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  An American Manifesto
Friday September 3, 2010 
by Christopher Chantrill Follow chrischantrill on Twitter

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Repeal the Health Bill The Content of Obama's Character

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Obama's Jobs Hole

by Christopher Chantrill
January 16, 2010 at 1:17 pm

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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:

TotalChange
Civilian labor force 153,059,000-661,000
Employment137,792,000-589,000
Unemployment15,267,000-73,000
Not in labor force83,865,000843,000

These are the numbers used to calculate the unemployment rate. Note the reason why the rate didn’t skyrocket. A total of 661,000 people dropped out of the labor force in one month. Don’t think that things are going to get better any time soon.

But let’s 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. That’s 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 don’t 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 didn’t, 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. That’s because Democrats still believe in the myth of Keynesianism, that you get out of a recession by printing money and increasing government spending. You’ll 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 we—that is he—can “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.

Let’s be generous to the president, as we pundits should be when a Democrat is in the White House. All those discouraged people aren’t going to jump back into the labor force at once, so unemployment won’t 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 nation’s economy is really in good hands.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com.  His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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 TAGS


What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican


Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District


Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State


Churches

[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


Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values


Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization


Conservatism's Holy Grail

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


Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self


Drang nach Osten

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


Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America


Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital


German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate. 
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West


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