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Peter Ferrara makes the case that growth helps all levels of our society, and redistribution attempts damage the most vulnerable. 

President Obama is proving a fundamental economic principle proven as well by President Reagan, though in the opposite way.  That principle is that economic growth provides vastly greater benefits for working people and the poor than redistribution.  It is economic growth that is the key to prosperity and the good life for the middle class, working people, and the poor.

President Obama’s policies have been all about redistribution, spreading the wealth as he puts it, a polite phrase for plunder.  That redistribution is in evidence from ObamaCare, to runaway government spending, to raising tax rates on “the rich.”

The results of those policies are in the latest Census report on September 14.  Median real family income has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels.  As the Wall Street Journal explained the next day, “Earnings of the typical man who works full time year round fell, and are lower — adjusted for inflation — than in 1978.”

The Census also reported that the poverty rate has climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago.  The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, nearly a quarter of all American children.  The total number of Americans in poverty is higher than at any time in the over 50 years that the Census Bureau has been tallying poverty.

Moreover, historically, for the American economy, the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery.  Based on that historical record, we should be nearing the end of the second year of a booming recovery by now.  But almost four years after the last recession started, there still has been no real recovery.  Unemployment is stuck over 9%, with unemployment among African-Americans, Hispanics, and teenagers at depression double digit levels for at least two years now. …

More of the same from Mort Zuckerman.

Take a deep breath. The industrialised world, America included, seems stuck in one of those horror movies, where the monster, thought to be slain, morphs into something even more scary. The fear is that a double-dip, or worse, is now upon us. Those who might help us escape are now being held back by the anti-business policies of President Barack Obama.

Mr Obama’s administration predicted a V-shaped recovery, based on the historical experience of the 1970s and 1980s. Not this time. The $4,000bn of fiscal and monetary stimulus produced less than $1,000bn in growth. Gross domestic product is now running at about 1.8 per cent this year but two-thirds of this will come from growth in business inventories, not final sales.

Consumers are clearly not willing to generate these new sales. The University of Michigan’s confidence numbers have fallen to levels 20 per cent or more below earlier recessions. The numbers now match the drops seen after the Iran hostage crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. No wonder that in the 14 quarters since the beginning of 2008, growth in consumption adjusted for inflation averaged just 0.5 per cent, the longest period of weakness since the end of the second world war.

This weak record on growth is proving disastrous for ordinary Americans. Per capita income remains below its 2006 level, while wage-based incomes are declining. It is little surprise, then, that adjusting for inflation, retail sales last month contracted at nearly a 5 per cent annual pace, while the proportion of Americans living in poverty soared. This is a modern day depression, only this time soup lines have been replaced by unemployment cheques. …

Sherman Frederick doesn’t like the way people who disagree with Obama are called racists.

We’ll probably never purge society of racial stupidity. Holding it to a minimum, however, remains a fine American goal.

It’s hard to marginalize the race-card mentality, however, when the country’s first black president and his supporters wield it like a splitting ax.

That track record on this is crystal clear. In 2008, when campaigning in Missouri, Sen. Barack Obama set the stage for his national run by saying his opponent, Sen. John McCain, would seek to “scare” voters because Obama didn’t look like past presidents and had a “funny name.”

You don’t need the imagination of Dr. Seuss to see that race card.

Those with no imagination (or those who won’t see) may wish to contemplate comments by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Racebait, TX. In the recent debt ceiling debate, Rep. Jackson said: “I’m particularly sensitive to the fact that only this president, only this president, only this one, has received the kind of attacks and disagreements and inability to work. Only this one.”

And just in case you didn’t get it, she added: “Read between the lines.”

We get it, Sheila. If you won’t give President Obama more money to spend, you’re a racist. …

WSJ gives us a tour of Las Vegas’ MGM Grand.

… Unlike most hotels, MGM Grand does all its own laundry. A separate 65,000-square-foot facility employs 165 people to wash, dry and fold linens. Each of the three dryers can handle 300 pounds. Employees feed dried towels and washcloths into folding machines that enable a single worker to fold 1,000 hand towels or 600 bath towels in one hour.

A six-month-old $1.2 million machine, nicknamed “the tunnel,” is making the washing process quicker. It continuously cleans, moving laundry through the 11 compartments of a 40-foot-long tube. A hydraulic press squeezes moisture out. The end result looks like an oversized hockey puck.

