According to Wikipedia (yes, consider the source)…. here is the definition of Stagflation:

In economics, stagflation is a situation in which the inflation rate is high and the economic growth rate slows down and unemployment remains steadily high.

Well, under Barack Obama’s economic policies passed by the Democrat-controlled Congress from 2009-10…. we at least have two of those three.  And inflation is higher than most of us have been used to since at least the 1990s.

Bob Krumm says the USA is now Stag-Nation.

This is what a stagnant economy looks like.  The gain of 115,000 jobs is less than enough to keep up with population increases, and was below the median economic forecast for April.  The only reason that the unemployment rate “fell” to 8.1% is because the labor force participation rate keeps dropping.  If you stop looking for work, you aren’t unemployed.  But you’re not employed either.  You’re just “missing.”  You don’t count.

Welcome to the country we now live in:  the Stag-Nation.

And this from the bloggers at ZeroHedge:

It is just getting sad now. In April the number of people not in the labor force rose by a whopping 522,000 from 87,897,000 to
88,419,000.  This is the highest on record. The flip side, and the reason why the unemployment dropped to 8.1% is that the labor force participation rate just dipped to a new 30 year low of 64.3%.

GP Ed Note: My post yesterday about the “invisible 86 Million” is now dramatically out of date…

Here are the official FedGov numbers:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 115,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, retail trade, and health care, but declined in transportation and warehousing.

Household Survey Data

Both the number of unemployed persons (12.5 million) and the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) changed little in April.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (7.5 percent), adult women (7.4 percent), teenagers (24.9 percent), whites (7.4 percent), and Hispanics (10.3 percent) showed little or no change in April, while the rate for blacks (13.0 percent) declined over the month. The jobless rate for Asians was 5.2 percent in April (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was little changed at 5.1 million in April. These individuals made up 41.3 percent of the unemployed. Over the year, the number of long-term unemployedhas fallen by 759,000.

The civilian labor force participation rate declined in April to 63.6 percent, while the employment-population ratio, at 58.4 percent, changed little.

Whether Obama & his team studied Martian or Marxist Applied Economics, one thing is clear: They didn’t learn any lessons from the unprecedented US economic expansion that resulted in the 1981-83 economic policies pushed through a Democrat Congress by Ronald Reagan.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As Glenn Reynolds has said….and I reiterate on Twitter…. UNEXPECTEDLY!!!!!!

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — There are far more jobless people in the United States than you might think.

While it’s true that the unemployment rate is falling, that doesn’t include the millions of nonworking adults who aren’t even looking for a job anymore. And hiring isn’t strong enough to keep up with population growth.

As a result, the labor force is now at its smallest size since the 1980s when compared to the broader working age population.

“We’ve been getting some job growth and it’s been significant, but it hasn’t yet been strong enough that you start to get people re-engaging in the labor market,” said Keith Hall, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A person is counted as part of the labor force if they have a job or have looked for one in the last four weeks. Only about 64% of Americans over the age of 16 currently fall into that category, according to the Labor Department. That’s the lowest labor force participation rate since 1984.

It’s a worrisome sign for the economy and partly explains why the unemployment rate has been falling recently. Only people looking for work are considered officially unemployed.

Yesterday I noted, also on Twitter (so you may want to follow me!), that I’ve come to conclude Obama & his economic team must have studied “Applied Theories in Martian Economics” rather than understand what truly drives human economic activity.  It isn’t rocket science, but The Most Brilliant President Evah somehow has missed the boat.  Class warfare does not employment make.

Kudos to CNN Money for addressing the Elephant In The Room that most of the rest of the MSM has ignored to this point.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Although candidate Barack Obama assailed then-President George W. Bush “for wage losses suffered by the middle class” in the 2008 presidential campaign, more “than three years into” his ” own presidency,” reports Bloomberg’s Mike Dorning, “those declines have only deepened“:

As a candidate in 2008, Obama blamed the reversals largely on the policies of Bush and other Republicans. He cited census figures showing that median income for working-age households — those headed by someone younger than 65 — had dropped more than $2,000 after inflation during the first seven years of Bush’s time in office.

Yet real median household income in March was down $4,300 since Obama took office in January 2009 and down $2,900 since the June 2009 start of the economic recovery, according to an analysis of census data by Sentier Research, an economic- consulting firm in Annapolis, Maryland.This decline in income could have a greater impact on average voters than the unemployment rate.

Via Instapundit. With less take-home pay, they have to set aside a grater proportion of their income for housing, groceries and other necessities, leaving less for recreation — and making it more difficult to save up for big purchases, like down payments on homes.

