Welcome back, Carter.

Glen Reynolds writes:

STEALTH TAX HIKE: Why the New $450,000 Income Threshold Is a Political Fiction.“Mr. Obama purports this is merely ‘a return to the Clinton-era tax rates.’ But capital-gains rates will be about three to five percentage points higher than in the 1990s, the Medicare tax is higher, and his stealth tax will raise personal rates higher than advertised. Forget the golden Clinton memories. Mr. Obama is pushing the U.S. back to the Carter era.”

As I keep saying, a Carter rerun is the best-case scenario, and it’s now looking implausibly optimistic.

The issue is not dogs, binders, Big Bird or bayonets.

This is the issue:

Halloween is Coming!

Want a scare?

OK...here you go:

Concerned about the widening gap between rich and poor?

Then you really ought to be concerned about Obama's inflationary strategy.

Inflation has been picking up since the recession ended in 2009. The problem with the CPI increasing year over year with no rise in household incomes is that the standard of living for most Americans erodes every year that incomes do not keep up. Household incomes are back to levels last seen in the mid-1990s while the cost of necessities has gone up. This brings us to our article today that examines the nuts and bolts of what constitutes the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI attempts to measure the changes in price for consumer goods and services. Overall it did a very poor job of measuring the housing bubble because of the owner’s equivalent of rent metric. Today, it is understating inflation because of the excess spending on “wants” that occurred in the 2000s has now shifted to spending on “needs” but is being dragged down by the amount of family spending on needed goods. We will dig deep into this data but suffice it to say that the Fed is creating inflation in items most Americans actually need to live their daily lives and the burden on the poor is actually increasing.

Do not believe the talk that inflation is nonexistent

Even a one percent rate of inflation is troubling if incomes are stagnant or falling. Since the recession has ended inflation has occurred even as measured by the CPI:

And:

Over this same timeframe, household incomes have remained stagnant and household net worth has fallen close to 40 percent. Yet there is something more troubling in the actual data. The inflation rate is actually being understated because Americans have shifted consumption from non-essential goods to actually seeing inflation in things that they actually need. In the 2000s spending on wasteful items was rampant and much of it came because of the easy access to debt. Yet with 100 million credit cards being yanked out of the system, this spending has fallen dramatically. So where exactly is the inflation occurring?

And:

Food and housing are the biggest line items. However because mortgage spending has fallen thanks to the Federal Reserve and Americans spending less on home furnishing and vehicle purchases the CPI is not reflecting the big changes occurring. A 15+ percent increase in rent from 2007 to 2011 with no increase in income is sizeable. Yet the items where family spending has fallen is largely elective. So when we look at family spending and then look at the CPI, you can understand why the increase in inflation seems modest yet most Americans are feeling the pinch to their wallets much tighter.

This is why the Federal Reserve through QE 3 and massive amounts of mortgage backed security purchases is essentially robbing from Peter to pay Paul. The end result is that you have shifted more of a burden to renters to essentially take off a bit of steam from home owners. Now you have major private equity investors buying properties and hiking rental prices since they are able to borrow money cheaply. In all reality you have shifted a larger burden on those least likely to have the means to afford it. This is why we have seen the middle class shrink in the last few decades and the ranks of the poor grow even larger. With over 46 million Americans on food stamps we really are becoming a split nation. And again, refer to the chart above on family spending. With the rise in the cost of food you are squeezing the lowest rung even further. Yet this is the setup of the current system. The Fed is picking winners at the expense of others. This is what occurs when you have manipulated money creation and coddling the banking sector versus actual real growth in the economy. When you see those headlines about inflation figures keep all this data in mind.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...and if things continue as they are there won't be any bad news about the Depression we are and will be in.

