If the economy is getting better, why do so many people feel they’re struggling?

On the positive side: The official data say that we’ve had some growth in jobs. And, while the federal deficit is still high, it has begun to drop (due both to rising tax receipts, and the GOP’s insistence that we have at least some fiscal discipline). And the stock market is making new highs.

On the negative side: The growth in jobs is so anemic that if a Republican were president, the media would be screeching nonstop about the “jobless recovery”. And the stock market’s rise flies in the face of weakening fundamentals, suggesting that the rise is just a “bubble” process (or a process of inflation).

Moreover, as Peter Schiff writes, imports are dropping while real consumer costs rise, which fits a pattern of declining living standards (people having to spend more on necessities). His argument is long, but worth considering:

Tyson Foods…announced that although their top line sales revenue increased by almost 2% (roughly in line with U.S. GDP growth), operating margins collapsed by almost 50%, leading to a 43% decline in profit. Consumer shifts away from relatively higher priced/higher margin beef and pork products to lower cost/lower margin chicken products were to blame….

According to government statisticians, the Tyson announcement would reveal modest growth and low inflation. After all, revenue at the company grew and spending on their products had increased modestly. But rising prices were obscured by consumers purchasing lower quality products. Not only are consumers avoiding the beef and pork that they otherwise may have preferred, but they are opting out of the convenience of prepared foods…This is known as getting poorer.

The trend corresponds with the steady increase in the share of income that Americans devote to food and energy…in 2002 Americans spent about 17.8% of income on food and energy. In the first quarter of 2013 the share had risen…to 21.3% of income…In the poorest countries almost all of income is devoted to such things.

…[A sharp drop in imports has meant that] our trade deficit with China in March dropped by a whopping 23.6%…[but overall] personal spending [still rose] in March. If we are buying less stuff from abroad, where are Americans spending the extra money? …Americans are buying fewer Chinese products because they are spending more money on food, rent, utilities, healthcare, insurance, and other necessities that can’t be imported. Again, this is consistent with a falling standard of living…

The combination of these symptoms suggests that the extent to which people are being impoverished by accelerating inflation is not reflected in official government measurements. This explains why unemployment remains high even as GDP appears to rise…the unprecedented expansion of the money supply under the current Fed leadership is pushing up prices for stocks, bonds, real estate, and consumer goods. Market indices neatly capture the price increases for all of these categories except for the latter, which has been concealed by an overly adjusted CPI.

If consumer inflation data were reported more accurately, it would be revealed that much of the apparent growth is an illusion.

In a previous post, I wrote about Obamacare Schadenfreude, that feeling of amusement when some ardent supporters of Obamacare realize that that monstrous piece of legislation will have negative consequences for them or for causes about which they claim to care.  I was reminded of that post again yesterday when I heard that one of the authors of Obamacare, Max Baucus (D-Montana), complained that the implementation of Obamacare was going to be a “huge train-wreck coming down.”

Likewise, a little over a week ago, Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) complained about the incomprehensible complexity of the law:  “‘I believe that the Affordable Care Act is probably the most complex piece of legislation ever passed by the United States Congress,’ he said, as quoted in the Washington Examiner. ‘Tax reform obviously has been huge, too, but up to this point it is just beyond comprehension.’”  My response to both Senators is simply to respond:  well, isn’t that just too bad.

Today, though, I’d rather write about another Obama-era affliction which I’ve been suffering with since late January 2009.    It is something akin to depression, and it is brought on or exacerbated by the daily outrages resulting from this administration’s policies.

Sometimes it boils up to anger which gives me more energy, but at other times I feel listless and unmotivated or even hopeless.  At times, I get by just focusing on the routines and necessary activities of my daily life, but sometimes even those feel like a burden.  Writing about the issues can be therapeutic, though there are many times when I’d rather not think about them at all.

So what to call this condition?  “Obamalaise” came to mind, but I think others have used that to describe the lingering weakness in our economy.

