Democrats: End of the Big Push

You remember World War I.  The Brits developed a term they called the Big Push.  The Battle of the Somme was a Big Push.  The great offensive in Flanders in 1917, featuring the Battle of Paschendaele, was a Big Push.

The point about Big Pushes is that, after a while, they peter out.  It doesn't matter how many millions of soldiers, or millions of shells, or thousands of tanks you have.  In the end, the whole thing peters out: people are exhausted.

Now in my view we have just seen a ten year Big Push from the Democrats.  It was one last effort to unite the party and defeat the wascally Wepublicans and put them in a permanent minority.

Maybe it started in the rage of 2000 when the "stupid" George W. Bush beat the Democrats by a hair.  Maybe it started after the humiliation of 2004 when Karl Rove pulled out an astonishing increase in the Republican vote to win the election over a slightly less astonishing increase in the Democratic vote.

It was certainly going at full blast in the 2006 midterms when Democrats achieved astonishing message discipline to damn the Republicans as extreme and corrupt, and the Democratic rank-and-file advanced over the political battlefield under cover of a 1,000 gun artillery barrage from the mainstream media.

The roar of battle continued with the 1,000 barrel gun-line firing non-stop through the 2008 election and 60 million Democratic hearts beating as one for America's first black president. With the solid seven  point victory of 2008 it seemed natural to keep on rolling ahead, demolishing all resistance and push stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank right down out-of-touch Republican throats.

In 2010 there was a pushback, as Americans elected a Republican House in the biggest pickup in seats since 1938.  But the Democratic army didn't flinch, and kept fighting shoulder to shoulder right through a four point reelection victory for President Obama in 2012.

But now the Big Push is over.  You can feel it.  It is not just the sequester, it is not that the Dem troops are exhausted.  It's just that the whole Democratic coalition just wants some leave and some rest and relaxation.  They are just tired of the constant coordination of messaging.  They just want to enjoy life again.

The Obama campaign team, of course, is breaking up, now that reelection is over.  And Obama himself, no longer disciplined by the goal of reelection, will unwind his intensity.

The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media did a bang-up job of selling the American people on the notion that Bush was a fool, the Iraq War was a disaster, and the Crash of 2008 was Bush's fault.  After all, Bush was not a great communicator, the Iraq War was a mess as all wars are, and the Crash happened on Bush's watch.

And then they did a bang-up job selling the American people on the idea that Mitt Romney was an unfeeling rich guy that didn't care about people like them.  You gotta give them credit for putting that one over, given that Mitt Romney is in fact a man who has given his life to serving others, as a man must do in the Mormon church.

But now all that is history.  The Big Push is over, Obama is reelected, the economy is limping along, and Obamacare is hanging like a black cloud over the nation.

Remember this: Social Security and Medicare worked because everyone got a piece of the action.  It's called Kristol's Law.  If you want to help the poor you must deal in the middle class.

But Obamacare just helps the supposed 30 million without health insurance.  People that already have health insurance are going to get a haircut.  And the 30 million without health insurance don't go without health care.  They just don't have insurance, probably because they don't have assets that need to be protected from health care costs.  If you don't have assets, then you don't need health insurance.  So there's a real chance that almost everyone will be really pissed of at Obamacare by 2016.

Nobody knows whether the political current has changed, or whether it has merely paused.  All we know is that the Big Democratic Push of 2002 to 2012 is over.  We are entering a new era.

The Economy: What Should Obama Have Done?

Obviously, all is not well with the economy.  The recovery from the Great Recession has been agonizingly slow.  But why?

In the American Spectator Peter Ferrara puts it all down to Keynesianism.  But I think that is too simplistic.

There are three analyses out there that claim to account for the failure of Obamanomics:

1. Not enough stimulus.
2. Not enough tax and spending cuts.
3. Don't be so impatient.

Reason One is the Keynesian response, that government spending (and cheap money) kick-starts the economy, and the Obama stimulus wasn't enough.  Conservatives like Ferrara say that Keynesianism didn't work in the Great Depression and it won't work today.  But in fact it did work, for a while, with 12 percent real GDP growth in the election year of 1936.  The only thing was that after the stimulus was removed, in 1937, the economy crashed into the Recession within a Depression.

The real point of Keynesianism is to borrow money to keep things going, in the hope that the economy will recover and lift all boats.  It's a short-term thing, for a year or two.  Obviously, it hasn't worked out over the longer term, as in four long years of subnormal growth.