Last night, Piers Morgan led off his eponymous CNN show by asking his colleague Wolf Blitzer to offer his thoughts on Mitt Romney’s speech.  Blitzer agreed that “It was absolutely an excellent speech from — from his perspective because it looked — it looked like sort of an unofficial acceptance speech of the Republican presidential nomination.”

Morgan then turned to Obama campaign spokesman Ben Labolt for the president’s perspective.  And by the manner in which he deflected questions raised by the presumptive Republican nominee’s speech, the Democratic flack effectively made Mitt Romney’s point.

When CNN anchor asked Labolt for his ”reaction to Mitt Romney’s speech“, he cited “particularly” the Republican’s “claim that because the president has failed America, he [Obama] will run a campaign, and you are effectively running the press for that campaign, full of diversions, distractions, and distortions.”

Labolt focused on the choice offered by the coming election.  In a followup question, Morgan pressed the point, ”What happens if a large number of Americans come November conclude that actually most of the answers [about whether we're better off today than we were four years ago] to that are no?”

Instead of responding, Obama’s spokesman attacked Romney:

Well, the fact is a better title for Governor Romney’s speech tonight than “A Better America” should have been “Back to the Future.” Because he’s proposing the same economic policies that got us into the economic crisis in the first place. More tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, letting Wall Street write its own rules again.

You know we’ve tried those same policies before. We passed those tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. They were supposed to unleash growth. They were supposed to unleash job creation and they didn’t.

In office three years now, but still running against George W.

Yeah, Labolt did offer a few tidbits of good news in the current lackluster recovery, but his focus was on distorting Romney’s record, diverting attention away from “growth [which] surely feels like stagnation rather than a strong recovery” with personal income which is “flat to falling.”  Such attacks are nothing more than distractions from Obama’s real record.

ADDENDUM: (more…)

Just caught this on Yahoo! headlines:

Wonder how often Yahoo offers headline which feature claims Republicans make that have a basis in political and economic reality such as:  ”Romney:  Obama policies cause women to suffer disproportionate share of job losses.”*  You could remove the “Romney” from the headline and it would far more accurate than the above headline if Obama were removed.

Take off “Obama” from and, well, it’s just a silly statement with no basis in reality whatsoever.  The Gipper would never support the Buffett rule (see below).

In the linked article, Oliver Knox quotes the president’s remarks, but also reports that “Reagan also championed the very same ‘trickle-down’ economics that Obama has roundly denounced—the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy lead to investment that generates growth and thereby jobs.”  Yet, only those critical of Reagan’s economic policies use the expression “trickle-down” to describe them.  And the Gipper favored cutting taxes across the board, not just on the “wealthy.”

Citing the actual speech where the Gipper discussed “problems with the tax code“,  an address which included  an “anecdote about an executive who was paying a lower tax rate than his secretary”, Philip Klein reminds us that

. . . Reagan was talking about simplifying the tax code, whereas Obama’s Buffett Rule would add another layer of complexity. Reagan was arguing for allowing people to keep more of their own money and reduce the burden of government. By contrast, Obama is arguing for instituting the Buffett Rule so that more money is available to pay for government programs.

* (more…)

Yesterday, while doing my cardio, I caught the “news” on CNN.  And once again, they spun the headlines to favor their friends in the White House.   Reporting the latest unemployment numbers showing tepid job growth, they helpfully furnished us with a chart similar to the one below comparing job growth under the incumbent to that under his predecessor.

Fortunately, when I did a google search for the chart, a blogger who linked it had the same reaction to the chart most of us did when first we saw it on our left-of-center friend’s Facebook pages*: “This chart provides us with only a year of the Bush Administration’s performance.”

It is, he added, “a little unfair to Mr. Bush to snag the worst of his numbers and compare to the rosiest of the Obama numbers“, providing then a more complete picture of job growth over the past decade:

You’d think that if the purpose of a news agency were to compare two politicians, they’d give us this more complete picture rather than the selective chart at the top of this post. It does seem that media outlets like CNN want to define George W. Bush’s economic record by his last year in office rather than the full eight years — and without indicating that for his last two years in office, that Republican shared power with a Democratic Congress.

* (more…)

It does seem you can count on the New York Times editorial page to repeat the talking points of the Obama administration.  And now apparently, their star columnist has joined the fray.  According to Jeff Poor in the Daily Caller, Tom Friedman is now calling the Republican Party “a radical party”:

I think it is the fact that in my view the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party. It’s become a radical party on a lot of these key issues.