I also thought of “Obama Weltschmerz.”  That conveys the angst and depression, and I like the fact that, like Obamacare Schadenfreude, it uses a German word.  As I see it, the use of a German word helps to communicate my sense that Obama’s America feels like it’s headed towards the sort of economic collapse which characterized Weimar Germany.

Maybe that’s too dark.  “Obamanomie” communicates a sense of impending social instability and alienation.  That might get at the matter a little better, though it’s perhaps even more depressing to think about.

In any case, I know I’m not the only one suffering with this condition.  I suspect many of our readers are, too.  What would you call it?

This is a pretty good website to illustrate how awesome it is that King Barack I is taking a whopping 5% pay cut.

SHEESH.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

In the New York Times on Sunday, David Stockman made some points that I’ve been making on this blog: that America has lost its way in a decades-long orgy of government spending, deficits and money-printing, creating a “bubble economy” where the real prosperity is rather less than the statistics claim, and each bubble’s burst is greater than the last, meaning that we’ve got a doozy coming.

Stockman’s piece speaks for itself, encasing relevant facts in very sharp rhetoric. I won’t quote it here, just recommend it to your interest.

His piece isn’t perfect; it contradicts itself in a few places. For example, Stockman rips (rightly) on Keynesian economic theory, but also affirms (wrongly) the neo-Keynesian story for why the Great Depression ended (that it was somehow due to WW2 spending). Or Stockman characterizes the last several decades both as rough times, and times of living “high on the hog”; that could seem contradictory if you don’t fill in the missing context yourself (that it’s been “higher” for the politically-connected and a little rougher for the rest of us).

And, while I agree with Stockman’s knocks on Alan Greenspan, I find him unfair in his treatment of such figures as Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan. But Stockman’s piece is a polemic, and no polemic is ever perfect. It’s a good one if it manages to get a lot right, and Stockman’s does.

UPDATE: John Tamny at Forbes critiques Stockman’s piece in more detail, from a perspective that I respect. (Non-Keynesian; perhaps Supply-side or even Austrian?) Like I did, he acknowledges large areas of agreement.

(NB: As often happens with my posts, I’ve tweaked a couple phrases since publication to better fit what I really had in mind.)

France’s President Hollande is determined to confiscate wealth; mere constitutions and courts can’t stop him:

French President Francois Hollande declared on Thursday that companies would have to pay a 75 percent tax on salaries over a million euros after his plan for a “super-tax” on individuals was knocked down by the constitutional court…

Irony alert:

On the defensive, with his approval ratings in tatters, Hollande acknowledged he had failed to anticipate the crisis dragging on for so long…

Gee, I anticipated it, from 6,000 miles away. I’m not very smart, I just understand that no country can tax its way to prosperity.

Moving along – It seems that in the wake of Cyprus, a top European official accidentally told the truth:

Monday March 25 – Markets took fright after the head of the group of eurozone finance ministers indicated that the Cyprus rescue could be a template for similar situations…

…Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, told Reuters…”If the bank can’t [survive], then we’ll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders…and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders”…

“Talk to” means “take from”, of course. A chorus of other top officials swiftly denied it was true and said, “Because, shut up.” Which means they’d do it again in a heartbeat; after all, one of their top bankers once confessed that lying to the public was part of his job.

UPDATE April 4: A top Italian banker says yes, actually, taking from the depositors is acceptable.

Over the summer of 2012 and during the last few months of the presidential campaign, a number of us watched the changing employment numbers and labor statistics with an increasing sense of skepticism.  The lamestream press would dutifully report the administration’s numbers and note that the unemployment number was going down slightly, but anyone who looked into the numbers quickly realized that the only reason the numbers ever went down was that with each successive report, the number of people in the workforce kept shrinking.  And so things have continued throughout the first few months of 2013.

Tuesday on his Twitter feed, Bruce linked to this article by Mortimer Zuckerman in the Wall Street Journal, which once again confirms what many of us have come to believe about the Obama economy:

The Great Recession is an apt name for America’s current stagnation, but the present phase might also be called the Grand Illusion—because the happy talk and statistics that go with it, especially regarding jobs, give a rosier picture than the facts justify.