These are damning economic facts:

The administration’s sole support for its contention that there has been meaningful job market improvement on its watch rests on one carefully chosen statistic: “The economy has now added private sector jobs for 30 straight months, for a total of 4.6 million jobs during that period.”
That claim is incorrect. It is true that the Establishment Survey at the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that private-sector employers had 4.63 million more workers in August than they did in February 2010 after seasonal adjustments. However, the BLS’s separate Household Survey tells us that the ranks of the unincorporated self-employed, all of whom are certainly private-sector participants, shrank during that time by 440,000 to a seasonally adjusted 9.46 million, knocking down the administration’s cherry-picked number by 9.5%. (The BLS doesn’t seasonally adjust its figures for the far smaller cadre of those who are self-employed but incorporated; their respective raw values in February 2010 and August 2012 were virtually identical.)

Qualitatively, the job market decay is all around us. The following stats only scratch the surface of the ugliness (all figures are seasonally adjusted):

• Full-time employment only increased by 43,000 in August. It’s down (yes, down) by 902,000 since March, and by over 1.4 million since Obama took office.
• 562,000 fewer married men and 700,000 fewer married women were employed in August than were when the recession officially ended in June 2009.
• 22% of the 3.47 million private-sector jobs created since the recession’s end have been at temporary help services.
• What about what the new jobs created actually pay? The National Employment Law Project recently reported that “Lower-wage occupations were 21 percent of recession (job) losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth. Mid-wage occupations were 60 percent of recession losses, but only 22 percent of recovery growth.” The leftists at the NELP wouldn’t state the obvious, so I will: Their research proves that the Obama administration’s economic policies are gutting the middle class.

President Obama’s failed stimulus program, brutally expensive and common law-shredding auto company bailouts, bankrupt “green energy” initiatives, and other exercises in “fundamentally transforming” the economy have extended a deep recession which predominantly traces its origins to decades of dangerous Democrat-driven housing policies, pervasive fraud against Wall Street and investors at Democrat crony-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and 2008 campaign promises by Obama and fellow Democrats which the nation’s entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors correctly saw as threats. The president’s and fellow party members’ bully-pulpit hostility directed at the productive (“You didn’t build that“), the regulatory regime’s unprecedented overreach, and the prospect of ObamaCare’s disruptive implementation have created an atmosphere of chilling uncertainty virtually guaranteeing that the nation’s economic malaise will continue as long as they control the levers of power.

That cannot be allowed to happen.

If the labor participation rate had remained constant over the last month, the unemployment rate would have ticked up to 8.4%.

The Obama strategy appears to be to get people so depressed that they stop looking for work.

According to AEI:

And here is Citigroup’s take:

The unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% from 8.3%, but in this case with declines in both the labor force (-368,000) and the household-survey measure of employment (-119,000). With labor force participation falling back to a new cycle low of 63.5%, the drop in the unemployment rate should not be reported as good news.

Now the depressing details of the jobs report:

– Nonfarm payrolls increased by only 96,000 in August, the Labor Department said, versus expectations of 125,000 jobs or more. The manufacturing sector, much touted by the president in his convention speech, lost 15,000 jobs.

– Since the start of the year, job growth has averaged 139,000 per month vs. an average monthly gain of 153,000 in 2011.

– As the chart at the top shows, the unemployment rate remains far above the rate predicted by Team Obama if Congress passed the stimulus. (This is the Romer-Bernstein chart.)

– While the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% in July, it was due to a big drop in the labor force participation rate (the share of Americans with a job or looking for one). If fewer Americans hadn’t given up looking for work, the unemployment rate would have risen.

– Reuters notes that the participation rate is now at its lowest level since September 1981.

– If the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.2%.

– If the participation rate had just stayed the same as last month, the unemployment rate would be 8.4%.

And:

Claims that Obama administration is adding jobs to the economy based on "statistical fudging."

According to Tyler Durden:

Happy by the headline establishment survey print of 133,245 which says that the US "added" 163,000 jobs in July from 133,082 last month? Consider this: the number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868. This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an "adjusted" rise? Simple: the BLS "added" 377K jobs for seasonal purposes. This was the largest seasonal addition in the past decade for a July NFP print in the past decade, possibly ever, as the first chart below shows. But wait, there's more: the Birth Death adjustment, which adds to the NSA Print to get to the final number, was +52k. How does this compare to July 2011? It is about 1000% higher: the last B/D adjustment was a tiny +5K! In other words, of the 163,000 jobs "added", 429,000 was based on purely statistical fudging. Doesn't matter - the flashing red headline is good enough for the algos.

