Posted on 06/03/2011 12:11:19 AM PDT by neverdem
With a little over a year to go until the next national election cycle is complete, it has become apparent that from an economic standpoint, the SS Liberal has officially run out of steam. Hull weighted down with the barnacles of false promises and rudder crippled by the reckless mismanagement of a spendthrift captain from Chicago, she sits there floundering in a sea of unemployment and malaise not experienced since Jimmy Carter was at the helm.
And despite all the rosy window dressing provided by the beaming ship attendants of the mainstream media, who pretend to be shocked every time another leak opens up, we passengers are fully aware of our surroundings.
CNBC reports that the private sector job market is still shrinking, with employers announcing over 37,000 more job cuts this month. That's up nearly 2% since April. In addition, Forbes reveals that home prices have dropped to their 2002 levels, falling another 4.2% in the first quarter of 2011. David Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Indices, released a chilling statement that, "This month's report is marked by the confirmation of a double-dip in home prices across much of the nation."
Any rational person hoping that we were righting our economic ship knows the words "double-dip" signify the exact opposite. Of course, not all numbers are down.
Government statistics show the number of food stamp recipients is at an all time high -- up 39% since Barack Obama took office. And though things are lean in the private sector, it's never been a better time to be employed by the federal government. Beyond just salaries soaring to the point where roughly 77,000 federal employees are making more money than state governors, a new study has found there has been a 73% increase in the amount of federally owned limousines to cart our central planning VIPs through the streets of the peasantry.
Along those streets, it's a different story. Bloomberg reports that as jobless claims jumped another 10,000 last month, "more Americans than forecast filed applications for unemployment benefits last week, a sign the labor market is struggling to gain momentum."
With economic numbers like these, it's no wonder that liberal commentators are advising Barack Obama -- the man who got elected as the anti-war president -- to run for re-election on his record as a war commander. Still, some left-wing economists aren't ready to give up the ship.
Take Paul Krugman, the intrepid little socialist and Nobel laureate who writes for the New York Times. Faced with the abject failure of the very excessive government spending he has promoted as the solution to our economic woes, Krugman's allegiance to Keynesian Obamanomics nevertheless remains undaunted. That might be admirable if it wasn't so foolhardy.
His recent column is the best evidence yet that when it comes to stimulating economic recovery, the left is simply out of ideas. Far from innovative, creative, or progressive, Krugman actually proposes bringing back one of the greatest failures of FDR's New Deal. He writes, "We could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads -- which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt."
For those unfamiliar, the Works Progress Administration was a controversial policy of the 1930s to put unemployed people to work doing various construction projects just so the government could give them a paycheck. Yes, sometimes that meant doing constructive things like building roads and highways. But more often, it included boondoggles like hiring one group to go out and dig a ditch, while hiring another to come through after them and fill in the ditch. The object was to put people to work so you could pay them -- the job they were doing was not important.
Did the WPA work? Nope. When FDR initiated it, unemployment was around 20%. Three years later, unemployment was around 19%. In the intervening 75 years, most rational people have figured out why it failed. Government jobs are paid from the general tax revenue that is created and produced only by the private sector. Thus, a plan like the WPA did nothing to generate prosperity, but rather merely allocated what was already there. Once the ditch was dug or the road resurfaced, the job disappeared and we were right back to where we started.
Not to mention that such a program cost an enormous amount of money to maintain. As our private sector continues to shrink under the backward policies of this administration, I'm not sure where Krugman thinks we will find the money to finance more government workers.
Yet this futility is all that remains in the left's idea bag. The only thing that is unclear is whether Americans will recognize it.
As much as we should, the danger comes in the reality that liberals have been rewriting textbooks and ingraining an anti-capitalist, pro-socialist message in the minds of America's youth for decades. The extent to which they have been successful will be determined by whether our nation decides to chain itself to the deck of this Obama-piloted Titanic, or do the smart thing and abandon ship.
Peter is a public high school government teacher and radio talk show host in central Indiana. Email peter@peterheck.com, visit www.peterheck.com, or like him on Facebook.