The country isn’t really advancing. By comparison with earlier recessions, it is going backward. Despite the most stimulative fiscal policy in American history and a trillion-dollar expansion to the money supply, the economy over the last three years has been declining. After 2.4% annual growth rates in gross domestic product in 2010 and 2011, the economy slowed to 1.5% growth in 2012. Cumulative growth for the past 12 quarters was just 6.3%, the slowest of all 11 recessions since World War II.

And last year’s anemic growth looks likely to continue. Sequestration will take $600 billion of government expenditures out of the economy over the next 10 years, including $85 billion this year alone. The 2% increase in payroll taxes will hit about 160 million workers and drain $110 billion from their disposable incomes. The Obama health-care tax will be a drag of more than $30 billion. The recent 50-cent surge in gasoline prices represents another $65 billion drag on consumer cash flow.

And that’s just the beginning of the article.  Read the whole thing if you want to feel even more depressed about the state of the economy than you felt already.

But that’s not even the whole story.  Tuesday when I was driving to lunch, I heard Tom Sullivan discussing “America’s Disability Scam Crisis.”  The facts of the disability crisis are alarming enough as it is, but even more surprising was that the facts which inspired the discussion on the Tom Sullivan show were first reported by NPR.   Scott Johnson at Powerline noticed and wrote up a post about it entitled “NPR goes Rogue.”

The NPR story linked above is quite long, but it focuses largely on the fact that since Clinton signed “welfare reform” into law, more and more people have been going on to disability and the disability rolls have grown to unsustainable levels.  It also mentions  the fact that many lawyers and doctors have found a lucrative business focusing on disability cases.

And it gets even worse.  As the NPR story reports: “signing up for disability benefits is an excellent way to stay hidden in one key way: People on disability are not counted among the unemployed.”  The story continues: (more…)

“Cyprus in your Heart” is the tourism slogan of the small Mediterranean nation of Cyprus. It is a member of the Eurozone. Perhaps you’ve seen headlines, the last couple of weeks, about its banking crisis. This post is to sum up a few points about it.

• The Europeans plan to resolve the crisis with yet another bank bailout.
• This bailout is different. For the first time, bank customers (depositors) will be hit with losses. “Small” or “insured” depositors under 100,000 Euro will be left alone; but over that amount, depositors could lose 20%, 40% or more of their money in the bank.
• That’s important. It’s a dangerous precedent. It means that “money in the bank” isn’t all that safe. Not in Europe; and if you believe a similar crisis could happen in the U.S. eventually, then not here.
• They were originally going to hit even the depositors under 100,000 Euro. That would have been an even more dangerous precedent. Thank God, the Cypriot parliament refused.
• The Russians are quietly furious with Europe, over all this. Cyprus had been sort of the Russians’ Cayman Islands or Switzerland; the Russians’ banking haven. Russian depositors may be hard hit (although some say that the clever Russians had already withdrawn their money).
• Also, Cyprus has a strategic location near Turkey and Israel, and important natural gas fields. So Russia and the EU both want it as their satellite. The Europeans were determined to keep Cyprus from withdrawing from the Euro.
• *IF* this outcome means that Cyprus stays with the Europeans (rather than the Russians – and I’m not sure if it does mean that, in the long run), it’s probably good for Israel.
• But for now, Cyprus will be hit with a severe depression, as its “Russian banking tourist” industry is gone, probably forever.

These developments have the Cypriots up in arms, feeling like their futures have been stolen. A few pictures here.

This all goes to the importance of money as a social contract. People put their trust in money as the basis for trading with each other, in all kinds of ways. If people’s bank accounts are violated – and/or, if the value of money is violated – then people feel hurt and disoriented, because a key social contract has been violated. I may say more about that in a future post.

This is a nice illustration of the point that a large government debt and a sluggish economy go together:

Hat tip, David Houle at Seeking Alpha. The “EM” means, a whole bunch of Emerging Markets economies.

The picture shows that the higher-debt countries tend to have lower growth; the lower-debt countries tend to have higher growth. I would argue that the direction of causation is mostly that policies of high government spending, high deficit and high debt will burden an economy, slowing its growth.