(Via Hot Air headlines.) Well, Tom, it is a fact that that is your view.  Problem is though that most Americans don’t agree with you.  Republicans now have a modest lead over Democrats in the RealClearPolitics average of the generic congressional ballot.

And it’s not just that poll.  As John Hinderaker reports, Rasmussen’s “latest ‘voters trust’ survey” shows Americans preferring Republicans to Democrats on 6 of 10 key issues, including the economy (“far and away the most important thing on voters’ minds this election“) where the supposedly radical party leads the president’s party by 11 points (49-38).  On national security the GOP has a 9-point edge (48-39).  On taxes, it’s a 6-point edge.

That’s one point higher than the Democrats’ largest margin — on education where voters trust them by a 44-39 margin.  Wonder if the margin would favor the Republicans if the producers of Waiting for Superman had addressed the ties between the teachers’ unions and the Democratic Party.

Seems Mr. Friedman is the voice of the liberal mindset (much heralded among those who share his opinions) rather than a man attuned to the realities of American politics.

SORT OF RELATED:  And this prominent New Yorker, the voice of a community entirely different from Mr. Friedman’s, has been calling the president’s policies “radical.”  (Via Gateway Pundit.)

When President Obama talks about the economy, it seems he derives his information not from historical facts, but instead from Keynesian theory.  At a campaign fundraiser in Maine, the politician once billed as post-partisan accused his partisan rivals of “madness”:

“We won’t win the race for new jobs and new businesses and middle-class security if we cling to this same old, worn-out, tired ‘You’re on your own’ economics that the other side is peddling,” Obama said.

“It was tried in the decades before the Great Depression. It didn’t work then. It was tried in the last decade. It didn’t work,” he said. “You know, the idea you would keep on doing the same thing over and over again, even though it’s been proven not to work. That’s a sign of madness.”

Well, the economics that the incumbent derides as “You’re on your own” created more jobs in September 1983 than were created in the past five months, among the best months for job creation since Mr. Obama took office.

In the decade** before the Great Depression, under the policies of Republicans Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the United States enjoyed the “Roaring Twenties,” an era of “sustained economic prosperity.“  It was only when Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, increased federal spending and ramped up government regulation, that the economy began to collapse, leading to the Great Depression.

Under Hoover and his successor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, federal officials tried various forms of state meddling over and over again, yet none of those policies proved to work.  Throughout the 1930s, unemployment remained high.  By this president’s logic, wouldn’t it be a sign of madness to adopt economic policies similar to Mr. Roosevelt’s?  Or Mr. Hoover’s?

(H/t The Gateway Pundit.)

* (more…)

Citing an article from from New York magazine, November 29, 2009, Jim Geraghty reminds us how after signing the “stimulus,” President Obama turned his attention to overhauling the nation’s health care system rather than focus on the economy, the top issue on America’s minds:

“Barack did the stimulus, and he thought he checked the box and moved on.” Of course, unemployment remained high, and the economy continued to struggle through this year. Obama moved on, of course, to Obamacare, phenomenallyunpopular legislation that may very well be found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Read the whole thing.  Seems he was more interested in provided the fundamental changes he sought than in providing the changes for which Americans hoped.

More on this anon.

Shortly after reading about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic speech in Chicago, I decided to read the address itself and see if a word search confirmed my hypothesis that the GOP presidential frontrunner emphasized the word, “freedom.”  Sure, enough the word,”freedom” occurred 32 times, (30 not counting the titles) in the prepared text.

This “word cloud” shows you just how central the word is to this man’s economic ideas:

Now, to be sure, this cloud does show that Mr. Romney also used the word, “government” a good deal (17 times by my browser’s count), but mostly to criticize state intervention in the economy:

The government does not create prosperity; free markets and free people do.

For three years, President Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people. He’s put us deeper in debt. He’s slowed the recovery and harmed our economy. And he has attacked the cornerstone of American prosperity: our economic freedom.

In response to these attacks, the Republican was going to tell us “why economic freedom is so critical – and how” he would “restore it in order to get our economy growing again”.  He found that the ideal of liberty distinguished American culture:

But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out: freedom.

The American economy is fueled by freedom.

Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality.

He went on to detail some of the damage regulators do and took the incumbent to task for the crony capitalism he practices: (more…)

Linking the latest Washington Post/ABC News Poll, headlined, Gas prices sink Obama’s ratings on economy, bring parity to race for White House, Glenn Reynolds, quips, “This is why they want people talking about birth control.”  In his piece on the very same poll, Jim Geraghty challenges the conventional wisdom about Obama’s inevitability, ABC/WashPost Poll: Unstoppable Incumbent Now Trails Romney Again.