Reason Two is the supply-side response, that government spending and taxes add up to nothing more than a burden on the economy.  So the sooner you remove the burden, the better.  Also, the tax system naturally tends towards increasing complexity and carve-outs for special interests, so the sooner you chop that stuff away the better.

The only caveat is that you probably don't want to cut spending until the economy has clearly turned the corner.  We do not mean here that unemployment is back down to 6.5 percent, as the Federal Reserve currently proposes.  We mean that you don't start cutting spending until the risk of meltdown has clearly ended.  In the current context, that would be about January 1, 2010.

Reason Three is the argument of Reinhart and Rogoff in This Time is Different.  They argue that after a major banking crisis it takes about six years for the economy to shake off the doldrums.  That's because it takes that long for all the underwater debtors to de-leverage, either by paying down their debts or by going broke or a combination of the two.  You can't have a vibrant economy when a ton of people have questionable credit: counter parties can't exactly be sure how "sound" they are, and the debtors themselves are constrained by their lack of equity.

What about Obama?  Let's give him the benefit of the doubt.  The Great Recession was worse that the 1980-82 recession because of the banking and real-estate meltdown.  So it's misleading to task him with the stunning growth of the Reagan years.  But almost everything Obama has done has retarded the recovery.  Here would be my list of stimulus policies:

1. Immediate cut in individual and corporate income tax rates followed in about two years by cuts in deductions and credits.  Temporary cuts in the business side of payroll taxes.
2. Immediate cuts in crony-capitalist spending followed by real entitlement reform in a couple of years.
3. A "bad bank" to take up all the underwater mortgages, and thus get the banking system healthy.
4. Programs to float the underwater mortgages as quickly as possible.  That would be by both encouraging people to abandon their underwater houses instead of hanging on like grim death, and also to sweeten the pot by writing mortgage principal down.
5. A general pruning of government spending.

Notice what we are doing.  We are changing the rules now, and cleaning up the garbage later.  We are recognizing that, after a big financial crisis, we are poorer and can't afford the luxury of all those big government programs.  Something has to give.  And we are doing positive things to repair the credit system.  A credit system is healthy when a) nearly all debtors are making their payments, and b) nearly all debtors are above water.

Note that Obama is pretty well 0 for 5 on this program, although he has done some muddy things to write down mortgages (good) while hindering the banks from foreclosing on non-performing loans (bad).  It's not surprising that the result is a F grade for economic policy.

If we had a mainstream media worthy of the name we would know all this, and the whole nation would be demanding a practical and pragmatic economic policy.  But we don't, so the economy suffers.  

In the long term, it probably doesn't matter.  The American people will eventually turn against Obamism, not because they understand the president's mistakes but because they will know that it didn't work.  

But we could have saved a lot of suffering with better policies to get us out of the worst economic crisis in just about anyone's lifetime.  So far.

When the Ruling Class Gets It Wrong

What do you do when you are ruled by an upper crust that is getting it wrong, and doesn't know what to do?

Our ruling class has messed up the financial system, has messed up the health care system, has messed up the education system.  But they don't know what to do about it, except keep on keeping on.

That's the reality of life today.  Our ruling class, from liberal to semi-conservative, believes in a top-down administered society.  The ruling class sets up programs, from pensions to banking to health care, using the ideas from the best minds available, and then goes on to the next gig, on the assumption that they have solved the problem in question.

But the basic problem of human existence is that you can never just set up things and then go on to the next gig.  Human life is a constant adaption to changing conditions, whether it is life as a hunter gatherer, an agricultural worker, or an industrial mass-production worker.  Someone has a bright idea, and everyone adapts.  But the bright idea is not the answer to everything; it is not even the answer to one thing.  Pretty soon people realize that the new idea, while good on the whole, has created some unexpected problems.  So we need to change and adapt.

But the problem with government is that the Stage 2, the unanticipated consequences, are almost impossible for government to deal with.  The system is already in place.  The ruling class has gone onto the next gig.  What do you mean there is something wrong?

The problem is that politics and government have a very small bandwidth.  Whereas millions of consumers and thousands of producers can make daily adjustments in their behavior, a national government is a committee of 535 people.  And its laws direct the government bureaucracy to produce uniform decisions based on a rulebook of regulations.  Forever.

People in government respond to all problems as a loss of control.  Soaring health-care costs are due to out-of-control insurance companies.  Financial crises are caused by greedy bankers or reckless speculators.  What's needed is a more rigorous system of control, to make sure that the bad actors don't go rogue.  So we get Sarbanes-Oxley when a couple of corporations start cheating when things go south.  We get Dodd-Frank when the government's subsidies of home mortgage lending put the whole economy underwater.  We get Obamacare when people respond to the natural incentives to their first-dollar health insurance by treating health care as a free resource.