But one could argue for at least some causation in the other direction: if a country is low-growth to begin with, it will be higher-debt, just because it can’t grow out of its debts as easily. My counter-argument is that it almost doesn’t matter: The picture suggests that, once your country is stuck in a high debt / low growth mode, adding more debt (or Keynesian “stimulus”) just makes you Greece.

Lately I’ve noticed more and more posts from people on Facebook about how to do a, b, or c yourself or to make your own x, y, or z.  It could be that my personal social network overlaps more with the “crunchy” demographic which shops at the local food co-op and Whole Foods, but it could be a larger social trend.  I think it is a little of both, but I’m curious to see if other GayPatriot readers have noticed the same thing.

In the past three years or so, I’ve started learning to make many more kinds of things for myself than I had in the past.  Most of the stuff I make for myself has been foods that I used to buy at the store, and the transition originally occurred because I wanted to have a healthier diet.    I was a tolerable cook before, but I depended on lots of store-bought staples.  But the more I’ve learned to do for myself, the more I’ve wanted to learn how to do, as well.  I’d say that while I was originally motivated by a concern for health, as time has gone on, I’ve also been motivated by the increased sense of independence in learning how to make things I used to buy, by the ability to control my own ingredients, and by the opportunity to be able to make better quality foods than I would have bought in the past and still have a cost savings.

Although I started with food, I’ve also made some of my own household cleaning products, and I’ve considered making my own personal care items, as well.   I have a friend who makes and sells her own deodorant and is thinking of making other products, as well. But there’s no need to stop there.  When television stations switched from analog to digital broadcasting, I built my own digital TV antenna using coat hangers and a 1×4 using plans I had found online.

One of my favorite websites to browse in the last few years has been Ana-White.com which contains hundreds of build-your-own plans for furniture.  The site, which is maintained by a self-described “homemaker” in Alaska, was originally called “Knock Off Wood” because it started with home-built knock-offs of items found at stores and in catalogs.  I’ve not attempted building any furniture yet, but I would like to try doing so at some point in time.

I haven’t taken the time to research this topic yet in depth, but it’s my belief that part of what we’re seeing with this trend is a reaction to the Obama economy.  As people worry more about their finances, frugality and independence become more important–at least for a certain segment of the population.  During the Great Depression, these kinds of household arts were quite common, partly out of necessity and frugality, but also partly because the population wasn’t quite as urbanized.   Store-bought items were  both a rarity and a luxury.  I don’t see it as a coincidence that make-your-own and do-it-yourself projects are proliferating these days, much as they did during the Depression years.

What do other people think?  Have you noticed this trend, as well?  Have you made such changes personally?  Are there items that you used to buy at the store that you’ve started making for yourself?

As a GP commentor once put it, “The stock market relies on confidence, and the stock market has done incredibly well since Obama took over. How do you explain that?”

A picture is worth a thousand words:

But here’s the summary. Fed pumping gobs of money into Wall Street? Market drifts upward. Fed stops pumping? Market doesn’t. The so-called “confidence” is drug-induced.

Hat tip: Zero Hedge

UPDATE: This is your town, on food stamps. Once per month, the town of Woonsocket, RI springs to life as residents receive (and spend) their benefits. The Obama administration has more people on food stamps than any in U.S. history:

Spending on SNAP has doubled in the past four years and tripled in the past decade, surpassing $78 billion last year. A record 47 million Americans receive the benefit — including 13,752 in Woonsocket, one-third of the town’s population…

I must hat-tip John M. Mason at Seeking Alpha for inspiring this post. He weaves some recent news articles into a story which I shall sharpen, with my own viewpoint and commentary.

First, consider that “Recovery in U.S. is lifting profits, but not adding jobs” (says the New York Times). As percentages of national income, corporate profits today are they highest they’ve been since the 1950s, and employee income is the lowest it’s been since the 1960s.

So what are companies doing with their profits?

• “More U.S. Profits Parked Abroad, Saving on Taxes” (says the Wall Street Journal).
• “U.S. Firms Send Record Cash Back to Investors” as dividends, share buybacks and mergers (says the Wall Street Journal).

