The Choice on Jobs

The Choice on Jobs



I agree with those who think that this is another effective ad from the Romney campaign. And, in the established context, the overall effect is fair. Obama did promise change, and jobs, and he's obviously not delivered.

But the statement that he made the other night that "some jobs are not going to come back" is absolutely true, and does not represent "giv[ing] up hope." The US economy is not producing the number of buggy whips that it once did, and those jobs aren't coming back. It's going to be a long, long time before much of the low-skilled manufacturing jobs which have left for the far east are profitable to bring back. (And if it becomes profitable for Americans to do those jobs again, it's very bad news for the American worker, because it means our economy, and standard of living, have been effectively destroyed.)

So, yeah, there are a lot of jobs that aren't coming back. But even more relevant are the jobs that will come back once the Federal Government stops implementing the economic policies that this administration wants. So the ad is, if not perfectly fair (albeit much more honest and fair than most of the Obama campaign advertising has been), plenty fair enough...

"The Dinner Table"

This ad, from Americans For Prosperity, is inspiring praise. Well-deserved, I think. This one stands out, and quietly cuts through the clutter of the race...

September Jobs Report

I am not an expert, but a significant drop in the reported top-line unemployment rate (from 8.1% to  7.8% - great timing for the President) in a month with only 114,000 jobs added does not smell right. (Of course, one way that the unemployment rate drops is if people give up looking for work, and leave the work force that way - unemployment rate only measures people who want a job AND are actively looking.  The people that want a job but are NOT actively looking don't count.  But you can expect to hear that 7.8% figure extolled repeatedly, saturating the mainstream press as evidence that everything's on the right track.) 

And I'm not the only one who thinks so. So I've gathered some commentary from people that know the numbers better than I do.

The Heritage Foundation

Job growth continues to sputter—this morning’s jobs report shows that 12.1 million Americans are still out of work.

Going against other economic indicators, the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent. Economists are already looking into the drop, saying it seems to be a statistical fluke, because it doesn’t match up with the sluggish job creation and recent downward revision of GDP growth.

James Pethokoukis:

Only in an era of depressingly diminished expectations could the September jobs report be called a good one. It really isn’t. Not at all.

1. Yes, the U-3 unemployment rate fell to 7.8%, the first time it has been below 8% since January 2009. But that’s only due to a flood of 582,000 part-time jobs. As the Labor Department noted:

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.0 million in August to 8.6 million in September. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
...
4. The shrunken workforce remains shrunken. If the labor force participation rate was the same as when President Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.7%.

Kevin Hassett (American Enterprise Institute)

Today’s jobs report is a classic. The report, of course, reveals the results of two surveys, one of households, one of establishments. The professional economists and the press usually emphasize the establishment survey because it is viewed as less volatile. The establishment survey was terrible. The 114,000 number of jobs created on net in September is well below the average for this year (146,000) and the average for last year (153,000). This is wholly consistent with the story that the economy is decelerating sharply as we head into the fall.

The household survey, on the other hand, portrays a September that was booming, far more so than could possibly be true given the other indicators. According to it, the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, with total employment jumping by a whopping 873,000. I wish it were true, but it will likely be a blip when we have a few more months of data.

ZeroHedge:

[W]hat was the reason for this epic jump in Household survey jobs? Simple, and those who have read our series on America's transition to a part-time worker society know the answer. The reason is that the number of part-time people employed for economic reasons soared by 582,000 to 8,613,000, the most since October 2011, and the largest one month jump since February 2009, when "restoring" confidence in the economy was all the rage... and just before the Fed announced the full blown QE1 in March of 2009. Odd symmetry.

Suitably Flip:

[T]his doesn't smell right. The household survey (the part used to calculate the unemployment rate, not official payroll growth, which comes from the establishment survey) shows a whopping 873,000 jobs added in September (seasonally adjusted).

How whopping? It's the best month of the millennium to date.

In fact, it's the best month since 1983 (excluding Januarys, which usually show crazy numbers, due to annual revisions, which is why they're removed from the chart).

That's just not remotely plausible. In the last 29 years, we've had 22 quarters of growth exceeding 5%. And never did the household job creation rate hit the ostensible peak we just experienced, with growth hovering in the 1-2% range.

We've either got a massively massaged seasonal adjustment in place, a drastic change in household survey methodology, or the number is real, the economy is booming, and ADP undercounted by 700,000.

The "ouch" quote of the day

Glenn Reynolds on Barack Obama's self-awarded "incomplete" on the economy:

I guess that’s because some people still have jobs...