“It seems,” Ed Morrissey writes looking at the poll . . .

. . . that Obama’s dismissive advice last week that gas prices are always “spiking up” this time of year didn’t do anything to set minds at ease.  Rapid gas price hikes and the resulting increase in food prices quickly erode buying power in working-class and middle-class households, which means that fewer people will have money for vacations and impulse spending in 2012.

And there we have (again) the specter of higher food prices, an increase felt more acutely by those who do the grocery shopping which, in heterosexual households, tends to be women.  No wonder the Obama campaign is making “an intensified effort this week to build support among women“.  Distraction, anyone?

UPDATE:  Have voters comes to expect incompetence from Obama?  Conflicting responses (which Geraghty noted) to the same question posed just shy of six years ago when George W. Bush was president offers a clue that they might: (more…)

“The best 12 months” for job creation “in the post-war period”, reports economist Danielle Hall, “were September 1983 to August 1984 when 4.9 million jobs were added.”  In September 1983 alone, “the US economy under President Reagan created 1.1 million jobs.”  Keep that figure in mind when you hear the media trumpet the latest employment figures.  In the past five months, the US economy under President Obama created fewer jobs than the economy under Ronald Reagan did in the ninth month of the third year of his presidency.

That said, the employment numbers are reasonably good, if not enough to keep pace with the administration’s projections in promoting the “stimulus” or to keep pace with a population growth.  (That link via Instapundit.)

That stimulus, in fact, has helped push our our debt and deficit to all time highs.  (Last link also via Insta.)  Yesterday, Jim Geraghty reported that, “The total U.S. public debt will probably hit $15.5 trillion today“, finding further that it increased by $4,872,146,580,769.36 since Barack Obama took office.  ”For comparison,” he noted, “the national debt increased $4.9 trillion — $4,899,100,310,608.44, to be precise — during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush”:

In other words, when the debt increases another $27 billion — $26,953,729,839.08 — Obama will have run up as much debt in three years and a couple of months as Bush ran up in eight years. Obama will reach that milestone in a few days. (Back in August, I predicted Obama would hit this milestone on the Ides of March.)

On that score, he was more prescient that yours truly who contended we would reach that milestone well before Memorial Day, now more than two months hence.

With the stock market’s major plunge today, we have another datum suggesting that the economic recovery may not be as robust as some have been reporting.  Couple that with the big drop reported earlier this month about the big drop in factory orders and shipments and it’s no wonder the president is feeling anxious about his chances this fall despite improving poll numbers.

Those poll numbers seem to have ticked upward in conjunction with continued acrimony among Republicans presidential candidates and increasing reports of economic improvement.  Well, that acrimony will eventually diminish.  And those reports might be fewer and farther between.

And now we have reports of the president hoarding his campaign cash:

President Barack Obama has a bleak message for House and Senate Democrats this year when it comes to campaign cash: You’re on your own.

Democratic congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have privately sought as much as $30 million combined from Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee — a replay of the financial help they received from Obama in 2008 and 2010.

But that’s not going to happen, top Obama aides Jim Messina and David Plouffe told Reid and Pelosi in back-to-back meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the high-level talks.

Ed Morrissey (to whom I tip my hat for this report) finds “only two conclusions to reach if this report is true.  Either Barack Obama is so self-absorbed that he can’t share the wealth himself, or his fundraising is going so poorly that his campaign has little wealth to share.”

I would add another that he may be husbanding his resources in anticipation of a potentially uphill contest this fall.

UPDATE:  Over at Hot Air’s Green Room, Karl offers a similar sentiment, asking “You know who doesn’t think Obama won the election already?” And answering: (more…)

Last night, I attended a meet-up organized through Ace of Spades for its readers and conservative bloggers in the heart of Obama country, Santa Monica. And once again, I introduced myself as a GayPatriot blogger and received a far warmer welcome than I do when I introduce myself as conservative at gay gatherings.

I had the good fortune to talk to Joy McCann who now blogs at Conservative Commune. Last week, she weighed in on the contraception kerfuffle, offering an opinion effectively identical to my own, “I don’t think the state should pay for it, or mandate it, or force others to pay for it, either directly or indirectly. Nor should the state discourage it.”