In other words: Companies just don’t feel that they have many productive opportunities / uses for their money, in the U.S. And do feel that they face unpredictable, yet ever-growing regulation – as well as relatively high taxes. So, they don’t hire (in the U.S.). Instead, they dispose of their profits in ways that accomplish little but to reward their shareholders, thus raising the stock market.

Connect that, folks, to the market’s recent highs. But what does a rising stock market accomplish? Little but to make the wealthiest households feel wealthier.

And so, to the extent that rising consumer spending has contributed something to U.S. recovery, that spending has come more from the wealthier households. “Wealthier Households Carry the Spending Load”, says the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart and Target, who serve less-wealthy households, have reported slower sales.

This is an economy suffering from the anti-market, anti-growth policies of the Obama administration. Not surprisingly, it is also an economy skewed to the wealthy.

I say “not surprisingly”, because I know that the two things are connected. It is precisely the middle and working classes which (more…)

Some make the case for how well things are going, in the U.S. economy. The statistics say that GDP has been edging up, and unemployment ticked down to 7.7%. One GP commentor recently put it like this:

…the stock market is reaching all time highs, the real estate market is bouncing back and the unemployment rate is going down. Yes, the unemployment rate needs to go down lower but overall, things seems to be really improving.

But I say, look at how we’ve gotten here: not in any way that can end well.

Last week, I mentioned that the markets are most likely up because the Federal Reserve Bank is pumping out $85 billion per month in new money. That’s a rate of about $1 trillion per year. By no coincidence, the government’s FY2013 deficit is projected to be around $1 trillion.

Please let me borrow, print-n-spend $1 trillion a year (or more), and I will also get you higher GDP numbers, along with financial market bubbles, $4.50 gas, and job growth that is positive, only after several years (and with a lot of part-time jobs). But, how much real wealth?

Analogy: Say your spouse is out of work. You have a family business. You create a job paying your spouse $50,000. The job doesn’t really produce much. You created it so your spouse will feel good. Paying for it tips your business into a loss, that you make up by borrowing. Has your household gained? Your tax return says that your household income is $50,000 higher. Is it?

The income isn’t an economic gain, if all you did was borrow money to simulate earned income. That’s what the government does. It borrows money, spends it on un-economic jobs (e.g., bureaucrats, bailouts, or paying the unemployed to do nothing), and says “Look – the national income (GDP) is up!” (^^)

I’ve said for a couple of years that GDP is not a number we should care about. We should look at GDP net of new debt.

According to this chart, in the four years of Obama’s reign so far, the U.S. has added around $1.1 trillion to its GDP level, and around $2 trillion in cumulative GDP (giving Obama credit for all amounts above the deep-recession GDP level that he inherited). In the same calendar period, the U.S. added $5-6 trillion in debt.

That’s a disaster. In the name of government deficits to “stimulate” the economy, we have, over several years, added much more in debt than we’ve gotten in GDP increases.

It’s not all Obama’s fault. But he’s captain of the ship, (more…)

Good article from Michael Boskin. Since it mostly speaks for itself (and since I’ve pounded the table on some of these ideas before), I’ll just quote a few highlights.

President Obama’s most recent prescription for economic growth—more government stimulus spending, new social programs, higher taxes on upper-income earners, subsidies for some industries and increased regulation for all of them—is likely to have the same anemic results as in his first administration…

Standard Keynesian models that claim a quick boost from higher government spending show the effect quickly turns negative. So the spending needs to be repeated over and over, like a drug, to keep this hypothetical positive effect going. Japan tried that to little effect, starting in the 1990s. It now has [ultra-high] debt-to-GDP…

Since World War II, OECD countries that stabilized their budgets without recession averaged $5-$6 of actual spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes…In a paper last year…Stanford’s John Cogan and John Taylor…show that a reduction in federal spending over several years amounting to 3% of GDPbringing noninterest spending down to pre-financial-crisis levels——will increase short-term GDP.