But what do you do about it?  Here we are marching to disaster, and nobody is doing anything about it.  The truth is that there is nowhere for all of us to hide from the march of folly.  When the bust-up comes we will all suffer the consequences.  And we will all be called upon to help those utterly devastated by the collapse and the turmoil.

I guess that the only thing to do is to keep your ship ship-shape, with the masts properly stayed, the rigging properly renewed, the sails new, the hull caulked, the engine properly maintained, the food well protected.

And you keep telling the world that it doesn't have to be like this.  We know how to keep an economy on an even keel.  We know how provide for the poor.  We know how to protect the environment.  And we know how to do it all without big government.

So why don't we just do it?  Because we are all too human.  We believe in a world of good and evil, and we are eager to punish the evildoers identified by our leaders, be they bigots, greedy bankers, Marxists or union thugs.

Maybe we should stop searching for villains and just get to work.

Jack Kemp and Minority Outreach

Let's get back to the days of Jack Kemp, says Larry Kudlow, and reach out to minorities.

Nobody, in my lifetime, in either party, has reached out with a message of hope, growth and opportunity to minorities better than Jack Kemp. 

While Jack Kemp reached out to middle-class whites with tax rate cuts, he reached out to minorities with goodies like Enterprise Zones in big cities.  You got big tax breaks if you moved a business into an Enterprise Zone.  With that sort of policy, Kemp could reach out to black liberal pols like Charlie Rangel and race-based interest groups like La Raza.

But that misses the point.  Great: Jack Kemp could get blacks and Hispanics to buy into free stuff, Republican style.  But did it do a blind bit of difference to move blacks and Hispanics off the Democratic plantation?  Not at all.  The fact is that the overwhelming majority of black and Hispanic voters respond to free-stuff and racist identity politics.  Maybe Republicans can peel off a few percent of the vote to make a difference in a close election.  Nothing wrong with that.  It just doesn't change the politics of America.

The fact is that blacks and Hispanics think in terms of patronage politics.  They think in terms of attaching themselves to a powerful patron and dining off the scraps from his table.  They experience themselves as weak and helpless in the brutal business of the city, like every newly-arrived immigrant group in the US for the last 150 years.

Typically, after a generation or two of struggle, the immigrant group rises into the middle class and its members begin to experience themselves as competent and responsible selves.  Then they find that the Democratic Party doesn't do it for them; they say, like Ronald Reagan, that they didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left them.

Thus the Religious Right came over to the dark side when the Dems went anti-religion, and now working-class white men after the Dems decided that working-class whites were the ones to pay the price for centuries of racism.

The strategic problem for conservatives is that liberal politics amounts to a cunning plan (whether deliberate or not) to keep "women and minorities" in a permanent dependency status, sucking on the government teat forever.  So it seems that they will never rise to a competency, and come to believe that the government is a wasteful cesspool of corruption.

So what should conservatives do?  Well, one thing would be to wreck the finances of the welfare state. That's the subtext when David Stockman, Reagan's Budget Director, rails at Republican policies in his new book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, excerpted in the New York Times. He even takes off after Ronaldus Magnus:

The destruction of fiscal rectitude under Ronald Reagan — one reason I resigned as his budget chief in 1985 — was the greatest of his many dramatic acts. It created a template for the Republicans’ utter abandonment of the balanced-budget policies of Calvin Coolidge and allowed George W. Bush to dive into the deep end, bankrupting the nation through two misbegotten and unfinanced wars, a giant expansion of Medicare and a tax-cutting spree for the wealthy that turned K Street lobbyists into the de facto office of national tax policy.

Gosh, you'd almost think the evil Republicans wanted to crash the government's finances!

But maybe it's working.  After all, President Obama, like a deer in the headlights, has kept the entitlement state going full speed ahead towards the icebergs of Greece and Egypt, without a thought of shaving a bit off the government fisc to make room for growth.  Without a course correction, Captain Obama will crash the welfare state, and women and minorities will be hardest hit.

Make no mistake.  A rising middle class of African Americans and Hispanics needs economic growth.  Newcomers to the economy need newcomer opportunities.  They need spaces left by the established classes, leads in the ice, into which they can rush and grow and thrive.  Think of the Jews creating the movie industry.

