We should have known it was all illusory quackery when they wheeled out Joe Biden to talk it up.

Today we learn that the “recovering” economy shed 131,000 jobs last month, the second straight month of falling employment. More and more temporary census jobs ended, and the private sector added a paltry 71,000 jobs, far fewer than most expected. In more bad news, the government revised payrolls for May and June to show 97,000 FEWER jobs than originally reported.

All of the arrows are down.

For the $1 trillion-plus that the Democrats have spent trying to “create jobs” and “stimulate the economy,” this is where we are: job losses, not job creation; a formal 9.5% unemployment rate with the real unemployment rate at 18%; stagnant growth; and an exploding deficit and national debt.

Heckuva job, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.

Obama’s top economic adviser, Christina Romer, announced Thursday that she’s checking out. She’s out the door on September 3, to return to her academic life in Berkeley, CA. Several years ago, she co-authored an economic paper with her husband arguing that tax increases kill economic growth and job creation. Duh. But she likely stepped down now because not only did she infamously predict that unemployment would not sail above 8% with the “stimulus,” but she sees job-killing tax hikes coming soon.

Romer is the second top economic adviser to leave in the past few weeks. The first one to go was Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, who reportedly was upset over the administration’s unwillingness to deal with the growing deficit.

Again I say: duh. We’ll see many more people leave this administration. They are the token “responsible thinkers” Obama amassed in the early days of his term to show how “even-keeled” and “thoughtful” he was. These tokens are now realizing that he’s on a Far-Left, progressive joyride. He’s out to remake America in the wealth-redistribution model, and he doesn’t give a flying whit about the deficit, spending, higher taxes, or the unemployment rate. He’s on an ideological bender, and people like Romer and Orszag now see it.

They also now know that he’s so determined to transform America, he cannot be dissuaded.

But he can be stopped. It’s called Election Day.

The following chart makes that case. Since the beginning of the recession (roughly January 2008), some 7.9 million jobs were lost in the private sector while 590,000 jobs were gained in the public one.  And since the passage of the stimulus bill (February 2009), over 2.6 million private jobs were lost, but the government workforce grew by 400,000.

Plus, as you know, according to the latest numbers from Bureau of Economic Analysis, the average federal civilian worker now earns double what private-sector workers earn when factoring in wages and benefits ($119,982 vs. $59,909). And the gap is increasing.  According to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, in 2000, the average federal worker earned 66 percent more in total compensation than the average private-sector worker. By 2008, that ratio had risen to 100 percent. That’s serious money.

Peter Orszag, the soon to be leaving OMB director, has  explained the differences in pay by saying that public employees have more diplomas (probably implying that they are smarter) than private employees:

But the truth is that a comparison of federal and private-sector pay, even by occupation, is misleading because the employees hired by the federal government often have higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector — even within the same occupations.  When you factor in the education and experience of the federal workforce, there is no statistically significant difference in average pay levels.

Edwards, however, shows this is nonsense. He writes:

Some people argue that the federal government has a unique high-end workforce, which deserves to be paid handsomely. But let’s consider some ordinary and mundane offices in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2010, the USDA’s Office of Communications employed 77 people and paid $9 million in wages and benefits. That works out to $117,000 each for these public relations workers, which is close to the overall federal compensation average. Or consider that the 62 employees of the USDA’s Office of Chief Economist earned an average $177,000 each in wages and benefits in 2010. It isn’t just rocket scientists that are earning high federal compensation, it is also workers in many run-of-the-mill bureaucratic jobs.

More importantly, the federal workforce has always had a heavy contingent of skilled professionals such as lawyers. So that is not new, and thus it cannot explain the dramatically faster growth in federal compensation compared to private compensation [...].

Besides, if these diplomas are what gave is the health care reform, the financial bill making its way to Congress and the stimulus, then I would argue that we would be better off if  high-school dropouts to run Congress.

