It seems like everyday I wake up and it’s the same old story with politics and politicians: If you vote for my bill, I’ll support yours; the Republicans hate this and the Democrats hate that; you scratch my earmark and I’ll scratch yours…

It’s frustrating.

If it’s not a disgraceful politician being exposed for illicit behavior, it’s somebody in some party being caught shoveling money to their friends or illegal back-door dealings, or charges being leveled. Then the other party thinks they have the moral high ground, even though it was their guy or gal that was caught the week before.

A massive cottage industry which produces nothing, builds nothing, and spends taxpayer money like it’s going out of style has grown up around Washington DC. It’s an establishment political class, grown fat and powerful on our backs which grows and grows…

… And regardless of the prevailing economic climate – it just keeps getting bigger.

What is the average American supposed to do?

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The most successful Obama campaign meme–repeated ad infinitum by the mainstream media–is the idea that the country is saddled with a “do-nothing Congress.”

The implication–brilliantly conveyed, though completely untrue–is that we have a “do-nothing Republican Congress,” though in fact the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has been extremely active.

It would be more accurate to say that we have a “do-nothing Senate“–by design, since it’s clear that the Demcorats’ leaders in the Senate believe that legislative gridlock works to their political advantage. It’s been nearly 1000 days since the Demcorat-controlled Senate even passed a budget–a violation of the Congressional Budget Act.

With tomorrow’s official unemployment number looming, and with today’s ADP employment report for December 2011 suggesting some improvement could be on the way, it’s worth asking what happened to Obama’s “Jobs Bill”–without which, he warned, “there will be fewer jobs.” Voters wanted Washington “to do something big and something bold,” Obama said–even if it was a stimulus packed with boondoggles and bailouts, much like the “Porkulus” that launched the Tea Party.

Lo and behold–there is a little bit of life in the job market; manufacturing is improving moderately; and consumer confidence, while still shaky, is up significantly from where it was when Obama was demanding his jobs bill.

And no jobs bill was enacted. (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson & Logan Churchwell:

After more than a month of protest demands for better employment opportunities and benefits, Accuracy in Media saw fit to test their desires with…employment applications. Our “headhunters” were treated to every excuse as to why these jobs aren’t good enough for them. The idea that recent college graduates or typical jobs seekers should work their way up from an entry-level position is lost on the #Occupy crowd.

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Congressman Paul Ryan, Chair of the House Budget Committee, has become the GOP’s go-to guy for everything economical, and there are two reasons why: first, he is courageous enough to jump into the water and get the pool party started. As with his Path to Prosperity, his budget, and his plan for Medicare, Mr. Ryan is clear that Americans need to talk about big changes in the amount of money we spend and ways we can grow our economy, increase productivity, and, of course, employment- none of which have been even remotely addressed by the current administration. His willingness to get out on the road and talk to Americans about his ideas, have conversations with them, and take on the darts and arrows demonstrates a strength of character that the president and his party might only dream of possessing.

Second, Congressman Ryan’s brilliant ability to explain aspects of the budget and economic data to Americans who may not be economists and budget analysts is on display in his new video, in which he describes the three necessary features of a new tax code: fairness, competitiveness, and simplicity.

Mr. Ryan told Tina Korbe of Hot Air, “If you tax something more, you get less of it. If you tax something less, you get more of it. If you tax work, savings, investment more, you’re going to get less of those things. If you lower tax rates across the board, we always see stronger economic growth result across the board.”

How simple is that? No jobs saved and created here. No double-counting Medicare in Obamacare. No tax increases to pay for investment, i.e., spending, in infrastructure.

In the same interview, the chairman made an important distinction between being “pro-market,” versus “pro-business.” He explained that Republicans need to be advocates for the former, a term which invokes the concepts of entrepreneurism, American creativity, and competitiveness in world markets.

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This WaPo article — “Obama tries to change subject back to green jobs” — is an instant classic of a new, Obama-era genre: cheerleading for expensive schemes which exist solely due to political whimsy and consideration, and are therefore little more than make-work.

The item begins, “After spending weeks talking about topics he probably would have preferred to avoid — debt limits, deficits, a plunging stock market — President Obama will hit the road Thursday to talk about jobs. Specifically, about how his administration is trying to create more of them.”

The green ones. Which schemes failed where the president used to tell us to look but no longer does because the failures were exposed. As his spokesman admits “the White House doesn’t create jobs”.

And his critics say he’s out of ideas! But, hmm. Yes. I suppose that ‘green jobs’ thing went over well last time he led with it. Still, if ending up as a punch-line is victory, what does defeat look like?

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Unfortunately, sometimes the most important news doesn’t always make the headlines it should. While Osama bin Laden may have contemplated attacking America’s train system before his demise, the Obama administration, particularly the E.P.A., have been orchestrating a train wreck of a different sort – one that would actually have devastating consequences for the well being of Americans over a far longer period of time.

That’s in no way intended to make light of terrorism; but to highlight the critical importance of a battle playing out in Washington, as well as in many states. One can talk GDP, Consumer Price Indexes and the National Debt all they want, but without an adequate, affordable source of energy for the future, our American economy will never again be able to perform the way it could and should. Such a disastrous shortcoming is precisely what many of Obama’s policies will bring about.