"Statistical fudging" is de rigeur to get apples to apples comparison, but this seems extreme.

Regulatory Capture.

Socialist Historian Gabriel Kolko documented that the regulatory agencies established to protect consumers from business quickly become captured by the business, whereupon they are then turned to protect the businesses from the consumers.

It seems like the Obama administration - ever arrogant, ever historically ignorant - fell into this trap with its morgage modification program:

Instead, Treasury just let banks implement the program using the same practices that caused the crisis in the first place. Where mortgage servicers had issued no-doc mortgages before the crash, Treasury allowed them to issue no-doc mortgage modifications after the crash.

And, surprise! The program was a complete failure. Of the 1.3 million mortgages modified by HAMP through June 2010, only 43 percent were converted to permanent modifications. Treasury did start requiring verified income documentation after that date, but the final numbers are not impressive either. As of June 2012, only 1 million mortgages had been permanently modified, far less than the 4 million Obama had promised.

Worse, as Barofsky's book notes, Treasury's failure to help more families was a feature, not a bug, of the HAMP program. "HAMP would 'foam the runway' by stretching out foreclosures, giving the banks more time to absorb losses while the other parts of the bailouts juiced bank profits," Barofsky writes. "Helping banks, not home owners, did in fact seem to be Treasury's biggest concern."

Barofsky's book was not the first clue out of the Treasury Department that HAMP was designed to help banks, not homeowners. Geithner admitted as much to a gathering of friendly financial bloggers back in August 2010, prompting Media Matters Senior Fellow Duncan Black to write, "[I]f you do liberalism badly then people get it in their heads that maybe liberalism is pretty sucky. The economy sucks and HAMP was a complete failure, whether deliberately or not, and that's what people know."

The headline of Black's post: "When Liberalism Doesn't Work It Discredits Liberalism.

Hope and Change - not only will there be less gridlocked traffic, but people will have to get out of their houses more...

...since they won't be able to afford to pay for lights in their homes.

Obama’s war on coal hits your electric bill.

Last week the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a shocking drop in power sector coal consumption in the first quarter of 2012. Coal-fired power plants are now generating just 36 percent of U.S. electricity, versus 44.6 percent just one year ago.

It’s the result of an unprecedented regulatory assault on coal that will leave us all much poorer.

Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.

Why the massive price increases? Andy Ott from PJM stated the obvious: “Capacity prices were higher than last year's because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.” Northern Ohio is suffering from more forced coal-plant retirements than the rest of the region, hence the even higher price.

These are not computer models or projections or estimates. These are the actual prices that electric distributors have agreed to pay for new capacity. The costs will be passed on to consumers at the retail level.

The great thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is no bad news...

...not even about how the President can't get one unemployed American a job.

No sooner had the absolutely horrifying unemployment report for March been released than we received an update on the status of engineer Darin Wedel, who became one of America’s most famous job seekers two months ago.

At that time, Wedel’s wife Jennifer found herself in one of President Obama’s gimmicky “online chat” events, and asked the President why the government is passing out so many visas for foreign workers when large numbers of Americans with excellent job skills are unemployed. Darin Wedel was a semiconductor engineer at Texas Instruments, but lost his job three years ago.

The President expressed surprise that such a fine resume couldn’t bring offers of employment in the high-tech wonderland of Obamanomics, where “industry leaders” just can’t find enough people to grab all the lucrative jobs tumbling from their overflowing cornucopias.

And:

Well, none of those wishes were granted. According to the March unemployment report, the American workforce continues to collapse under Obama’s policies, shedding enough workers to nudge the “official” U-3 unemployment rate down by .10 percent… even though job creation was literally half what was posted in February, and far below the level needed to keep pace with population growth. Even the more supportive pro-Obama media organizations had to wince, while they scrambled to keep the real news out of the headlines.

And as for Darin Wedel, well, he still doesn’t have a job. The brief flurry of interest artificially created when the White House stepped in and decreed that job offers should rain down upon one house in Texas has subsided, as reported by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

More than two months after President Barack Obama asked for Darin Wedel's résumé, the phone is quiet, e-mails are no longer flooding in and the long-sought-after job interviews -- which had begun to be scheduled -- have petered out.

