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| Repeal the Health Bill | The Content of Obama's Character |
by Christopher Chantrill
January 16, 2010 at 1:17 pm
THE BUREAU of Labor Statistics released the December employment report January 8, and the mainstream media reported that 85,000 jobs were lost. The big story, as usual, was in the Household Survey. There was no mild leakage of 85,000 jobs there, but a whomping 589,000 jobs flushed down the drain. Here are the numbers from the Bureau:
| Total | Change | |
| Civilian labor force | 153,059,000 | -661,000 |
| Employment | 137,792,000 | -589,000 |
| Unemployment | 15,267,000 | -73,000 |
| Not in labor force | 83,865,000 | 843,000 |
These are the numbers used to calculate the unemployment rate. Note the reason why the rate didnt skyrocket. A total of 661,000 people dropped out of the labor force in one month. Dont think that things are going to get better any time soon.
But lets look beyond the numbers to the trends, also available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is where things really get scary.
Employment in the US is now down from the peak of 146.5 million reached back in November 2007. Thats a loss of 8.5 million jobs in two years.
Thank goodness the mainstream media has not made invidious comparisons to the Bush recession of 2001-02. Back then only 2 million jobs were lost, a mere scratch compared to the gaping wound in jobless Obama America. You can see why knowing people speak of 2009 as the year the locusts ate. What was President Obama doing flogging health care reform for a whole year when his policy should have been, from noon on January 21, 2009, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs?
Perhaps the president thought that the $787 billion stimulus bill would take care of the economy.
We dont know what President Obama and his advisors were thinking a year ago when they decided to go for broke on the liberal legislative agenda instead of healing the economy like the American people wanted.
But they didnt, and now we know that it was a strategic mistake that has put the Obama administration and the Democratic Party deep in the hole.
Even worse, things are going to get worse before they get better. Thats because Democrats still believe in the myth of Keynesianism, that you get out of a recession by printing money and increasing government spending. Youll remember how well that worked when the Democrats tried it again and again in the 1930s.
Probably President Obama has never really thought much about economic affairs. His rhetoric mostly soars at the prospect of enlarging the administrative state, most obviously by taking over the health care industry to heal the sick or capping and taxing energy to lower the oceans. In his unscripted remarks before Ohio plumbers it does not seem to occur to him that the private-sector cattle must be fattened before wethat is hecan share the wealth.
We will see in 2010, as his increasingly desperate attempts to jump start the economy intersect with the impatience of the voters, just how badly the president has failed the American people by favoring liberal pet projects over the basic needs of the American people.
The reason we can predict this with confidence stares out at us from the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers. The reason that unemployment is a mere 10 percent and not up at 11 to 12 percent at this moment is that many people have given up looking for work. Here is a chart on the labor force.
The chart tells us that if the labor force had expanded at a normal rate since 2007 it should be about 157 million by now. But in fact it is down at 153 million. Four million people have dropped out of the labor force and have stopped looking for work. Imagine what will happen when businesses start hiring again and discouraged job-seekers start reporting that they are looking for work. That 4 million in missing workers will turn up on the unemployment column. If unemployment were to go from its present 15 million to 19 million then unemployment would go to 12.1 percent.
Lets be generous to the president, as we pundits should be when a Democrat is in the White House. All those discouraged people arent going to jump back into the labor force at once, so unemployment wont jump to 12 percent overnight and humiliate him. Probably, the unemployment rate will only get up to about 11 percent.
Our friends in the mainstream media will have to summon all their considerable journalistic talent to remind the American people in objective news reports that despite the harrowing unemployment numbers the nations economy is really in good hands.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.
Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says we should....
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
When we received Christ, Phil added, all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.
E. G. West, Education and the State
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©2007 Christopher Chantrill