As the Heritage Foundation points out, it was one year ago today that Obama imposed a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Sen. David Vitter (D-La.) has introduced a few different bills to push back against the job and economy destroying policies of the Obama administration.

One year ago today President Obama imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It banned shallow-water and deepwater operations, setting the stage for a year of delays in permitting. Now a U.S. senator wants to put a moratorium on federal agencies. Sen. David Vitter (D-La.), an outspoken critic of the administration’s anti-drilling policies, introduced the Agency Overreach Moratorium Act, which would require congressional approval for federal regulations that restrict energy exploration on federal lands and offshore.

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Consider the following commentary on the economic situation:

Foolhardy procedures which are divorced from economic realities, or whose economic implications are not understood by their promoters, do not perforce become sanctified and wise merely by designating them as “action”; tilting at windmills does not draw water.

[W]hen a recovery program, which, while it may appear effective, depends for its efficacy upon much the same kind of “cheap money” inflation which . . . was the main cause of the recession from 2007 to 2009, then the present recovery must ultimately prove as illusory as the boom from 2001 to 2007, and it is the duty of economists to pierce the veil of illusion.

Certainly the recovery movement to the date of this writing [December 2010] is a peculiar one: it is shot through with anomalies. With [more than 15 million estimated to be] unemployed . . . with governmental relief rolls still at high levels, . . . there very obviously is something wrong, somewhere.

The fact would seem to be that the authorities who are undertaking the “management” of the current recovery, and congratulating themselves that prosperity is returning because they “planned it so,” are utterly oblivious of the fact that recovery is being engineered largely by the same means which produced the last boom – and recession. With this difference: whereas the banking system during the recent boom was producing an investment credit inflation by extending credit to business men and corporations, Government is now assuming the role of inducing new deposit currency in the banking system and thereby producing a consumption credit inflation. The Federal Government, instead of private corporations, is issuing the bonds which the banks are now purchasing, thereby inflating the deposit currency structure all over again. These “created” funds are in this instance being used principally to finance consumption expenditures through relief disbursements, make-work projects, and the like. . . . [T]he current inflation tends to conceal and to preserve the fundamental disequilibria which so prolonged the recession after 2007 and which we are now carrying over therefrom without having once squarely faced the problem of correcting them.

Notice, however, that the foregoing commentary, except for the terms in bold font, was written not yesterday, but, in its final form, in 1937. The authors, C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson, placed this commentary, along with a wealth of related evidence and analysis, in their unjustly neglected book Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1937). The quoted passages, which appear on pp. 212-14, originally read as follows:

Foolhardy procedures which are divorced from economic realities, or whose economic implications are not understood by their promoters, do not perforce become sanctified and wise merely by designating them as “action”; tilting at windmills does not draw water.

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Each summer, Wall Street strategist Byron Wien convenes a meeting of high rollers to discuss the outlook for investment. This year’s meeting brought together fifty individuals, including more than ten billionaires.

Their expectations, as reported by CNBC, are gloomy:

“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,” said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.”

Add this report to the many similar ones to which my colleagues and I have called attention over the past two years.

Of course, for mainstream macroeconomists, such evidence means nothing. In fact, they hold it in complete contempt because (1) their formal mathematical models do not have a variable called “regime uncertainty,” and (2) even if they could be persuaded to take this factor into account, the canned data on which they rely—the product of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, for the most part—do not supply them with an “official” data set for their analysis. What you can’t measure, according to their “scientific” credo, does not exist. Their de facto motto (of which I have more than once been on the receiving end) is: you’ve got no formal model; you’ve got nothing.

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The only thing surprising in this report from The Hill is that two states actually have had positive job growth since early 2009:

House Ways and Means ranking member Dave Camp (R-Mich.) on Friday released data complied by his office that shows 48 out of 50 states have lost jobs since the February 2009 enactment of the economic stimulus bill.

“While Democrats promised their 2009 stimulus would create 3.7 million jobs, the reality is far different,” stated a release from Camp’s office. “To date, 2.6 million jobs, including 2.5 million private sector jobs, have been lost.”

According to the report, only Alaska and North Dakota have experienced positive job growth since early 2009. The District of Columbia also saw an increase in hiring during that period. (more…)

The current state of the economy has placed a large burden on private business, especially on small businesses and the self-employed. Subscribing to a Keynesian tenet of financing debt and increasing government spending to boost output, lawmakers are repeatedly giving themselves cover for splurging.  After the first bailouts came the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, an urgent remedy that Congress and the White House insisted was all about “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.”

And as spending has increased, so has the size of the public employment sector. Meanwhile, the private sector will soon be close to earning a coveted placement on the endangered species list.

As the union leaders’ plundering of the private sector has continued, this doesn’t mean that they have abandoned unionizing private sector workers altogether.  In fact, while the number of private sector jobs overall is down, the number of unionized private sector jobs is trending upward, right alongside the public sector growth.

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