The problem is that newly arrived immigrants have never believed in the capitalist road to economic competence.  They always believe in the charismatic leader, the FDR, the Hugo Chavez, the Barack Obama.  And very often they keep on believing in face of the evidence.

But there is hope.  Usually, by the middle of a second term the "low-information" voters are ready for a change.  Things just don't seem to be working out for them, and they get restless.  With Obama safely reelected we are now reading that black leaders are starting to get restless about black unemployment in the Obama economy.

And in the end, the folks that believe in a miraculous political solution to their problems give up on politics and go back to work.

Jack Kemp was a great guy, and a great supporting actor in the Reagan era.  But the fact is that he couldn't turn his Kempism into a presidential campaign.  That may tell us something about the politics of minority outreach.

The Real Deniers

When the global warming enthusiasts started talking about "climate deniers" that was the moment that we all knew that global warming wasn't a science.  It was politics and religion.  Because science doesn't care about good and evil, about right and wrong.  It just cares about the instrumental results: does it work?

Still, science isn't everything.  It may be, as science seems to propose, that the universe has no meaning, but clearly, humans as social animals depend on the notion that life has meaning: they act as if it does.  There may not be "free will" but the cultural meme of the "responsible self" seems to have clear cultural benefit in human culture.

Sometimes, in other words, denial has its virtue.

But the denial of marginal economics and the price system by the Left is not one of them.

It was the classical economists that elucidated the remarkable social benefits of the price system, how it motivates people to serve others and how it corrects mistakes -- the wrong product at the wrong price -- through the cleansing effect of losses.

It was the marginal revolution of 1870 that placed the capstone in the powerful arch of modern economics.  If you need a reason to embrace the importance of the marginal revolution, here's a good one.  About four economists discovered this solution to the problem of use value vs. exchange value at about the same time.  There was Carl Menger in Austria, then Stanley Jevons in Britland, Leon Walras in Switzerland, and John Bates Clark in the US.

Significantly, this revolution cut the ground out from underneath Marxian economics -- with Das Kapital published ten years earlier in 1860 -- which had spun a brilliant labor theory of value and exploitation out of the contradictions between use value and exchange value.

The point is that there is no such thing as absolute value, in use or exchange.  Funny how liberals can opt for absolute transcendental values when needed.  And we thought they were all relativists.

In the economy there are just prices from buying and selling, and people make decisions about buying and selling based not on labor unit or usefulness or the exchange value but on a decision to buy or not to buy at a certain time and a certain place at a certain price.

• Does someone decide to work an extra hour?  It depends on the return on that marginal hour of labor, taxes included, and the perceived value of the forgone leisure, on that day.
• Does someone decide to buy a product?  It depends on the price, and other things that might be bought instead.

If you accept the basic science of the price system and the marginal revolution then you cannot be a Marxist and you cannot be a Progressive and you cannot be a supporter of the liberal administrative welfare state.  Because all these fashionable doctrines require a denial of the truth of the price system and the truth of the marginal revolution.

That's why liberals in the 1980s refused to admit the ideas of supply-side economics and called it "trickle-down" economics.

Arthur Laffer's famous curve in particular had to be marginalized, because it hit liberals right where they lived.  The Laffer Curve says that, if you are a big-government liberal and want to maximize the return on taxes, you ought to realize that higher tax rates do not mean higher tax collections. But, of course, the whole point of progressive politics is to demand that the "rich" pay more.  So the Laffer Curve cannot be true.

The problem with the deniers of the price system is not merely academic.  We have today a nice little piece about Venezuela and the cratering of the economy under Hugo Chavez.

The country that Chavez left us is a country that is financially ruined. True, we still have a lot of oil under our feet and good management can bring us back to a semi functional state in as little as half a decade. But the bonanza of the last decade will have been spent with very little to show for it.  It has been swallowed by corruption, inefficiency and gifts because what Chavez has done is to distribute cash around, never establishing anything productive and sustainable over time. Nothing.

The point is that the price system does a much better job of bringing the poor out of poverty than egalitarian politics -- let alone the particularly thuggish version practiced by Chavez.  Because the only way you bring the poor out of poverty is with the price system constantly jogging businessmen and consumers to improve their game.  Under chavismo nobody improves their game.

Then there are the disappointing returns from the financial transaction taxes recently imposed in Europe, reported by Daniel J. Mitchell.  These taxes, taking about 0.1 percent on the value of each financial transaction, seem to be collecting about 50 percent of the expected revenue.  Faced with the tax, people are doing fewer financial transactions.  Marginalism in action.  Who knew?