The driveway leading to MGM Grand has 14 lanes. “It is almost like working on a major freeway,” says Paolo Domingo, director, front services. One of the biggest headaches for valets—who parked about one million cars last year—is lost valet tickets. Once, that meant “running around” looking for cars in the 9,487-space guest parking lot, Mr. Domingo says. (On busy weekends, a minivan ferries valet workers around.) But in 2005, MGM linked a computer system to cameras that photograph all sides of each car. The system notes the space number and the time the car entered the lot. If a guest knows roughly when the car was parked, an employee can track it down. … 

Telegraph, UK with the background of our success killing Awlaki.

As he sat by a roadside eating what would be his last ever breakfast, Anwar al-Awlaki could have been forgiven for being in upbeat mood. Some 18 months after Washington had given him arguably the ultimate terrorist accolade by putting him on a list of people authorised for assassination, he was still hiding in the lawless Yemeni mountains where neither his own government nor US drone strikes could seem to reach him.

Then, as he and his comrades chewed dates and drank traditional Yemeni tea, a high-pitched buzz above them signalled yet another drone strike – this time one that found its mark.

Details of how the US finally managed to track down al-Qaeda’s chief mouthpiece to the West can be revealed today by The Sunday Telegraph, which has learned that the key breakthrough came when CIA officials caught a junior courier in Awlaki’s inner circle. The man, who is understood to have been arrested three weeks ago by Yemeni agents acting for the agency, volunteered key details about Awlaki’s whereabouts which led to Friday’s drone strike as his convoy drove through the remote province of Jawf, 100 miles east of the capital, Sana’a. Told he faced either a harsh prison term or the chance of a new life outside terrorism, the prisoner gave the vital clues that led to the most significant blow against al Qaeda since Osama bin Laden’s death. …

Stunning time lapse picture of 15 minutes of lightning in Missouri from Earth Science Picture of the Day.

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Mark Steyn wants to know why the bien pensants never did due diligence on the kid.

“The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”

He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as “hope” and “change”: That’s more than “a little” soft. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don’t have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. “I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap,” admits David Brooks, the softest touch at The New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: “He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”

If you’re a tenured columnist at The New York Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But out there among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn’t know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you’re one of Obama’s core constituencies, the ones who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: “Young Becoming ‘Lost Generation’ Amid Recession” (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse.

But don’t worry, it’s not much better at the other end of the spectrum:

“Obama’s Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere” (UPI). Gee, aren’t you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called “due diligence”? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his “perfectly creased pant leg” or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multitrillion-dollar economy to a community organizer, and you’re surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk? …

The administration’s jobs act still has no co-sponsors in either the House or the Senate. Ed Morrissey points out that in a parliamentary system, the government would fail because of this no confidence vote.

… Anyone in either chamber can add their name to the bill as a co-sponsor.  It’s not as if there are only a couple of Democrats in Congress.  The House has 193 Democrats, 192 of which apparently don’t want to be associated with Obama’s job-creation track record.  Democrats control the Senate with 51 members and two independents, although on this legislation it looks more like one Democrat and 52 independents.

We have a federal system, not a parliamentary system, so our legislature doesn’t take votes of no-confidence to force an executive out of power.  But given the high-profile rollout of the AJA by Obama, including his demand for a joint session to escalate pressure for action, the lack of any co-sponsors on these bills is about as close as we’ll get to a vote of no confidence in this executive short of an outright floor-vote failure in the Senate on the bill.

Matthew Continetti shows how the left media was hot on the Enron trail, but decides to overlook Solyndra.

In happier times, the firm had been celebrated as a harbinger of the future. The political connections it enjoyed were the fruit not only of well-placed contributions but of a self-imposed ideological mission: It was going to deliver cheap energy in amazing ways. Top executives had dismissed accounting irregularities. The normal rules, it was said, did not apply.

Then came the reckoning. Bankruptcy. Layoffs. An FBI investigation. Subpoenas. And the guard dogs of the press—always ready to sniff out a good scandal—leaped into action. What you read in the news was “not just the story of a company that failed,” wrote one major columnist. “It is the story of a system that failed. And the system didn’t fail through carelessness or laziness; it was corrupted.” A frenzy of speculation surrounded the company’s demise: “One wonders if it is the tip of an iceberg,” the columnist wrote. “And how many of us have, without knowing it, booked passage on the Titanic?”