Democrats sure do want to make it appear that Republicans want to prohibit it.  And with a generous assist from the legacy media, Rick Santorum and, briefly, Rush Limbaugh, they’ve been pushing that dishonest notion — and raising money from it.  As William A. Jacobson put it, zeroing in on the talk show host’s language, “the use of ‘slut’ or ‘prostitute’ even in an analogy was inappropriate, as Rush has acknowledged.  It also distracted from the attack on religious freedom which is the heart of the controversy.”

That’s not the only thing it’s distracted from.  Seems the president is bending over backwards to reach out to women voters.  And women, Joy reminded me, tend to do most of the grocery shopping.  They know, what reader ChrisH and I have observed, the cost of groceries has increased significantly over the past year. (more…)

Gotta love the entrepreneurial spirt of certain conservatives. Look at the clever product some are now hawking on the web:

Seems the creator of this product took the idea from an sticky note he had seen “at a Kroger grocery store in Douglasville, GA, about 30 miles west of Atlanta this past Sunday night.”

3.65 for a gallon of regular seems mighty cheap for those of us California’s Southland.

Many Democrats, of late, seem particularly bullish on the 2012 election.  The Republicans seem fractured, their enthusiasm dampened by a brutal contest for the party’s presidential nomination.

Yesterday, David A. Graham offered a thoughtful piece contending that Reports of the Republican Nominee’s Doom Are Greatly Exaggerated.  The whole thing is well worth your time.  His points include two relating to the precarious state of the economy as well as one reminding us about the unpopularity of the president’s policies and another anticipating Republican unity in the presidential contest.

He also notes that the “Obama Administration is overdue for a major scandal (despite the best efforts of congressional Republicans, neither Fast and Furious nor Solyndra seems to have had a major impact on public opinion).”  Well, they might have more impact if the legacy media paid them more heed.

All too many news outlets do seem to offer the president undue deference.

Despite that deference, a number of recent surveys from Gallup (perhaps the most reliable pollster) have shown that even as the president is not faring as well as the narrative suggests.  Yesterday, Ed Morrissey linked “the latest Gallup survey show[ing] that enthusiasm has begun to rise among Republicans — and remains flat among Democrats:”

By 53% to 45%, Republicans, including independents who lean Republican, are slightly more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say they are “more enthusiastic than usual about voting” this year. Republicans have consistently led Democrats in voting enthusiasm since last fall, but to varying degrees.

Today’s Gallup tracking shows Mitt Romney leading Obama by 4 points: (more…)

Like many of my friends and neighbors in Los Angeles, I have noticed that my grocery bill has increased in the pat year.  And yet, the official reading on inflation shows only a modest increase in prices.  Today at the Washington Examiner, Charlie Spiering provides a statistic which helps explain the discrepancy:

Every year the official Consumer Price Index is released demonstrating the average price hikes experienced Americans each year. Last year the CPI rose 3.1 percent, a seemingly modest hike by many standards.

But the American Institute for Economic Research has released an alternate index, narrowing the scope to items purchesed by the average consumer every month, leaving out “big-ticket items” like cars, computers, and furniture.

According to this index, the prices for everyday items like food, beverages, fuel, power, and prescription drugs have risen 8.1 percent in 2011.

So, it wasn’t just my imagination.  And it’s not just my grocery bill.

To many people, that increase seems even steeper. Since President Obama signed the “stimulus,” John Merline reports, “Median annual household income is about 7% below where it was in February 2009, according to the Sentier Research Household Income Index.”  (H/t: Powerline picks for Merline link.)

Two weeks ago yesterday, one could buy a gallon of regular at the Shell Station on Fairfax & Beverly in Los Angeles (one of the cheapest places to fill up in Hollywood) for $3.93. Last night, the price was 40 cents higher:

Caught this while passing the Shell Station at the Corner of Fairfax and Beverly.

Yesterday, a gallon of regular was $4.19 a gallon.

“Every U.S. recession since 1971“, warns blogger Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge

. . . has been preceded by an increase in the price of oil, currently up more than 7 percent year-to-date. With the economy barely advancing – growth in output is moderating by most measures – the economy may not be able to withstand the blow of a spike in oil and an ensuing increase in prices at the pump. While oil at $106 per barrel and gasoline prices averaging $3.59 a gallon are not yet at crippling levels, they seem headed in that direction.

(Via Instapundit.)  Meanwhile, our friends in the legacy media are pushing the meme that the president just can’t do anything about this, you know those forces beyond his control.

Funny when a Republican was in the White House, some of the same folks now excusing the incumbent Democrat seem to think the president can control these things.  Guess that means they credit Republican for being far more effective executives than Democrats.