The Great Jobs Massacre

Michael Ramirez:

DEAR AMERICA: It’s Time To Say A Big “Thank You” To Amazon

Henry Blodget:

If more American companies started to do what Amazon does--ignore short-term pressures, sacrifice near-term profits, and invest for the long-term--the American economy would start to heal itself quickly. America would create more innovation, more jobs, and more long-term wealth. And, just as important, more Americans would be able to go back to being proud of our corporations and innovators and entrepreneurs... instead of camping in parks and protesting them.

As both a long-time customer, and a long-time investor in Amazon, let me just say, "Amen." (And I wish I'd invested 10 times what I did when I first got in, and I'm not selling now...)

Questions that answer themselves...

"Why cant I get a job in my field ? "

You can't make this stuff up...

I had started to make some comments about the intellectual capability of an Illinois congressman, but have decided that his comments really speak for themselves...

Jesse Jackson Jr. - Congress in Rebellion

Illinois Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. told The Daily Caller on Wednesday that congressional opposition to the American Jobs Act is akin to the Confederate “states in rebellion.”

Jackson called for full government employment of the 15 million unemployed and said that Obama should “declare a national emergency” and take “extra-constitutional” action “administratively” — without the approval of Congress — to tackle unemployment.

“I hope the president continues to exercise extraordinary constitutional means, based on the history of Congresses that have been in rebellion in the past,” Jackson said.

Clearly, he took his congressional oath of office, to protect and uphold the Constitution, seriously...

NY Times: "Yes, everything we ever said about bipartisanship was a lie."

Over at the New York Times this morning, there's an astounding editorial.

As soon as he proposed to pay for his $447 billion jobs plan with tax increases, President Obama knew he was going to do battle with Republicans. But he is also being challenged by Democrats because they cannot face another big pre-election fight or are thinking more about campaign contributors than the country’s best interests.

Is that it? Those are the only two choices? The Democrats are scared of a fight or are putting campaign contributions ahead of the country's best interests? (And let's face it, that's only one choice - political interests are trumping national interests.) And that's the only thing that the Times could come up with? How an idea, Mr. Big-shot New York Times Editorial Writer. Maybe the Democrats, along with the Republicans, recognize the President's "plan" for what it is - a nakedly partisan, cynically political attempt to improve his own public standing at the expense of Congress', a "plan" that contains nothing but a re-hash of all the things he's already done that haven't worked, a "plan" that would do nothing to increase the economic well-being of the country but would, instead, continue to increase the already staggering debt without creating a single job in the process.

What's funniest about the whole thing, though, is the sheer chutzpah of the Times, one of the foremost "bipartisanship" fetishists, whining about what they normally cry out for. This is prima facie evidence that what they want isn't bipartisanship - it's liberal policies. This editorial renders every future cry they make for bipartisanship even more farcical than the ones they've made in the past. "Bipartisanship," like "civil discourse," is a political weapon to use against Republicans, not an actual trait that they really give a damn about, and this editorial is proof of that. Keep that in mind the next time Republicans refuse to agree with Democrats and the inevitable plaintive cries of longing for "bipartisanship" rise from the offices of the Times' editorial staff.

There's more "good stuff" in the piece, too.

Some Democrats oppose the jobs bill for its apparent connection to the stimulus law from 2009, which Republicans lambasted on their way to victories in the midterm elections in 2010. The problem with the stimulus bill is not that it did not work. [LB: There are others, too, of course, but yeah, the big problem obviously is that it did not work.] The problem is that neither the administration nor Congressional Democrats ever persuasively used the evidence of its positive effect on jobs, as documented by the Congressional Budget Office and in private economic analyses.

The reason that they never "persuasively used the evidence" is that there isn't any. Or, rather, that the evidence that exists is so weak that it cannot possibly be used "persuasively" to convince someone who didn't already wholeheartedly believe it without the evidence. The CBO report¹ that showed the stimulus working started with the model that they used to design the stimulus, the model that showed "if you do x, y will happen," and used the model to say "look, we did x, therefore y happened - the model proves it!" The Times' own pet Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman, has spent the last two years telling us that it didn't work (because it wasn't big enough). The idea that it was a colossal success that the administration is being too modest to take the credit for is well beyond silly, rapidly approaching insane.

Economists have estimated that Mr. Obama’s plan, if fully adopted, could create 1.3 million to 1.9 million jobs next year.

Yes, and what did those same economists estimate would happen with Mr. Obama's first plan? That it would prevent unemployment from topping 8%.