The columnist’s then-colleague, who has a flair for the dramatic, wasted no time placing this image of corporate greed “against the stark backdrop of those less well-connected Americans who are fighting our war.” And the editorial board at their paper let its verdict be known throughout the land: “In order to restore confidence in American capitalism and in the integrity of its financial markets,” the editors wrote, “the public needs to understand what brought” the company “down.”

Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and the New York Times, in other words, were all bent on uncovering the extent of the executives’ crimes and the nature of the White House’s involvement. But that must have been only because the company in question was Enron and the administration under attack was George W. Bush’s. About the spectacular bankruptcy of the (admittedly smaller) solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, our most fashionable minds are much less curious. …

This administration by the numbers. Great graphics from flickr.com Could not manage to massage the format of this blog post. So, follow the link.

Jennifer Rubin on hypocrisy alert.

I had to rub my eyes when catching up on my news reading for the past few days. Are liberals such as columnists Eugene Robinson and Michael Kinsley really suggesting that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is too fat to be president?

If so, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with reasons why throngs of GOP voters and a great many independents and Democrats otherwise prepared to vote for Christie should reconsider.

Let me first observe the gross hypocrisy at work here. President Obama smokes. While in office Bill Clinton was overweight and had high cholesterol. I never heard any of these folks raise a peep. So long as there was no evidence that they could not fulfill their duties over the course of their term, liberals (being nonjudgmental in all things except the behavior of conservatives) didn’t seem to mind. (I suppose they’d have insisted that Winston Churchill stay in the wilderness with that smelly cigar?) …

The US is oil rich like Saudi Arabia? WSJ piece by Stephen Moore says so. 

Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be “completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century.”

“President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy,” he adds. We can’t come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into “green energy” sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas.

You’d expect an oilman to make the “drill, baby, drill” pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation’s fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers.

How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: “No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels.”

If he’s right, that’ll double America’s proven oil reserves. …

… Mr. Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, “I truly believe the federal government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties.” That’s more than the U.S. national debt, I say. He smiles.

This estimate sounds implausibly high, but Mr. Hamm has a lifelong habit of proving skeptics wrong. And even if he’s wrong by half, it’s a stunning number to think about. So this America-first energy story isn’t just about jobs and economic revival. It’s also about repairing America’s battered balance sheet. Someone should get this man in front of the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee.

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Charles Krauthammer can tell the Mid-East truth again.

While diplomatically inconvenient for the Western powers, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s attempt to get the United Nations to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state has elicited widespread sympathy. After all, what choice did he have? According to the accepted narrative, Middle East peace is made impossible by a hard-line Likud-led Israel that refuses to accept a Palestinian state and continues to build settlements.

It is remarkable how this gross inversion of the truth has become conventional wisdom. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu brought his Likud-led coalition to open recognition of a Palestinian state, thereby creating Israel’s first national consensus for a two-state solution. He is also the only prime minister to agree to a settlement freeze — 10 months — something no Labor or Kadima government has ever done.

To which Abbas responded by boycotting the talks for nine months, showing up in the 10th, then walking out when the freeze expired. Last week he reiterated that he will continue to boycott peace talks unless Israel gives up — in advance — claim to any territory beyond the 1967 lines. Meaning, for example, that the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is Palestinian territory. This is not just absurd. It violates every prior peace agreement. They all stipulate that such demands are to be the subject of negotiations, not their precondition.

Abbas unwaveringly insists on the so-called “right of return,” which would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs, thereby turning the world’s only Jewish state into the world’s 23rd Arab state. And he has repeatedly declared, as recently as last week in New York: “We shall not recognize a Jewish state.”

Nor is this new. It is perfectly consistent with the long history of Palestinian rejectionism. Consider: …

The more things change . . .   Michael Ledeen has interesting post comparing Carter and Obama foreign policies.

… One of the best short summaries of the dangerous foolishness of our current foreign policy goes like this:

‘ Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies. Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest. What makes the inconsistencies of the Obama administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States. The administration’s conception of national interest borders on doublethink: it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s “true interests.” ‘

I made one change in the original text.  I inserted “Obama” in place of “Carter.”  The paragraph comes from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which appeared in Commentary magazine in November, 1979. …

Nile Gardiner thinks it is foolish for our debtor nation to lecture Europe.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported, Germany’s finance minister Wolfang Schauble has launched a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration after Washington pushed for the European Union to boost its EFSF bail out fund. After Obama declared that the European financial crisis is “scaring the world”, Schauble shot back at the US president by warning: “It’s always much easier to give advice to others than to decide for yourself. I am well prepared to give advice to the US government.” He also made it clear what he thought of the idea of increasing the 440 billion euro lending limit, a position supported by US Treasury Chief Tim Geithner:

“I don’t understand how anyone in the European Commission can have such a stupid idea. The result would be to endanger the AAA sovereign debt ratings of other member states. It makes no sense.”