Lastly there is the peerless Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).  She had a lefty up before the Senate Banking Committee to discuss the virtues of the minimum wage laws.  As one critic wrote: "Leave it to an academic to be totally ignorant of the workings of the economy."

There are a lot of liberals running around calling people that disagree with them "deniers" and "bigots."  But for some reason there are a lot of liberals running around that can spout absolutely ignorant things about the workings of the economy without being sent to the dunce's corner.

We know why that is.  Nothing is left of liberal politics if you accept the basic notions of the price system and marginal economics.  And that nobody can deny.

Liberals on the Wrong Side of Main Stream of Life

I agree with Roger L. Simon.  The problem is not gay marriage, it's marriage, and marriage is declining sharply among low-income Americans.

That's the whole point of Charles Murray's Losing Ground.  We, the top 20 percent, the educated class, the ruling class: we are doing fine.  We are educated, married, credentialed, prosperous.  But the middle-income folks are not doing so well, and low-income folks are not doing well at all.  Low-income women are not getting married, not much,  and low-income men are not working, not as much as their upper-income betters.

We know why low-income women aren't getting married.  It's the benefits.  If you are a single woman there are all kinds of government benefits out there for you, Julia, so why not get yours?  Why not marry the state instead of a low-income man who is disinclined to "get out and get me some money / like some other men do," as the song goes.

But if you don't get married and have children more or less in that order you are cutting yourself off from the main stream of life as a social human.

And if you, Julian, don't get a job, and don't marry the mother of your children and support them into adulthood you are cutting yourself off from the main stream of life as a social human.

Same goes for gays and gay marriage.  Look, if you decide to live with a same sex partner, our modern society says OK.  And it makes sense that it should make tolerant accommodation for people that make that choice.  But gay marriage, or "marriage equality" is not going to wish away the basic fact that gays  cut themselves off from the mainstream of life as a social human.

And that is true whatever the settled science about homosexuality eventually tells us about the "gay gene" or the notion that almost everyone is instinctively bisexual.

Last Fall, I voted in Washington State for gay marriage.  But I still think it is stupid.  I am taking the Benjamin Franklin attitude: experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.  Gays are politically powerful.  They won't leave us alone until we give them gay marriage.  OK.  So now you got it.

What gays will want after gay marriage, God only knows.  Because once a political cadre gets a movement organized, it seldom walks away from political power once it has got what it wants.

And that is the larger point.  Liberals are drunk on political power.  That means that liberals always need a political issue to divide the country, because Politics is Division.  It always means that they are dangling free stuff in front of the voters, because the basic originary form of politics is the warrior band marching through the world looting and pillaging.

But liberals are tempting people off the main stream of life with their glittering free baubles from gay marriage to welfare.  It's not an easy life being poor, but the payoff from marriage is huge if you are poor.  A Brooking study says that

the poverty rate among families with children could be lowered by 71 percent if the poor completed high school, worked full-time, married, and had no more than two children.

Yeah.  The Census Bureau data shows that the lowest-income household quintile has the least number of people working, and the top quintile has the most people working.

So the more that liberals subsidize single parenthood the more they are encouraging poverty.

You could say the same about divorce.  Speaking as a divorced man, I probably would not have got divorced if it had meant paying support to my ex-wife for the rest of her life, as it used to be before "no-fault" divorce.  And who has benefited most from "no-fault" divorce?

One of the reasons for morality and social norms and social control is to provide guide rails, to shepherd people along the main path of life and make it difficult to go off at a tangent.  In many ways, the whole point of the modern era is to remove the stigma for jumping the tracks of the main line of life.  You can say that it starts with the Romantic movement and the German cult of creativity.  We seem to be determined to deny that there is nothing more creative in this world than creating children and raising them to independence.

But if you are a ruling class you rather like the idea of a dependent and grateful peasantry, tugging at forelocks, or even shouting hosannas at politicians speechifying in front of Greek columns.

Apart from the moral question of living a meaningful and socially useful life on the main stream of life, there is the practical side.  If you build yourself a life with skills, and spouse, and children, and a reputation for kindliness and helpfulness, then you are probably in a good position if the government runs out of money and you are thrown back on your own resources without any lovely government entitlements to smooth your way.

A notable feature of all Democratic voters is that, one way or another, they have voted for plugging into government, just like a plug-in hybrid.  But if you are unmarried, childless, low-skilled, then you are really vulnerable if things go south and the wonderful wind farm can't juice your hybrid because there is no wind.  In the end, it isn't going to do you any good by voting for big government.  In the end, government will take care of itself, not you.