"Not even recruiting companies are calling anymore," said Jennifer Wedel, the Fort Worth mother of two who chatted online this year with Obama about her out-of-work husband.

And:

The “optics” of this story are absolutely horrible for the White House, but it was actually horrible from the moment it began. The idea that Americans should have to beg the royal court for indulgences – which the court then demonstrates it cannot provide! – is nauseating, and it’s not a new aspect of the Obama presidency. In the very first weeks of his Administration, he was at a town hall meeting in Florida when a homeless woman asked him for a house, and lo! A house was soon offered, after the President hugged her.

The President loves to govern by anecdote, peppering his speeches with references to all the letters of supplication he receives from the New Poor (formerly known as “the middle class”) All of these people’s lives will supposedly be shattered if the Obama agenda is opposed. The childish absurdity of basing the decisions of a titanic mega-government on a handful of personal appeals never occurs to him, or to the media, which congratulates him on his political skill in “personalizing” huge social “crises.” That’s how the last shreds of cold, hard reason are steamed out of our discussion of the most bankrupt government in history.

It’s Obamanomics in a nutshell: if you’re lucky enough to find your way into his carefully controlled town hall meetings, or you’ve got the right political connections, you can do okay… until things get so bad that His Majesty can no longer wave his hand and cause bounty to be showered upon selected peasants. Fortunately, Obama can count on the media to downplay this story, instead of treating it as a powerful symbolic moment in a failed presidency, as they would if he were a Republican.

At least Evita could change your life for a day or maybe two!

In the era of "Hope and Change."

24 Statistics To Show To Anyone Who Believes That America Has A Bright Economic Future.

And:

22 Signs America Is On The Verge Of A Devastating Global Recession

Don't worry.

Be happy.

The country is in the best of hands.

And, of course, "it's all Bush's fault."

There.

Feel better?

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House...

...is that there is never any bad news.

In 2006, $3.00 per gallon gas was a crisis according Pelosi, Obama and Clinton.

Now, when gas is pushing $5.00 per gallon, everything is copacetic!

Hope and change, baby.

Hope and change.

Why wouldn't Obama want higher gas prices...

...higher gas prices means more money for him from the taxes on gas.

Glenn Reynolds notes:

MITCH DANIELS: Obama Administration Wanted Higher Gas Prices.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) blamed President Obama for the spike in oil prices, saying the administration had pushed for consumers to pay higher prices at the pump.

“Let’s give the president credit for one domestic policy that works. He wanted higher gas prices and he got them,” said Daniels on Fox News Sunday. “Secretary Chu said $8 are about what they pay in Europe. It would be great. Secretary Salazar said $10 and it still wouldn’t be for drilling in the places where we know there’s an awful lot of domestic production. And so, they have gotten the doubling of gas prices and perhaps worse, it’s a conscious policy of this administration. Maybe the one thing they set out to do and actually accomplished.” he said.

Ouch. Well, it’s easier to call for higher gas prices when they’re low. Once they’re high, and people are feeling the pain, it seems kind of idiotic. At least in an election year.

The real unemployment rate is...

...14.5%

Sure, the jobless rate is falling. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, we are going through the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Depression. The rate has been higher than 8% since February 2009, the month after Obama took office.

And, says the CBO, it is expected to stay above 8% through 2014.

Even worse for an administration straining to make the case that it deserves to be around for another four years is the real unemployment rate. It's not 8.3%, but closer to 15%, a figure that reflects those who "would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part time but would prefer full-time work," says the CBO.

Another White House problem comes from this in the CBO report: "The share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months — referred to as the long-term unemployed — topped 40% in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since."

The CBO data aren't isolated. Gallup reports that its unemployment rate based on weekly surveys stands at 9%, while underemployment is at a hefty 19%.

Also threatening Obama's re-election offensive is the nation's shrinking labor force (see chart). Many laid-off workers, frustrated by grim prospects, have stopped looking for jobs and are no longer in the labor pool.

Don't let them snow you.

You're smarter than that.

Jeepers, the Government institutes price controls and holds pharmaceutical manufacturers up to class warfare...

...and suddenly we have shortages of vital cancer treatment drugs.

Next up, let's have trials of "wreckers" and "hoarders" like Stalin did it in 1929.

That always works.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

HEALTH CARE: Supply of a Cancer Drug May Run Out Within Weeks.“A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.”

This seems kinda third-worldish to me. And these shortages keep happening.

UPDATE: Reader Don Jansen writes: “So price controls are imposed on injectable drugs and lo and behold a shortage arises. Who would have thunk it?”Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Physician-reader Eric Novack writes: “Glenn- these shortages are very real… one center I work at has trouble getting propofol for anesthesia and another cannot get zofran (ondansetron), one of the most effective anti-nausea drugs on the market…” Very upsetting.

MORE: More here:“Again, the reader is left with the impression that drug manufacturers are hugely incompetent, failing to produce the needed amount of drugs even in the face of rising prices. Thank goodness President Obama is on the case, issuing executive orders! But the existence of any kind of shortage in a market-driven economy should make one’s nose twinkle. One drug shortage might be some kind of freakish anomaly, but 180 crucial drug shortages? The usual suspect in these kind of situations is the dead hand of government, and according to bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, writing in last August’s New York Times, that’s exactly the case. . . . In other words, government has distorted the market and removed incentives for the production of life-saving drugs. And the New York Times’ readership, unless they somehow recall Emanuel’s opinion piece, are left none the wiser.”

Hope and Change as far as the eye can see.

White House Panic: Gruesome 2012 Economic Forecast Could Doom Obama:

The number crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office have been rather busy this week. As interesting as their examination of public vs. private sector compensation may be, today's dreadful report will cast a much darker and longer shadow over the 2012 presidential election landscape. Team Obama will likely put on a brave face and serve up rosier in-house economic figures in the media, but you'd better believe the CBO's latest economic projections are causing a lot of heartburn at the White House. Hideous:

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday predicted the budget deficit will rise to $1.08 trillion in 2012. CBO also projected the jobless rate would rise to 8.9 percent by the end of 2012, and to 9.2 percent in 2013. These are much dimmer forecasts than in CBO's last report in August, when the office projected a $973 billion deficit. The report reflects weaker corporate tax revenue and the extension for two months of the payroll tax holiday.

A rising deficit and unemployment rate would hamper President Obama's reelection effort, which in recent weeks has seemed to be on stronger footing. If the CBO estimate is correct, it would mean that the United States recorded a deficit of more than $1 trillion for every year of Obama’s first term. The deficit was $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011. The largest deficit recorded before that was $458 billion in 2008.

CBO had forecast an 8.5 percent unemployment rate for the end of 2012 in its August report. It now expects the jobless rate to be higher, and to still be at 7 percent in 2015. The higher unemployment numbers are due to lower economic growth than previously estimated. Gross domestic product for 2011 is now estimated to have grown 1.6 percent in 2011, down from the 2.3 percent forecast in August. CBO a year ago had predicted 3.1 percent growth for 2011. The outlook for 2012 has also worsened. GDP is forecast to grow only 2 percent this year, compared to a previous estimate of 2.7 percent.

That's one ugly stat piled atop the next. Trillion-plus-dollar deficits in every single year of Obama first (and possibly only) term. Unemployment creeping back north toward nine percent (remember, the White House projected that joblessness would have sunk below six percent by the end of this year, due to their $825 Billion "stimulus"). And worst of all, very sluggish growth -- the engine that has the capacity to make all of these numbers if it weren't gummed up with destructive regulatory and spending policies. The US economy grew at 1.7 percent in 2011, which is roughly half of the final 2010 number. In light of those entrenched struggles, CBO is pegging our growth target at a measly 2.0 percent for 2012. Keep in mind that any happier numbers you coming from the Obama people are likely premised on much more robust growth forecasts. That level of economic expansion has yet to materialize, and the president is only proposing more of the same: Higher spending and raising taxes on job creators. Great. Incidentally, these 2012 debt projections are actually lowball estimates:

The deficit will be much higher if Congress takes several actions that many expect. If the Bush tax rates are extended, for example, the deficit would rise. It will also rise if Congress patches the Alternative Minimum Tax, which lawmakers have routinely done to prevent higher taxes from being imposed on middle class taxpayers. It would also rise if Congress continues to pass the “doc fix” that prevents a cut to Medicare payments to doctors, something that Congress has done on a near annual basis.

Finally, if Congress does not follow through on cuts mandated by the failure of the debt supercommittee, the deficit will grow. Lawmakers are already talking about cancelling scheduled cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. In the “alternative fiscal scenario”where these things happen, the national debt rises to $23 trillion by 2022. Total ten-year deficits amount to $11 trillion compared to $3 trillion in the current law scenario.

Most, if not all, of the Bush tax cuts will be extended -- since all taxpayers benefitted from them (a fact that Democrats often forget to mention). The AMT patch and the increasingly costly "doc fix" will both go through, as they always do. Ironically, the Alternative Minimum Tax correction is an annual must-do for Congress in order to prevent a 1960s-era "Buffett Rule" -- which targeted a tiny handful of rich Americans -- from slamming tens of millions of households this year. In other words, Democrats in Congress are acting to reverse the disastrous, sloppy fallout from the last ill-conceived "fair share" tax while considering a new one.

Hope and Change.

Expect $5 per gallon gas by Memorial Day.

Of course, rising gas prices is part of the Obama plan for conservation.

Why does the President want to discriminate against charity?

You have to wonder if this isn't part of a general attitude that the government should be the center of all activity:

A little-noticed provision in President Obama’s new $447 billion jobs bill seeks to limit tax deduction for charitable giving at 28 cents for every dollar donated, causing big waves along the front lines of those serving in rescue missions and crisis shelters across the country.

The provision in the bill will not only limit the generosity of private donors who give to rescue missions, but it will also hamper the ability of rescue missions to raise private dollars that pay for badly needed services for the hungry, homeless, abused, and addicted, these mission groups fear.

“This is a time to increase incentives for all Americans to give; it’s not a time to experiment with disincentives,” John Ashmen, president of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (AGRM), told The Christian Post Friday.

“There are some who argue, based on history, that those with a heart for the poor will still give, despite not having the significant tax break. But that’s not a proven fact.”

Many mission directors agree with Ashmen, saying most Americans are barely making ends meet since the economy took a dive. The well-known phrase, “one paycheck away from homeless,” is not so far-fetched for many families living in the U.S.

What if the cliches and platitudes are wrong?

From Jim Geraghty's "Morning Jolt."

I didn't think this was the worst speech Obama gave. It's not even that all of the ideas in it are all that terrible. It's just that they're reheated leftovers, reruns, small-ball initiatives that are likely to be as effective as every other stimulus program that repaves sidewalks or funds research on exotic ants. We're a $14 trillion economy that makes everything from timber to jumbo jets to firearms to smart-phone apps to Hollywood movies to every food product under the sun. The notion that some grab bag of tax credits and federal grants is going to kick-start a hiring binge to put 14 million Americans back to work or that the economy is one tax credit for hiring veterans away from recovery is laughable.

The recession we've endured for the past three years is far from normal, and yet we keep getting the normal Keynesian responses. I realize I'm about to offer blasphemies and shockers on par with Rick Perry's Ponzi-scheme comparison, but what if Obama was wrong last night, and a big issue is that some of the people of this country do not, in fact, work hard to meet their responsibilities? What if decades of a lousy education system have left us with a workforce that has too many members with no really useful skills for a globalized economy? What if way too many college students majored in liberal arts and are entering the workforce looking for jobs that will never exist? What if the massive housing bubble got Americans to condition themselves to work in an economy that's never coming back? (How many realtors are unemployed right now?) What if we have good workers who can't move to take new jobs because they're underwater on their mortgages and can't sell their house?

Holding Paper - Remember when Obama thought that running up $4 trillion in debt was "unpatriotic"?



That was so 2008.