That being said, if bureaucrats have job security, their workforce grows during recession, and they make increasingly more money, being a proud public sector employee should become your little ones’ dream. In this context, wanting to be a fireman or a princess is so yesterday.

Proof comes in the form of an email, which went out to ACORN supporters on April 16 and which came two weeks after ACORN’s faked dissolution on April Fool’s Day as a national organization.

ACORN_email_April162010

Writes ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis:

ACORN is not dead!

ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice. Over the past 40 years, ACORN members have been through a lot in the fight to empower working families and families of color — and it has been the commitment of people like you, regular folks doing extraordinary things, that has made it possible.

In the email the perennially truth-averse Lewis, whose lies throughout the undercover video saga are well documented, continues to play the victim card arguing that ACORN, dozens of whose employees have been convicted of election-related crimes, was set up by shadowy corporate forces.

Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, already admitted ACORN isn’t really going away.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up to carry on ACORN’s business, his leaked email suggested. At least a dozen of the group’s state chapters have already broken away under new names.

“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” Henderson-James.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already restored full funding to ACORN, which used to employ President Obama.

The fiscal floodgates are opening for ACORN, the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.

The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is appealing Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.

It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.

As Director of OMB, Peter Orszag is the arbiter of all financial information shared with Congress.  A series of little-known, OMB “circulars”, such as A-11, have established the rules, and repercussions if violated, by which Executive branch agencies communicate with Congress, especially regarding budgets, funding and agency priorities.

OMB, the President’s gatekeeper for budget matters, executes a complicated juggling act, balancing Obama Administration priorities and budgetary spin, against agency needs.   Frequently, to secure a critical vote, an elected member may be rewarded with a pork project for the folks back home, and, often, it’s the OMB director that has to figure out how to avoid the appearance of a bald-faced bribe, while manipulating CBO scoring on infrastructure projects.  Orszag, as the former head of CBO, understands exactly how this game is played.  Thus, most of the project and budget information that Congress reviews have been shaped by OMB’s preferences.

Peter Orszag controls much of the content and quantity of the data flow to Congress, to the President and to American citizens.  Orszag has oversight over most of the federal government’s critical data reporting structures.  Apart from the ineffective and error-prone Stimulus reporting sites (data.gov, recovery.gov),, OMB oversees federal contract opportunities and federal grants.

Perhaps even less well known, OMB reviews and edits most of the testimony submitted to Congress, and edits most of the responses that Cabinet members and federal agencies submit in response to Congressional queries.   Hence, Mr. Orszag is able to not only manipulate the numbers, but is simultaneously able to insure that there is discipline throughout the Administration regarding talking points.

The great concern is that Mr. Orszag, by all accounts a bright fellow, seems to demonstrate an ability to misrepresent facts and figures to further the confusion.  Put bluntly, Mr. Orszag does not seem to be a truthful man.  Moreover, he seems unusually good at deception.   From the deceptions and messiness of his personal life, where salacious stories, recently publicized about his personal life, of two girlfriends and an illegitimate child, generated a media frenzy, we learn that Peter Orszag  seems especially adept at  deceiving those closest to him, people that know him best.   In his official capacity, Mr. Orszag seems to have been especially deceptive, able and willing to misrepresent facts.

This past year, to advance the myth of “jobs created/jobs saved”, Orszag seems to have used his power to fudge the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers (dropping millions of unemployed Americans off the reports, thereby enhancing the monthly unemployment statistics) and he has enhanced the “jobs created” numbers, by issuing a memo, directing Agency heads to claim that all existing federal government jobs, where work is performed administering Stimulus funds, should count as “jobs saved”.

Nowhere will this willingness to deceive be more keenly felt than in the follow-up to the recent Healthcare Reform legislation signed into law by President Obama.  Congress has trusted a CBO scoring that requires over $500Billion in cuts to various government programs and entitlements.  OMB is the office that will ultimately have the responsibility for identifying, tracking and reporting on these cuts, since expenditures for Health and Human Services (HHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) report to OMB.  What OMB decides to show Congress is what Congress is going to see.

