Travel only with thy equals or thy betters;
if there are none, travel alone.
The Dhammapada
Blog Readership in August
Readership dropped slightly in August, possibly due to a 2-day blog Hurricane Irene-related outage. This sustains a long-term decline since last October (with a one-month interim bounce). Foreign readership continues to be negligible with leading pageviews from Germany topping the Netherlands..
Okay--I'm Officially Annoyed by Obamanomics Apologists
I am sick and tired of mediocre politicians like Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) and political hacks like David Axelrod, not to mention the man himself, Barack Obama, constantly making excuses for the freefall of job losses, in the amount of hundreds of thousands of jobs lost per month, following Barack Obama's taking office. Somehow Bush, who had to deal with an opposition-controlled legislature since January 2007--when, incidentally, we were still in the expansion side of the cycle, is ludicrously accused for being responsible for those losses.
By no means should anything I write here be viewed as an exoneration of Bush's economic and fiscal policies. I have been a critic of spending and debt accumulation under Bush's tenure, he expanded Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, when all major entitlement programs (social security, Medicare, and Medicaid) were already chronically underfunded and unsustainable and without properly funding the new benefit. No true fiscal conservative could ever approve of the creation of a behemoth Department of Homeland Security, an in-sourced, rapidly growing Transportation Security Administration with little regard for individual liberty, lack of progress on government privatization and business process reengineering of government operations, and a huge growth in regulations. We did not see pro-growth business tax reform, we did not deal with a tax revenue model that discriminated in favor of consumption versus savings and investment and was excessively progressive to the point of moral hazard with almost half of workers without a vested interest in frugal government spending, we did not observe the President working with the government revenue he did have to pay for the expenses of Afghanistan and Iraq, e.g., with compensatory budget cuts elsewhere. Whereas Bush did react to the GSE accounting scandals (from 1998 to 2004), he did not really work to minimize the risk to the American taxpayer as the duopoly dominated the mortgage secondary market, especially as they bought riskier mortgage notes at what turned out to be the housing bubble peak.
But let's deal with the misleading talking points suggesting that Obama is not responsible for heavy job losses early in his tenure. There was an election in early November 2008. No doubt Barack Obama wants no responsibility for what happened over the next 2.5 months, but make no mistake about it: businesses making hiring or layoff decisions on November 5, 2008 and afterwards were NOT making decisions based on Bush's policies. The most familiar saying to any investor is "past performance is not indicative of future returns". From a business standpoint, Bush's policies were no longer relevant; he was a lame duck. And keep in mind Bush was dealing with a Democratic legislature; a lame duck Congress, with a stronger hand in the upcoming 111th Congress, could delay any new legislation (including passing the new fiscal year budget) until Obama took office; Bush's only power was passive: he could veto bills passed in the lame duck session.
If federal policies did make a difference, what were businesses facing? A President whom had been running on raising taxes on high-income Americans (including job creators), spending increases (which could potentially compete with business capital requirements), anti-trade and pro-union legislation, aggressive environmental, financial and other regulatory expansion, business mandates, and business interventionist policies (e.g., anti-trust). A nearly-filibuster proof Senate Democrat majority and a massive majority in the House. What business saw, in addition to existing uncertainty resulting from the recession and economic tsunami, was the incremental uncertainty caused by an anticipated progressive Obama Administration assault on business interests embracing an anti-growth agenda.
I argue, if anything, Obama, not Bush, should really be charged with the 2 million of interim (Nov 5 - Jan 19) layoffs. Why? Because businesses were making job decisions based on their expected FUTURE business prospects, not on any purported lame-duck Bush policies. Obama had been consistently leading in the polls by late September, and it was clear that the Democrats in Congress would, at minimum, still remain in control.
Lilly Ledbetter legislation and other alleged worker protections (which, among other things, required more human resource record keeping and related higher business costs) were just the tip of the iceberg. What about the impact of the upcoming Congress on significant labor costs, like health care benefits? Would the Obama Administration pursue an activist pro-union agenda, say abusing its authority by trying to intimidate companies like Boeing from exercising their rights to open plants in other states, manipulating auto bankruptcy proceedings to blatantly favor lower-standing union interests against bondholders, or lowering the barrier to union election certification by a simple plurality versus majority of affected workers? Would the progressives limit businesses' flexibility to manage labor costs by increasing the minimum wage or implementing a so-called "living wage", imposing sticky barriers to layoffs (e.g., separation payments, retraining funds, appeals procedures, etc.) or expensive new benefit mandates (e.g., paternity leaves)?
Edmund Wright, in the above cited essay, points out the interim job loss AFTER Obama's election victory--roughly 600,000 jobs a month--closely paralleled the 700,000 losses a month Obama himself acknowledges at the beginning of his tenure that he "inherited" from Bush. He points out that the job losses during the period of the economic tsunami itself, say August through October 2008, were less than the rate after Obama's victory.