It is rather ironic that Barack Obama, who has probably done more damage to the American economy that any president in modern US history, is now lecturing European leaders on their financial problems as well. …

Toby Harnden catches David Axelrod telling the truth.

Talking at a Politics and Eggs breakfast in New Hampshire (a quaint little event where attendees are given a wooden egg and clamour to have it signed by the speaker), David Axelrod, chief strategist for the Obama campaign, used the word “titanic” when talking about the task facing his boss next year:

“This is going to be a titanic struggle.But I firmly believe we are on the right side of the struggle. In 2008, we had the wind at our backs. Now, we don’t have the wind at our back. We have the wind in our faces, because the American people have the wind in their faces.”

Of course, Axelrod, a kindly, lugubrious figure who is often compared to a walrus, meant “titanic” in terms of the dictionary definition of “huge or colossal”, deriving from Titan, rather than the R.M.S. Titanic, which sank in the Atlantic en route from Southampton to New York in April 1912. But for a political consultant to use the t-word about his own candidate was, to put it mildly, not an example of the best political spin. …

Alana Goodman notes the president’s fundraising has hit some headwinds.

This might explain those passive-aggressive donor solicitation emails. The White House Dossier’s Keith Koffler catches some news buried in the New York Times write-up on Obama’s town hall yesterday. According to Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, the president is on track to pull in $55 million when the filing deadline ends Friday – which is $30 million less than he raised in the previous quarter: …

Michael Barone says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, has had enough.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, is a very smart guy. He got JPMorganChase  moving out of mortgage-backed securities while the other big banks were moving further into them. He got Bears Stearns, and its $1 billion headquarters building at Madison and 46th, from Ben Bernanke for a song. His acquisition of WaMu turned out much better than Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. He made it clear his bank didn’t want or need Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $25 billion capital tranche and paid it back as soon as he could. I’ve observed him other the years and interviewed him and have been hugely impressed.

Dimon describes himself as a moderate Democrat. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, was mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary and has had meetings at the Obama White House. Now comes the news from the New York Post that Dimon has just attended a Mitt Romney fundraiser.

Streetwise Professor posts on “soft.”

We should all feel so ashamed.  We are letting down Obama.  We’re not pulling our weight.   He thinks we’re “great”, but we’ve gotten “soft” and lost our “competitive edge.”  He gives himself high grades, except for his failure to communicate just how wonderful he and his administration have been for the country, but he has an explanation for that: he’s been so darned focused on his Herculean labors that he’s forgotten to let us know just how heroic they are.  As for the rest of us, we need to pick our game, toughen up, stop whining, and get with it.  We need to live up to his lofty standards, and his lofty expectations for us. …

Hearing remark’s saying America has gone soft, Jonah Goldberg wonders if “soft” is a translation of the French work “malaise.”

… Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone “soft”? Really?

Jersey boy moves to the South and says to folks back home. “Y’all come down.” National Review has the story.

I’m a Jersey boy. I was born there, went to high school and college there, and assumed I’d spend the rest of my life there. But though I loved the people and food, the Jersey Shore summers, and short rides through the Lincoln Tunnel to Broadway shows and Madison Square Garden, I gave it all up and moved south. Very far south. I’m not alone.

According to the latest Census figures, and stories in USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere, the South was the fastest growing region in America over the last decade, up 14 percent. “The center of population has moved south in the most extreme way we’ve even seen in history,” Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, said a few months ago.

That migration wasn’t limited to white Yankees like me. The nation’s African American population grew 1.7 million over the last decade — and 75 percent of that growth occurred in the South, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. What those stories and studies failed to report were the reasons propelling that migration. The economic and cultural forces driving this migration south have been ignored by the press. And by the Obama administration

So I figured this Jersey boy who now calls Oxford, Mississippi, home could explain why. This Yankee turned good ol’ boy could explain the pull — no, the tug — of the South. …