The Administration will, understandably, be eager to claim that cuts were made, but if the past year’s accounting by OMB is any indication, the cuts are unlikely to occur, though the data may be manipulated to imply that the cuts occurred.  This kind of obfuscation is bad for Congress, which will be trying to measure whether the Healthcare Reform program is working as advertised, and bad for American taxpayers, who are getting stuck with the bill.

Americans might expect that others , wise to these sorts of shenanigans, might blow the whistle, but that’s not likely to happen since for the OMB Deputy Director chairs the (President’s) Committee for Integrity  and Efficiency (PCIE) which oversees  the federal government’s Inspectors General.  Indeed, when one IG at OPM recently tried to go around OMB, an OMB staffer bluntly asserted that “we will make your life miserable”.

Peter Orszag is responsible for implementing   President Obama’s  campaign promise of a line-by-line review of the federal budget to eliminate any non-performing federal programs , exposing federal programs that are non-performing and wasting taxpayer money.

Mr. Orszag’s most publicized, cost-cutting effort was the SAVE competition, designed to encourage federal employees to identify waste and propose solutions to trim the ever-growing $1,300,000,000,000 deficit.  The winning idea recommended that patients at Veteran Hospitals take home unused eye drops and other over-the-counter medication when discharged.   Not a bad idea, but it is becoming clear that the SAVE program, like so many of Mr. Orszag’s other efforts, was primarily a PR gimmick that helped deflect criticism about the Administration’s out-of-control spending.

When all the man hours, and effort, that was poured into implementing the SAVE program at OMB are considered, Americans will likely find that the costs of running the SAVE program far exceeds any gains or savings that the program may achieve.

Mr. Orszag has been especially active in government contracting, (the head of federal procurement – the Office of Federal Procurement Policy [OFPP] is part of OMB) and Orszag has boasted of improvements.  But, the results flowing from his decisions are making existing procurement problems worse, crushing small business opportunities and exacerbating the very problem he hopes to solve.   Indeed, the health of the once-vibrant, small business, government contracting community has  probably never been so dire, and is likely to get much worse as a result of Mr. Orszag’s ham-handed efforts to improve the federal acquisition system.

What makes Peter Orszag so dangerous is his access to more information, at a granular level, than any federal employee.  Information is power, and the ability to sculpt information with impunity makes Orszag dangerous.  Information withheld can cause as many problems as information that has been doctored, and whether intentional, or not, inaccurate information, disseminated by OMB, presented as fact to Congress and the American people, is what has often occurred.

So, at a time when our nation needs to confront our budgetary problems with honesty and determination, Americans should be asking themselves: are Orszag’s skills at deception what we really want to see in our OMB director?

The fiscal floodgates are opening for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.

The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.

It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.

Could the OMB be moving at lightning speed to restore funding for ACORN, which is under indictment in Nevada for election fraud, because ACORN is in dire financial straits? Perhaps it’s a reward for ACORN’s loyal support in the ObamaCare battle.

Oh, and to top it off, his staff began by deceiving about it and end (for now) by telling a whopper in the struggle to avoid scrutiny over the mess.

That is, however, precisely what’s going on in the Palmetto State, at least according to this report about the latest twist in the long, strange saga of Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Without reciting the story ably summarized by a Gamecock writer, the whopper told in the scramble is this, offered by “Graham’s top South Carolina strategist, Richard Quinn” – as well as to others I have spoken to who have recently called the Senator’s office seeking to inquire about the oddity:

“‘Lindsey doesn’t support Cap & Trade and he will not support Cap & Trade,’ Quinn told us flatly.”

Except when he does.