Why? Because expectations of lower future taxes and debt, and therefore higher incomes, increase private spending…

An economically “balanced” deficit-reduction program today would mean $5 of actual, not hypothetical, spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes…

…the demand by Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats that any dollar of spending cuts in budget agreements this spring (to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year and when the debt limit again approaches) be matched by an additional dollar of tax hikes is economically unbalanced in the extreme…

Emphases added. Read the whole thing. Boskin backs his claims with examples, which I’ve omitted, to give you a reason to go there.

I’ve titled this “A start on fixing the economy” because we need additional steps to reduce government’s crushing, depressing burden on the economy. Spending cuts alone will not be enough. Repealing Obamacare would also help a lot, as would some other sort of measures to make clear to people that the Obama administration’s nonstop, unpredictable interference in business is over.

Today the stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, hit an all-time high of 14,283 (intraday basis; closing at 14,253). A broader measure of stocks, the S&P 500 index, also seems to be doing well as it closed at 1539, nearing its all-time high.

So all is well in Obama’s economy, right? People are confident, great time to invest in stocks, right? Not necessarily.

The economy’s fundamentals remain poor. I believe that the Federal Reserve Bank’s “Quantitative Easing” program, which pumps around $85 billion per month of newly-printed money into the financial markets, causes the stock market to go up irrationally.

People know that America’s economic fundamentals are poor; but if the Fed is pumping so much money into the markets, then the markets are going to do well ‘no matter what’, at least for awhile. Realizing this, people feel a pull to join the party – after all, everyone else is doing it – and that makes markets go up even more.

I don’t see how it can end well. I see it as another market bubble. When the Fed stops QE – and it will have to, eventually – the stock market seems more than likely to crash. Bubbles are terrific fun, while they last. That is the phase we’re in now: the drug-QE-induced euphoria.

Moreover, what’s really going on here is (I believe) a process of inflation. I’ll explain. (more…)

(Worse than Lance Armstrong.)

UPDATE: Obama getting an intervention: (more…)

A few days ago, Kurt posted on this speech by Daniel Hannan. I agree that it’s brilliant, in how much it packs into a short space.

Kurt’s angle was, Who are our Hannans? But I would like to get into the substance of what Hannan said.

You may disagree, but I find that any of Hannan’s major points (summarized below) could be expanded into a worthy discussion.

• The 2008-9 bailouts, and the money-printing which continues today (another form of bailout), are an ethical crime. In effect, they transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the largest banks.

(more…)

The word ‘austerity’ has been kicking around in political life, these last few years. It conjures images of Greek old people forced to eat cat food as their country’s economy collapses and to burn furniture for heat, because right-wing budget-balancing Nazis have forced cruel cuts to social spending.

I exaggerate, but not much; see this Greek depiction of Germany’s Merkel. Leaving aside the fact the Nazis were socialists who believed in Keynesian deficit-spending on public works and social benefits (much like our Democrat friends believe), the word ‘austerity’ – specifically, the image of cruel spending cuts – is largely a myth, that left-wingers deploy to narrow the range of acceptable thought.

“Look at Europe!”, cry advocates of Big Government and deficit spending, “They’ve tried austerity and it doesn’t work!” And what they mean is: don’t you dare think about government spending cuts.

If you corner them, they may acknowledge that tax hikes also count as ‘austerity’ policies. But they are usually fine with tax hikes; they love tax hikes. So when they hurl ‘austerity’ as a pejorative, they mean, DON’T CUT SPENDING.

But let’s step back a minute. Have European countries actually cut their spending? And if they are suffering, might other factors – another policy, perhaps – explain the suffering? These questions are worth examining. (more…)

It is Sunday evening and I’ve had a very nice weekend away from the magnifying glass of politics. It has been a normal weekend: chores, laundry, dog walking & mindless television.

Sometime during the day, I started tweeting a series of ideas about where the Republican House of Representatives should go from here. My conclusion: Give Obama everything he wants.

Let’s pretend this is a parliamentary system. Let’s pretend the Democrats won and Obama was re-elected as Prime Minister. In that system, everything Obama wants would pass.