Here's the President's economic adviser Cristina Romer, on her way out the door a year ago:

What the Act hasn’t done is prevent unemployment from going above 8 percent, something else that Jared and I projected it would do.

And

Precisely because such severe financial shocks have been rare, there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact. To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did, and why they cut labor so much more than they normally would, given the decline in output.

So obviously, there's no way they could be over-estimating the impact of doing more of the same thing that worked so well last time, right?

The Republicans will not support the jobs bill, if only because Mr. Obama wants it. Americans need Democrats to step up now, and for Mr. Obama to lead them.

Again, can they not see any other possible reason? Is it really beyond the realm of comprehension that someone might look at that "plan" and think, "you know, that's really not a very good idea"?

Apparently not.

It would be comical if it weren't so damaging...





¹ - Congressional Budget Office report:

Estimating the law’s overall effects on employment requires a more comprehensive analysis than can be achieved by using the recipients’ reports. Therefore, looking at recorded spending to date along with estimates of the other effects of ARRA on spending and revenues, CBO has estimated the law’s impact on employment and economic output using evidence about the effects of previous similar policies and drawing on various mathematical models that represent the workings of the economy.

More from Romer:

The reason that prediction was so far off is implicit in much of what I have been saying this afternoon. An estimate of what the economy will look like if a policy is adopted contains two components: a forecast of what would happen in the absence of the policy, and an estimate of the effect of the policy. As I’ve described, our estimates of the impact of the Recovery Act have proven quite accurate. But we, like virtually every other forecaster, failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be in the absence of policy, and the degree to which the usual relationship between GDP and unemployment would break down.

How do we know that the estimates have "proven quite accurate"? Well, our models suggest that that's what happens. Despite that, as noted above, and in her own words, "there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact" of "such severe financial shocks."

A little media quiz this morning

If you've been paying attention, the following quiz should be easy. It deals with this story from Reuters:

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits rose ____________ last week in a sign concerns about a weak economy were sapping an already beleaguered labor market, data showed on Thursday.

Applications for unemployment benefits climbed to 428,000 in the week ending September 10 from an upwardly revised 417,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.

Which of the following words was removed from the story?

• a) sharply
• b) slightly
• c) unexpectedly
• d) predictably

And the answer is ... c) unexpectedly!

To re-quote Jim Geraghty,

If I find myself in a fistfight, I hope it's with one of these economists who are always getting quoted by Reuters or Bloomberg, because then I'll rest assured that I'll always have the element of surprise. These guys never expect everything.

Semi-serious question: does the Reuters style book require that its journalists refer to all increases in jobless claims as "unexpected"?

The Programmed President

Good piece in Human Events by Daniel J. Flynn:

Only in the bizarro world of liberalism is a program’s inefficacy considered a compelling argument to expand that program....

Reality is a rude affront to grand ideas.

Friedman, one of the Blue Collar Intellectuals included in my forthcoming book, waited tables, sold fireworks by the roadside, and peddled encyclopedias door-to-door before winning a Nobel Prize in economics. Obama collected signatures for Ralph Nader’s NYPIRG and taught in a law school before becoming president. Notice a difference?

The real world grounds ideas. Ideological fantasies send minds into the ether.

People armed with programs have usually been programmed. What they lack in ideas they make up in ideology. Ideologues don’t think. Their ideologies do this for them. Like a robot, the ideologue’s mental circuits overheat when confronted with a situation he hasn’t been programmed for.

Read it all...

"961 days in, Obama becomes sick and tired of someone dawdling about jobs"

Andrew Malcolm:

Obama, whose Democratic spending priorities have pushed the national debt beyond $14,000,000,000,000, said it was important to curb spending and keep to the deficit reduction plan agreed to earlier this summer while also investing in, you know, many important things.

He then provided a joint session of Congress with a broadly ambitious list of goals that sounded to many people very much like a lot more spending, like, say, the $787 billion economic stimulus bill of 2009 that didn't stimulate much of anything except that national debt.

With the national debt already increasing $3 million every minute of every day, Obama wants to repair and modernize 35,000 schools. Obama wants $35 billion to go toward salaries for teachers, firefighters and police.

Obama wants $140 billion largely to update roads and bridges. Obama wants another $245 billion in business and individual tax relief. He also wants to extend unemployment benefits.

And he wants it all right now. Seriously. Now that his Martha's Vineyard vacation is over, this situation is urgent.

The Obama Economy in miniature

Solyndra to Declare Bankruptcy

Solyndra, a major manufacturer of solar technology in Fremont, has shut its doors, according to employees at the campus.