You see, this is all about an op-ed in the New York Times which Sen. Graham penned in recent weeks (noted in this space at the time with bemusement if, I humbly submit, amusingly) with Sen. John Kerry touting bipartisanship on climate legislation. The problem with deathless opinion pieces is one tends to offer a lot of detail, or at least specific statements. One of them in this case is that he was, inescapably, pushing cap-and-trade:

“First, we agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security. That is why we are advocating aggressive reductions in our emissions of the carbon gases that cause climate change. We will minimize the impact on major emitters through a market-based system that will provide both flexibility and time for big polluters to come into compliance without hindering global competitiveness or driving more jobs overseas.”

Hmm. I’m just askin’, but which time is the senator’s office telling the truth or, alternately, is it the senator or his aide who is spreading the real story? If it isn’t cap-and-trade that he supports – and, after a dozen years on this issue, that’s the only thing even remotely meeting the above (oversold) description to which he affixed his name in our nation’s “Newspaper of Record” – then, ah, what is it precisely that he supports?

So far today his office is saying that what the senator means is that he supports a carbon cap that doesn’t cost businesses anything (even Obama’s OMB director Peter Orszag has admitted the axiomatic, that cap-and-trade would be passed on to consumers, but I’m not sure Team Graham is trying to be clever like that here). Still, OK. But as a student of the issue — you didn’t jump on board without learning about it first, right? — you do realize that doing that wouldn’t do anything? Businesses or households don’t drastically curtail energy use unless it’s really painful not to.

Here’s the issue, distilled. Sen. Graham sought to trade off his support for cap-and-trade for nominal support for offshore oil and gas exploration and support for nuclear power. The former is less than pressing given that Congress already bowed to public pressure and allowed the absurd moratorium to expire; the latter is a classic case of “waiter, the food was horrible, and there wasn’t enough of it” (the support is illusory in the absence of resolution of the waste disposal issue, and if done meaningfully is nonetheless merited, not something you plead for by offering to sell out support for cap-and-trade energy rationing).

In the process of trying to sell our energy future for a bag of magic beans, Sen. Graham discovered that the public’s feelings run much deeper on this matter than he assumed when relying upon longtime global warming crusader and cap-and-trader John McCain as his confidante and political guide star.  Now, caught in flagrante Kyoto, he’s doubling down on the damning by (being charitable here) spinning wildly about his troubling position while not actually stepping forward to abandon what’s troubling about it. Because, plainly, he hasn’t abandoned it. He wants to finesse it. He wants to finesse the voters. This is at once the biggest tax increase and biggest regulatory intervention in the country’s history and the guy who sees a leader in the mirror can’t even bring himself to be straight with you about it.

A bipartisan coalition of senators concerned about spending stopped Senators Reid from bringing “Doc Fix” to a vote with 13 Democrats siding with the entire Republican Caucus.  Democrat Senators Evan Bayh of Indiana, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Bill Nelson of Florida, Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Warner and Jim Webb of Virgina, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Independent Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut all opposed the motion to start debate on the bill.

The strategy to pass the “Doc Fix” outside of Obamacare in an attempt to buy off doctors groups’ support for Obamacare was documented in the media.  The Hill reported earlier this week that “the White House and Democratic leaders are offering doctors a deal:  They’ll freeze cuts in Medicare payments to doctors in exchange for doctors’ support of healthcare reform.”  Clearly the majority of senators would not go along with this strategy because the $247 billion price tag for the bill was too high to buy Obamacare. 

The secret negotiations in the Capitol on Obamacare held by Senators Reid, Max Baucus of Montana, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag and Health Care Czar Nancy-Ann DeParle ordered the Senate to take up “Doc Fix” and Senate Leaders failed to win the first proxy fight on Obamacare.  This vote clearly shows that Democrats have a long way to go before their caucus is ready to vote for expensive health care bills that add billions in new debt to an already massive $1.4 trillion debt from this year.  Obamacare is one step closer to hitting the showers, but this first loss will send the Obamacare coaching staff into a frenzy to figure out a new strategy to win passage of President Obama’s health care reform bill.