nuts, eh?

Let’s see.  The federal government gathering sensitive medical and personal data, maintaining it in some vast and surely non-secure database and able to modify the definition of who is and is not allowed to purchase a firearm pursuant to the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms.  What could ~possibly~ go wrong here?  This is one of the heretofore underemphasized aspects of the onslaught of breaking Obama Administration scandals, but a valuable one going forward in the Second Amendment debate.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the president’s budget proposal and how its calls for even higher taxes, higher spending, bigger government and more empty promises will do nothing to get us out of the Obama recession.

Read all about it at The American Spectator. It comes from Obama and starts at the FAA, and then on from there.

Well, this will come as unwelcome news in the Obama White House.  Their “Blame Bush” raison detre never held merit intellectually.  Even if it did, however, someone willing to blame Bush for Obama’s failures at this point would by logic have to blame Clinton for Bush’s failures.  Now, a new poll from The Washington Post and ABC News suggests that it’s no longer a workable political strategy regardless of logic.  Specifically, almost as many people now approve of Bush’s performance as disapprove, and he now equals Obama:

The new poll found 47 percent saying they approve and 50 percent saying they disapprove. Among registered voters, his approval rating today is equal to President Obama’s, at 47 percent, according to the latest Post-ABC surveys.”

So “Blame Bush” is running on fumes, and exploiting the Newtown victims’ parents as political props failed him.  To which ploy will Obama stoop next?

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez. 

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.