"I was told by a security guard to get my [stuff] and leave," one employee said. The company employs a little more than 1,000 employees worldwide, according to its website.

Shortly after it opened a massive $700 million facility, it canceled plans for a public stock offering earlier this year and warned it would be in significant trouble if federal loan guarantees did not go through.

The company has said it will make a statement at 9am California time, though it's not clear what that statement will be. An NBC Bay Area photographer on the scene reports security guards are not letting visitors on campus. He says "people are standing around in disbelief." The employees have been given yellow envelopes with instructions on how to get their last checks.

Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs.

I have enormous sympathy for the people losing jobs. There's no part of that that's fun. But if a company can't compete, those resources are much better spent in a company that can. And having the government prop up a company that can't compete is just a plain and simple wealth transfer.

Solyndra is almost the archetype of an Obama economy job creator. Which is a big part of why there aren't many jobs being created...

Line of the day...

Andrew Klavan:

Question: What’s the difference between a Federal Jobs Creation Program and Kim Kardashian’s wedding?

Answer: Kim Kardashian’s wedding creates jobs.

He's right, too - read the whole thing...

Can't we ever catch a break?

AP:

The debt crisis behind him, President Barack Obama challenged his Cabinet on Wednesday to redouble its efforts to strengthen a "weakened" economy and get people back to work.

Because, you know, the efforts have been so successful so far...


I'd feel a lot better if he and his cabinet would take the next 15 months off.


UPDATE: Oh, yeah, note to the AP - the "debt crisis" is nowhere near behind the President, or anyone else. The "debt ceiling crisis" has passed, for the moment, but the debt crisis continues to loom...

More of the same

At the Hill blog, Rick Manning, the communications director of Americans for Limited Government, has called my attention to this NY Times editorial from Sunday on the current economic situation. The Times editors think that

Republican lawmakers have responded to renewed signs of weakness with a jobs plan that prescribes more of the same “fixes” that Republicans always recommend no matter the problem: mainly high-end tax cuts, deregulation, more domestic oil drilling and federal spending cuts.

The White House has offered sounder ideas, including job retraining, plans to boost educational achievement and tax increases to help cover needed spending. But its economic team is mainly focused on negotiations to raise the debt limit, presumably parrying Republican demands for deep spending cuts that could weaken the economy further while still reaching an agreement on the necessary increase.

Manning notes that

In just a few lines, the Times managed to encapsulate the left’s complete lack of understanding of why jobs are created.

To be clear, jobs get created in private enterprise when additional labor is required to produce goods or services that will increase the profit of the enterprise.

Jobs don’t get created:

A: because people are trained to do them.

B: because people have higher educational attainment.

C: by raising taxes on those who we hope will create the jobs.

Which is, of course, absolutely correct.

But I'm a little more interested, today, in the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that the Times is using here, and the unstated assumptions that go into it.

Republican lawmakers have responded ... with a jobs plan that prescribes more of the same “fixes” that Republicans always recommend no matter the problem: ... The White House has offered sounder ideas

So, while both parties are, in this instance, absolutely true to their undergirding philosophies and the wishes of their supporters, the Republicans are offering "more of the same" while the White House has "sounder ideas." The evidence that these ideas are "sounder" is assumed to be true, or left as an exercise for the reader. No doubt the typical Times reader shares those assumptions, so it would be a waste of time to actually make the case. But both parties are offering "more of the same." The Republicans are, in fact, offering "tax cuts, deregulation, more domestic oil drilling and federal spending cuts." Those are the policies that Republicans always tend to favor. The Democrats, on the other hand, when they can be bothered to offer anything, offer things like "job retraining, plans to boost educational achievement and tax increases to help cover needed spending." It's quite a trick to condemn one party for offering "more of the same" while at the same time praising the other party for offering "more of the same," but that's what they've done here.

Note that there's nothing inherently wrong with criticizing one set of ideas while supporting the other. There's nothing dishonest about it. But "more of the same" is a fundamentally dishonest criticism.

And what, exactly, are those "sounder ideas" of the Democrats?

job retraining

That sounds good, doesn't it? "Job retraining." Helping people help themselves. Out-of-work pastry chefs learn how to fill the critical gaps in our power-supply infrastructure capabilites or traffic control. Who wouldn't want to increase his or her job skills?