Let them have it. I’m not suggesting that Republicans of principle silence themselves and not warn about the consequences of Obama’s economic plans. Those Republicans would include Sens. Marco Rubio, Jim DeMint, Ted Cruz, Pat Toomey and Govs. Scott Walker, Susanna Martinez and Nikki Haley. Let them put their stakes of opposition forcefully and vocally in the ground.

But let the House GOP and the Senate GOP get out of the way and allow the Democrats what they want on the economy. No obstruction, perhaps a vote of “present”…. but no other sign of getting in the way.

We, as Conservatives, know that these economic policies are disaster. But Obama is right — Americans voted for higher taxes and more regulation — so let them have it.

We will win the long game. We should have allowed the economy to tank harder than it did in 2008 to begin with. And all that’s been happening since is kicking the can down the road.

So I’m in favor of a hard stop. Let the Democrats’ vision of economic “success” play itself out.

The result will be hardship the likes of which no American has faced since the 1930s. But so be it. Americans voted for it — let them have it.

Conservative policies will win in the long game.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

I swear the Romney/Ryan campaign is paying attention to what the conservative bloggers are talking about.  I remember watching John McCain in 2008 and screaming at the TV something like — “Hey you idiot… why didn’t you bring up [this topic] — it is all the blogs are talking about!”

Now during each debate this year, I scream something like – “Mitt must be reading my Twitter timeline!  He knew that [non-covered MSM fact or story].”

Last night I had a number of moments, but one was most important.  Many of us in the conservative blogosphere have been contrasting the Obama “Recoversession” to the actual Reagan Recovery.  It is a tale of stagnant growth and meager employment versus robust quarterly growth and the fastest job growth in post-WWII America.

Romney laid it out last night and I cheered at my TV.  Glenn Reynolds has a great graphic this morning at Instapundit that further illustrates the stark (and I mean damned-ass stark) contrast between Obama and Reagan on economic recovery.  If these are the “three decades of problems in our economy” that Obama whines he inherited — please bring more!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As I speculated in my post last night, the winds was out of Obama’s sails during his now-widely panned convention speech.  Not only was it a mere rehash of all of the speeches he’s given since 2008, Obama knew about this morning’s awful jobs reports.  It’s not just awful, it is downright disastrous.  It is the worst jobs report of the year and continues a backwards slide.

FACT: We had entered a Recovery BEFORE the 2009 Stimulus was passed.  Ever since that law was implemented, and Obamacare was passed, our economy has been in a long, slow slide into oblivion.  Today’s news confirmed it.  These are the facts, folks.  It cannot be denied.  Obama had full control of the goverment from 2009 to 2011 and so we are living in HIS economic infrastructure. 

And it is an unmitigated disaster.

The number of Americans whom the U.S. Department of Labor counted as “not in the civilian labor force” in August hit a record high of 88,921,000.

In July, there were 155,013,000 in the U.S. civilian labor force. In August that dropped to 154,645,000—meaning that on net 368,000 people simply dropped out of the labor force last month and did not even look for a job.

There were also 119,000 fewer Americans employed in August than there were in July. In July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 142,220,000 Americans working. But, in August, there were only 142,101,000 Americans working.

NINETY MILLION AMERICANS ARE NO LONGER IN THE WORKFORCE?  And someone will try to defend the economic & Obamacare policies as HELPING?  I call “bullshit” from now to November.

But wait, folks…. there’s more!!!  Obama has completely gutted the future of those who believed in him the most in 2008: Young Americans.

For most Americans, today’s jobs report was merely bad. For young people, though, the news was just downright awful.

After declining for most of the summer, the unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 16 and 19 popped up again, rising from 23.8 percent to 24.6 percent. Among 20-to-24 year olds, it hopped to 13.9 percent from 13.5 percent in July.

I honestly was NOT expecting the news to be THIS bad.  I figured another middling employment gain of 150-200K which could bolster the phantom idea that “things are getting better.”

Today, the bottom fell out of Obama’s re-election.  He was already standing on a rotted platform.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)