Should Obama get credit because businesses, after dropping hundreds of thousands of jobs monthly for a string of several months, finally slowed down? Are you kidding? According to economists, the recession was declared at an end in June 2009, just 5 months into the Obama Presidency. It was not due to Obama's stimulus money, only a small fraction of which had been disbursed in the interim. Businesses had certain manpower requirements to maintain current operations. The recession was already longer than the average recession when Obama took office; we had been through real estate cycles in the past. My verdict? Businesses slowed down their layoffs despite Obama, not because of his policies.
Obama and the Democrats completely misplayed the hand they had been dealt. The best thing they could have done would have been to reassure businesses that they had no new mandates or tax burden to worry about in the short run and provide closure on soon expiring Bush tax cuts. They would have focused on ratifying pending free trade pacts and streamlined business tax rates to be globally competitive. Instead of an adversarial relationship with oil and gas companies, they would have have done everything to encourage greater economic security, a stronger dollar and related employment by promoting suppressed development and utilization of American-based natural resources. Instead of trying to finesse their way into a recovery by picking winners (e.g., green energy companies) and losers in the economy, they should have focused on more broad-based initiatives across the economy which would provide the more diverse opportunities for employment consistent with existing job skills of the unemployed.
Famous Last Words From the Hypocrite in Chief
This video from the 2008 campaign has gotten a lot of replay on FNC and conservative websites and blogs. In fact, I made a brief reference to it in an earlier post discussing my approach to the 2012 election, that the GOP should back off Bill Ayers-style negative spots and instead use Obama's own words against him, his empty, broken promises.
The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents - number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back - $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.
As of Monday, the national debt stood at $14.62T, $9.99T of which is held by the public (including foreign investors), On January 20, 2009, the national debt stood at $10.63T, $6.31T held by the public. (The residual amount of debt involves various government reserves, including the social security trust.) Publicly-held debt, in less than 3 years of the Obama Administration, has grown 58%; the national debt has increased 37.5%. Oh, and that $4T Obama talked about Bush accumulated near the end of Bush's second term? Obama "all by his lonesome" managed to do it in just over 2.5 years.
What's that you were saying, Mr. Barack "Mr. Civility" Obama, about someone being "unpatriotic" and "irresponsible" by adding $4T to the national debt, particularly funding from the "Bank of China"? Words have a way of being returned to sender; let ABBA explain...
Conor Friedersdorf,
"Americans Should Be Able to Sell Stuff Without a Permit"
THUMBS UP!
This has been a pet peeve that I've focused on in several segments on this blog, particularly what kids are been subjected to selling something as innocuous as lemonade in front of their family home. There's an ordinance that requires you to purchase a license or a permit (and how many boorish Judge Judy's of the world do we have to hear repeat "ignorance of the law is no excuse"?) It may require you to jump through hoops and have arbitrary restrictions; can you imagine having, say, having to put up a fee that may exceed what you're hoping to clear from relevant transactions and to go through a criminal background check, just to sell roses on the curb to husbands whom forgot to buy roses earlier on Valentine's Day? And maybe you can only sell flowers twice a year (say, Valentine's Day and Mothers Day), each requiring their own license. Of course, if you've paid your debt to society, you just might not get the privilege of selling flowers at all...
Of course, all the busybody local legislators are just looking out for the common good... Yeah, right: you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
Friedersdorf does a nice job summarizing those good people never realizing or perhaps knowing all too well how their meddlesome elected officials are imposing arbitrary restrictions on their own economic liberty:
Targeted entrepreneurs say the same thing again and again: I just had a good idea and started a business. It never occurred to me that I needed permission. And, of course, other would be entrepreneurs don't ever get started because they're too intimidated to assess and grapple with the bureaucratic hurdles. Or else the regulations are written in a way that excludes from commerce folks who are operating at a very small scale.And just what sort of nefarious people are getting arrested and fined for inconveniently exercising their unalienable right of economic liberty?
Kids selling lemonade on the street are shut down. A Missouri man has been fined $90,000 for selling rabbits (he made about $200). In Illinois, an artisan ice cream maker is being shut down for lack of a dairy permit. Manuel Winn was arrested, handcuffed, and booked for selling magazines door-to-door without a permit. A Maryland mother of three was arrested for selling $2 phone cards without a license. Lots of municipalities are going after food trucks. A group of Louisiana monks had to go to court to win the right to sell simple wooden caskets to consumers.Does anybody else feel like petitioning Cher to do this to related local elected officials and police officers whom lack common sense and have the audacity to enforce these ludicrous ordinances? GET A LIFE, PEOPLE!
NOTE: I found the original article cited on MJ Perry's excellent Carpe Diem blog.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
David Gates/Bread, "Goodbye Girl". Final song of my Gates/Bread series. This is one of those cases (e.g., St. Elmos Fire or Karate Kid II : "Glory of Love") where I like the song more than the movie.