That's a big difference from life in the main stream of life.  Because if you get into trouble on the main stream of life then probably your spouse or your children will take care of you.  It's the social human thing to do.

The Liberal Generation That Knew Not Carter

For a geezer like me it's hard to understand the new generation of liberals and their renewed push for big government.  Haven't they learned the lessons of the liberal failures in the stagflation of the 1970s?  Don't they realize just how the Reagan Revolution turned things around?

Well, actually they haven't; they don't.  Because if you are a chap like Ezra Klein, born 1984, or Markos "Kos" Moulitsas, born 1971, you weren't there.  Klein wasn't even alive!  Nor could they have reached political consciousness in the early 1980s when against all fashionable opinion, the amiable dunce Ronald Reagan turned around the US, economically and culturally, from the existential despair of the late 1970s.

It was in the late 1970s that liberals, having failed to maintain a vibrant economy and culture, reckoned that nobody could do it.  It was a huge embarrassment when Reagan actually did it, and it demoralized a whole generation of liberals.

The truth is that if you cut government spending, cut regulations, and stabilize the credit system, you get big-time economic growth.  That's what Reagan did in the early 1980s.  It took a couple of years for the economy to take off, but when it did...  Well, it shut liberals up for a couple of decades.

But then a new generation came along that knew not Carter and the utter futility of big government politics in the Carter era.  Golly gee-willikins, they began to say, how come we don't have comprehensive national health care yet?

Well, the new generation will find out in due course.  They will discover, as Obamacare grinds the nation to a halt, that the administrative liberal welfare state is a terrible idea, at least as far as comprehensive, centralized, bureaucratic, administrative "affordable" health care is concerned.  Probably the Medicaid problem (where up to 90 percent of Medicaid beneficiaries can't get a doctor) will metastasize across the whole health care system, and liberals will blame the insurance companies.

In Reason today, they are talking about the new crew at The New Republic.  The magazine started out in the 1910s as an unapologetic cheering section for big government.  But in the 1980s it had some second thoughts, as thoughtful liberals realized that something had gone wrong.  The New Republic started to get a bit skeptical of big government.  But now, with Obama and the Kos and Klein generation, it's back to full-throttle big government, and damn the torpedos!

How clueless can you get?

But don't despair.  The fact is that things are already going badly wrong.  The Great Crash of 2008, blamed on greedy bankers, was really a failure of politicians mucking around with the credit system.  The current Federal Reserve money-printing exercise is a full-on admission of political failure, the failure to reduce spending to fit the national revenue.  Atlantic today has a piece on the explosion of the Social Security Disability program, now at $128 billion a year and counting.  Way to go, liberals!  The entitlements are on course to crash in ten years.  Government education is lousy, and government pensions are going to bankrupt the states.

Why Worry!

If President Obama were a Republican the mainstream media would be screaming bloody murder.  But as it is, we will have to wait until the current generation of Democrats hits the wall, and the American people recoil in disgust.

Although Republicans are pretty discouraged right now, things are really not so bad politically.  FDR in the 1930s ran full-speed-ahead for six years before hitting the wall of a 60 seat reversal in the 1938 House midterms.  He won 57% to 40% in 1932 and 61% to 37% in 1936.  Obama, lest we forget, won 53% to 46% in 2008 and 51% to 47% in 2012, losing the House in 2010.  There is a difference!

The facts are that just about everything the Obama adminstration has done economically has hurt the nation's economy, from stimulus to Obamacare to energy regulation to putting off entitlement reform to cranking up the printing press to proposing a higher minimum wage.

But, you say, the American people are clueless on economics.  They don't understand how the Obama Kos Klein generation is hurting them.  That's true.  But the American people do know when it is Time for a Change.  And they will be knowing it good and hard by November 2014 and November 2016.

You can already feel the change in the air.  The fact is that Democrats have been on a forced march for the last 12 years, ever since the insult of Bush's "selection" in 2000.  After the reelection of Obama they reckon it is time to enjoy the fruits of office and relax a little.  They are only human, after all.

But the thing about government is that Government is Force, and for people that support the opposition, the incumbent government is always experienced as unjust.  The longer the incumbents are in power, the angrier they get.  Those are the kind of people who will be turning out in 2014 and 2016.  Liberals may swan around in their liberal bubble, but outside the bubble people are hurting, and pain is what motivates people to get to the polls.

But it is a shame that we have to relearn the lessons of the 1970s.  Because it is always the little people that get hurt.