Soon as the local schoolo board figures out Peter Heck wrote this article, he’ll be unemployed worked number 37,001.
Peter has been reading my posts. Think that is hyperbole? Read my comments during the past week.
Of course you could read any of 100 other Freepers posts and get the same result.
We are the source.
“His recent column is the best evidence yet that when it comes to stimulating economic recovery, the left is simply out of ideas.”
Well, in a sense, there are no workable ideas that “stimulate recovery” in any immediate sense. The bubble/debt economy has been extended for so long that it has to reset with a major deflation before it can turn into a real economy again.
Iceland is an istructive example. They defaulted and went thru a couple of horrible years. But their economy appears to be healed and on a path to sustainable recovery.
But in America today, all paths lead to bad immediate consequences. The progressive’s path will lead to much longer and much more painful consequences.
Hell has never had any real ideas.
They just put forth the discarded wrappers of Heaven’s ideas as pretend ideas.
Keynesian economics’ is a misnomer. Keynes was a Fabian and the leftist who produced this political theory.
The Left is never out of ideas. That is the problem.
Keynes At Harvard - a website version...
http://www.keynesatharvard.org/
The left has another “idea” that they demand is the root of all our problems.
We must tax the rich at much higher levels, they must pay "their fair share" to right our economic problems - just ask them.
That will “stimulate the economy”, pay for all the programs they've enacted and create jobs... They say when the maximum federal income tax rate was 70%+ all was well. It was Reagan and all that tax cutting that caused our current economic condition - again, just ask them.
All I can say is, if they get their way, that may well be the final nail in the coffin.
They are far past reason. Insanity really...
The Left are too smart to be wrong even when they are.
They are capable of taking this country to places not seen since the 1930’s with all of it’s human suffering! Rush is right when he says they have to be destroyed and never allowed to rule again!
The Left doesn't run on ideas. It never has. They are into themes.
Have they stopped their 'government is the answer to all problems' theme?
Have they stopped their 'individual liberty must be disallowed' theme?
Have they stopped their 'destroy anyhow/anyway, anyone who opposes them' theme?
etc etc.
“This month’s report is marked by the confirmation of a double-dip in home prices across much of the nation.”
. . .
How can it be called a “double dip” when home prices never even leveled off or started to tick back up? It’s been a steady dip, dip, dip....
Also, they are not out of ideas.
There was an article yesterday (or the day before) where the progs over at the NYT were advocating that medical school be “free” so as to increase the number of general practitioners and reduce the numbers of specialists.
I WISH they’d run out of ideas.
Things built by the government are not turned over to private citizens, so private citizens gain no wealth from government capital projects such as roads, etc. Citizens can use them, but they personally do not own them, the government does. If the roads, bridges, etc., are not really needed, but could have been undone and life would just go on fine, there is extremely little benefit to the nation as a result of the labor and materials used in a government capital project.
Anyone with a decade or two of real-world business experience instinctively new that the stimulus plans and bailouts were simply debt begin forced on future taxpayers. This debt will not be paid as a separate payment, of course, it will need to be repaid out of tax dollars collected from taxpayers.
IMHO, people who are poor or middle income and who vote Democrat need to learn this. Those who know should work on ways to explain this so they see the light. It’s not really about nObama in particular, but all the Dem party is an enormous lie. Perhaps they will believe and listen a little better if they also hear that RINOs are just as bad.
“By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some....There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.” (John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919.)
“For those unfamiliar, the Works Progress Administration was a controversial policy of the 1930s to put unemployed people to work doing various construction projects just so the government could give them a paycheck.”
Not to defend Krugman or FDR, but is giving people money to do absolutely nothing, better ?
They may have run out of ideas but the idiots still vote hence Obama and his freakish administration and all the left wing freaks in the House & Senate.
No he won’t. He has been writing local op-eds and runs a radio show. Been doing so for years.
Ping. See the concluding paragraph.
This guy mentions “malaise”, all well and good. Any one want to talk about the “Misery Index” i.e., Inflation plus (actual) Unemployment? I get 20+4 or 24 And,going up.
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