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Mark Steyn on the economy and the emperor who has no jobs.
…”I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it’s such a smart idea to let one’s breezy insouciance out of the bag when you’re giving a press conference. In May, the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs. For the purposes of comparison, that same month over 100,000 new immigrants arrived in America.
So what kind of jobs were those 54,000? Economics professorships at the University of Berkeley? Non-executive directorships at Goldman Sachs? That sort of thing? No, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley, half the new jobs created were at McDonald’s. That’s amazing. Not the Mickey D supersized hiring spree, but the fact that there’s fellows at Morgan Stanley making a bazillion dollars a year analyzing fluctuations in minimal-skill fast-food service-job hiring trends. What a great country! For as long as it lasts. Which is probably until some new regulatory agency starts enforcing Michelle Obama’s dietary admonitions. …
…A couple of days later, Chet’s announced it was closing after nine decades. “It was the economy and the smoking ban that hurt us more than anything,” said the owner. But maybe he can retrain and re-open it as a community-organizer grantwriting-application center. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median period of unemployment is now nine months – the longest it’s been since they’ve been tracking the numbers. Long-term unemployment is worse than in the Depression. Life goes slowly waiting for a fast-food job to open up. …
Charles Krauthammer looks for the argument that will beat the president.
…It’s not that the ideological case against Obama cannot be made. Obamacare with its individual mandate remains unpopular. The near-trillion-dollar stimulus remains an albatross. Even the failed attempt at cap-and-trade — government control of energy pricing — shows Obama’s determination to fundamentally transform America. And he is sure to try again to complete his coveted European-style social-democratic project if you give him four more years.
Medicare has nonetheless partially blunted that line of ideological attack. Yet, just as the Democrats were rejoicing in the fruits of their cynicism, in came the latest economic numbers. They were awful. Housing price declines were the worst since the 1930s. Unemployment rising again. Underemployment disastrously high. And as for chronic unemployment, the average time for finding a new job is now 40 weeks, the highest ever recorded. These numbers gravely undermine Obama’s story line that we’re in a recovery, just a bit slow and bumpy.
Suddenly, the election theme has changed. The Republican line in 2010 was: He’s a leftist. Now it is: He’s a failure. The issue is shifting from ideology to stewardship.
…I would still prefer to see the Republican challenger make 2012 a decisive choice between two distinct visions of government. We are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation debate about the nature of the welfare state (entitlement vs. safety net) and, indeed, of the social contract between citizen and state (e.g., whether Congress can mandate — compel — you to purchase whatever it wills). Let’s finish that debate. Start with Obama’s abysmal stewardship, root it in his out-of-touch social-democratic ideology, and win. That would create the strongest mandate for conservative governance since the Reagan era.
In the National Review, Rich Lowry looks at long-term unemployment.
…The insidious thing about long-term unemployment is that it builds on itself — the longer you are without a job, the harder it is to get one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that the chance of someone unemployed for less than five weeks finding a job in the next month is about 30 percent. For someone unemployed 27 weeks or more, it’s just 10 percent.
For an economy so famously on the mend that it experienced “recovery summer” last year, the trend has been in the wrong direction. A Pew study notes that the number of people unemployed for a year or more increased by 25 percent from December 2009 to December 2010.
The job market is now segregated by levels of educational attainment, but long-term joblessness disregards schooling. Once they are unemployed, about 30 percent of college graduates, high-school graduates, and high-school dropouts are out of a job for more than a year. It doesn’t matter what sector of the economy they come from. “More than 20 percent of unemployed workers in every non-agricultural industry,” Pew writes, “have been out of work for a year or more.”
…Democrats may want next year’s election to be about Medicare; Republicans may have thought it would be about debt. But if current conditions hold, it will instead be about unemployment and the associated economic travails of stagnant wages, falling home values, and rising prices. There is no more natural theme in our politics than “putting America back to work.” Next year, Obama could be vulnerable to it. It’s the flashing red light of his reelection.
There was a debate last night. Michael Barone had impressions of each candidate and a summary.