But here's the problem with that lovely sounding idea - currently, there are millions of Americans out of work who want jobs. Where, exactly, are the millions of jobs that they would fill if they were "retrained"? If we train all of our out-of-work coal miners to run Microsoft Word and Excel, does that fix the unemployment problem? Shall we re-train all of our out-of-work auto workers as nuclear physicists? How, by what mechanism, does "job retraining" create a single new job, never mind the millions that are missing from the economy as a result of the disruptions of the past few years? (OK, so you get a hundred thousand government-paid "retrainers" hired by the Federal government, and a couple of thousand bureaucrats to administer the program. How do you create any jobs beyond those?)

The Times has, of course, no answer for those questions, if they ever considered them, which is profoundly unlikely.

plans to boost educational achievement

"Plans to boost educational achievement." Oh, they've got "plans to boost educational achievement" - that'll generate millions of jobs!

How, exactly? I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for an answer.

tax increases to help cover needed spending

Because apparently, the government isn't spending enough already.

To do them justice, one could see unemployment dropping if the government spent more. Yes, the first stimulus was a disaster, but there's always room for the old Keynsian classic, "hire two million people to dig holes and two million more to fill them in." That'll address the unemployment rate, at least in the short term, and it's not like it would significantly change the debt situation - we've already got no chance of staying solvent without massive tax increases, so what's a little more?

So maybe the Times is one-for-three on this section. Or maybe they just think that "sounder" means "sounds nicer to us."

But its economic team is mainly focused on negotiations to raise the debt limit, presumably parrying Republican demands for deep spending cuts that could weaken the economy further while still reaching an agreement on the necessary increase.

"Parrying Rebublican demands for deep spending cuts that could weaken the economy..." As with everything else that they've written, the question comes again - "HOW?" What is the mechanism by which "spending cuts...weaken the economy"? What is the mechanism by which the Federal Government is increasing the economic productivity of the country? Even assuming that there is some mechanism or mechanisms by which government spending increases economic output, where's a single shred of evidence to suggest that there's still room for more economic productivity to be had by raising taxes and spending? The government has been on a wild spending spree for the past four years now (thanks, Nancy and Harry and Barack!) and the economy doesn't seem, at least to my untrained eyes, to have gotten better. What can they offer to support the Democrats "more of the same"?

Nothing. And they don't bother trying. It's just "more of the same" from the New York Times...

Tennessee Court Makes It Easier to Sue Employers Over Illegal Firings

Tennessee Court Makes It Easier to Sue Employers Over Illegal Firings

In a decision that some legal observers found surprising, the Tennessee Supreme Court has reversed precedent and made it easier for workers to sue their employers when they believe they were fired illegally [LB - whether they were or not].

The court ruled 3-2 last week that employers must prove that workers' claims of discrimination or retaliation are false or else face a trial, according to The Tennessean.

Yeah, that'll help. Anyone want to speculate as to whether this kind of decision might lead to a) more hiring, b) less hiring or c) no impact on hiring decisions?

Tough question, right?

Not. But hey, they're just businesses - who cares if they're assumed guilty until proven innocent?

Seriously, does anyone benefit, other than lawyers?

Obama's 'pivot' to the economy comes far too late | Washington Examiner

Good Byron York piece in the Washington Examiner this morning...

Obama's 'pivot' to the economy comes far too late

White House officials insist these are serious policy initiatives that are not being put forth just so Obama can say he's doing something about the economy. But that leads to the question: If these are such great ideas, why wasn't the president pushing them earlier?

"They've had nearly two years to think about it, and they've come up with a Democrat caricature: tax and spend," says one high-ranking GOP Hill aide.

But even if Obama's proposals were good policy, it's not just too late for them to have any significant economic effect by November. It's also too late for them to have any significant political benefit for Democrats. Large segments of the public believe Obama and his party focused on the wrong issue -- health care -- for too long in 2009 and 2010, and when they did pass a big economic measure, the $814 billion stimulus, they got it wrong. That will be a hard perception to change by Nov. 2.

"The die has been cast in many voters' minds," says another Hill Republican deeply involved in the midterm effort. "People believe the stimulus was a failure. By trying to 'pivot,' Democrats can't all of a sudden hide from their signature jobs effort. After all, didn't we just have the recovery summer?"

"People believe the stimulus was a failure." Now why would people think that? How could people possibly see the pouring of billions of dollars into sustaining Democratic interest groups and state and local public officials' coffers while the unemployment rate skyrockets as a failure? The stimulus has done exactly what most of us expected it to do, hasn't it?

Anyway, it's a good piece - read it all...

Jobs Take Second Place, Again

Great quote from this Commentary piece, Jobs Take Second Place, Again:

The administration turns out to have less credibility than Big Oil.

"Go and create jobs!"

The brilliant Michael Ramirez: