Friday, August 3, 2012

Unemployment Sideways

Imagine if John McCain had won the 2008 election and unemployment was currently at 8.3 percent.  Yes.  The howls, the scandal, the monstrosity, the cruelty of it all would be bellowed out of every MSM outlet.  And there would be no chance, not one, that McCain could get reelected.

But here we are, and either employment increased last month by 163,000, according to the Establishment Survey, or declined by 195,000, according to the Household Survey.  Either way, the economy is not growing fast enough to get Americans back to work.  Right now, we are about half way back to the number of jobs in the US at the start of 2008 before the crash.

Let us not forget that the Obama administration deliberately made a policy choice back in 2009.  They would push the hugely expensive ObamaCare and the hugely bureaucratic Dodd-Frank financial reform.  And they would push their expensive green energy, and they would obstruct fossil fuel development.

If you had wanted to implement a slow recovery from the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, that is the policy mix you would have chosen.  We can assume that the Obama people didn't think that their interventions would be that harmful to the economy.  After all, everyone wants to be reelected.  They probably didn't really think about it.  They just went ahead with their agenda and assumed that their trillion dollar stimulus program would be enough to get the economy going.

But it hasn't.  And the evidence is that the Obamis really don't understand a thing about the economy.  Their new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is busily reintroducing the failed policies from the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks to loan money to unqualified borrowers.  Don't they get it?  When you leverage up the economy with bad loans you set up a big financial crash when things start to go south!  Just like in 2008!

And then the president says "you didn't build that."  Well, yeah.  Business people don't build roads and bridges.  But they do everything else.  You could look it up.

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