… This was a New Hampshire debate, but it has serious ramifications for Iowa as well. I have disparaged the idea that Romney is the frontrunner; I continue to think that given the polls no one is the frontrunner. But Romney behaved like a frontrunner tonight, one with confidence and sense of command and with the adroitness to step aside from two major issue challenges (Romneycare, his various views on abortion) he faces. Romney has wisely eschewed the Iowa caucuses this time, leaving as two major competitors there Pawlenty (from next door Minnesota and a genuine religious conservative) and Bachmann (not only from next door Minnesota but also born and raised in Iowa). Presumably they will both be competing not only in the Iowa precinct caucuses, but in the August 13 Iowa Republican straw poll in Ames. I think Bachmann emerged from this debate a more serious competitor and Pawlenty not a stronger one than he was before. You could extrapolate much from Pawlenty’s performance in support of the proposition that he is a serious candidate for the nomination. But you could extrapolate much from Bachmann’s performance that she is a serious competitor in the Ames straw poll. And if she could come out ahead of him, that would certainly shake up the race, and leave the way open for another competitor. Perhaps for Jon Huntsman, who wasn’t there tonight and who has indicated that he won’t compete in Iowa. Or perhaps for Texas Governor Rick Perry, whose 2010 race top advisers were part of the mass resignation last week from Newt Gingrich’s campaign, but who may not turn out to be a wine that will travel. Or perhaps for a draft for Paul Ryan, who it might be argued could enter late and be a substitute for Pawlenty as the competitor for Romney which Pawlenty did not succeed in being at St. Anselm’s flashy auditorium.
More debate thoughts from Jonathan Tobin.
Coming into this debate, a lot of pundits thought Mitt Romney would benefit from having the other challengers gang up on him about health care. They were wrong since doing so would have exposed Romney’s vulnerabilities not confirmed him as the frontrunner.
Unfortunately for Tim Pawlenty, he listened to those voices urging caution and that provided the debate’s signature moment. Offered an opportunity to hit his main opponent hard on Obamneycare as he called it just a few days ago, Pawlenty whiffed. In the end, it really doesn’t matter whether it was because he was too nice or not courageous enough to call out Romney to his face. Either way he failed. It was a key moment in this race and one that Pawlenty will rue in the months to come. He walks away from the debate clearly weakened by this astonishing failure of either nerve or imagination. Instead of winning the competition between the two mainstream candidates, Pawlenty is now in danger of slipping back into the second tier. …
John Podhoretz has an enjoyable riff on David Mamet’s political conversion.
David Mamet tells me he’s like the character in one of the greatest comedies ever written, Moliere’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” who declares: “Good heavens! For more than 40 years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.” Mamet says he made a similar discovery a few years ago: He is a conservative and has been for decades without knowing it.
The self-mocking comparison to Moliere’s “bourgeois gentleman” is a mark of the modesty with which America’s most celebrated and successful serious playwright discusses his latest book — a white-hot work of non-fiction called “The Secret Knowledge” that is both an account of his discovery and an explication of the views he now espouses with a discoverer’s intensity.
…Mametbureaucrat — the person whose entire profit comes from skimming off the labor of others. It is only a failure to understand the independent value of work that leads people to believe it is acceptable to use the law to redistribute the earnings of a productive laborer and transfer them to someone else in the name of fairness and equity. …
, who knows a great deal about the darker recesses of the human heart, has freed himself here to express unambiguous love — love of country, love of tradition, love of his own people and (most exciting in terms of the book itself) the love of a good day’s work.
…Mamet is indeed an unapologetic “bourgeois gentleman” who believes there is nothing more profound than people working, together or separately, to produce something.
…What he loathes is the middleman,
Andrew Malcolm rounds up the late-night jokes for the LA Times.
Conan: Democrats and Republicans calling for Congressman Weiner to resign. Meanwhile, late-night comedians are calling for him to hang in there.
Leno: President Obama’s top economic advisor Austan Goolsbee is being replaced by something a little more effective — the Magic 8-Ball.
Fallon: Good news. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says the economy will pick up in the second half of the year. So you know what that means -– absolutely nothing.