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James Pethokoukis with seven graphs that sum up the record of this administration.
My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. Enjoy!
1. The overly optimistic unemployment forecast of the Obama White House. This may be the most infamous economic prediction in U.S. political history (helpfully updated by The Right Sphere). For the original January 2009 chart from White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, see here.
2. The real unemployment rate. The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this: …
Jennifer Rubin cites the worst 12 political moves of the past year.
In 2011 we saw some impressive political moves. For example, Rep.Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) figured out how to make himself as the House Budget Committee chairman the chief opponent to President Obama on fiscal issues. But there were also some boneheaded plays. In the spirit of the holiday, I have 12 that stand out.
1. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) decides not to run for president. He would certainly be the front-runner by now and could very likely have galvanized disparate elements of the GOP.
2. Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) decides to run for president.Lacking preparation, policy ideas and verbal skill, he soon crashed and burned as a candidate. Barring a miraculous comeback, he will have permanently harmed his political stature.
3. Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich decides to attack Mitt Romney on his Bain Capital experience. This may have been the key turning point in the race, when Gingrich lost support of many on the right and Romney stood up for free market capitalism. …
OK, so what do left-liberals think of the administration? Two Washington Post writers come up with a scathing report on the administration’s green investments.
Linda Sterio remembers the excitement when President Obama arrived at Solyndra last year and described how his administration’s financial support for the plant was helping create hundreds of jobs. The company’s prospects appeared unlimited as Solyndra executives described the backlog of orders for its solar panels.
Then came the August morning when Sterio heard a newscaster announce that more than a thousand Solyndra employees were out of work. Only recently did she learn that, within the Obama administration, the company’s potential collapse had long been discussed.
“It’s not about the people; it’s politics,” said Sterio, who remains jobless and at risk of losing her home. “We all feel betrayed.”
Since the failure of the company, Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.
Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.
The records, some previously unreported, show that when warned that financial disaster might lie ahead, the administration remained steadfast in its support for Solyndra.
The documents reviewed by The Post, which began examining the clean-technology program a year ago, provide a detailed look inside the day-to-day workings of the upper levels of the Obama administration. They also give an unprecedented glimpse into high-level maneuvering by politically connected clean-technology investors.
They show that as Solyndra tottered, officials discussed the political fallout from its troubles, the “optics” in Washington and the impact that the company’s failure could have on the president’s prospects for a second term. Rarely, if ever, was there discussion of the impact that Solyndra’s collapse would have on laid-off workers or on the development of clean-energy technology.
“What’s so troubling is that politics seems to be the dominant factor,” said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “They’re not talking about what the taxpayers are losing; they’re not talking about the failure of the technology, whether we bet on the wrong horse. What they are talking about is ‘How are we going to manage this politically?’” …
And David Brooks thinks they need better historians.
The members of the Obama administration have many fine talents, but making adept historical analogies may not be among them.
When the administration came to office in the depths of the financial crisis, many of its leading figures concluded that the moment was analogous to the Great Depression. They read books about the New Deal and sought to learn from F.D.R.
But, in the 1930s, people genuinely looked to government to ease their fears and restore their confidence. Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.
According to a Gallup survey, 64 percent of Americans polled said they believed that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 26 percent believed that big business is the biggest threat. As a result, the public has reacted to Obama’s activism with fear and anxiety. The Democrats lost 63 House seats in the 2010 elections.
Members of the administration have now dropped the New Deal parallels. But they have started making analogies between this era and the progressive era around the turn of the 20th century.
Again, there are superficial similarities. Then, as now, we are seeing great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top. Then, as now, the professional class of lawyers, teachers and journalists seems to feel as if it has the upper hand in its status war against the business class of executives and financiers.
But these superficial similarities are outweighed by vast differences. …
Alana Goodman posts on Canada’s pipeline warnings.
The Obama administration has spent three years reviewing the Keystone XL pipeline, and the Canadian government is understandably frustrated that the decision has been kicked further down the road. After the White House insinuated earlier this week that it might reject the pipeline, Prime Minister Stephen Harper threatened to take the oil elsewhere (via HotAir):
Canada could sell its oil to China and other overseas markets with or without approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the United States, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
In a year-end television interview, Harper indicated he had doubts the $7-billion pipeline would receive political approval from U.S. President Barack Obama, and that Canada should be looking outside the United States for markets.
“I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to Asia. I think we have to do that,” Harper said in the Monday interview with CTV National News?.
Right now, there’s no avenue for Canada to get the oil to the Pacific for shipping, so any deal with China would be far down the road.
Proposals to build a pipeline extension to reach Canada’s West Coast are also likely to get major pushback from environmentalists. But it is possible. At Huffington Post Canada, Christopher Sands explains:
Canada’s best move now would be to quietly build the pipeline to the West Coast, regardless of the outcome of the U.S. 2012 elections or the progress of Keystone XL construction. Canada needs real options to avoid being repeatedly held captive to American political caprice. To earn U.S. respect and stop the bullying by environmental groups and politicians, Canada must turn its Keystone threats into credible promises, and act on them when necessary.
This would be a major disappointment, but it would be hard to blame Canada for taking that route. Let’s say Obama gets reelected, and the Keystone XL decision comes due in 2013. There’s a good chance Obama will approve the pipeline once he’s free of reelection constraints, but it’s far from certain. Who knows what the political dynamic will be like in a year?
Robert Bradley in Forbes writes about the unlimited energy potential of North America. If only we had leadership in DC that would take advantage of it.
The fossil-fuel energy era is not waning. Quite the opposite; it is still young.
For decades, activists have been trying to convince the American people that declining resources would forever make us dependent on expensive foreign oil. But according to a new report from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) on North America’s energy resources, that line of thinking is flat-out false. Based on the latest official statistics, domestic oil, natural gas, and coal deposits are much more extensive than commonly realized.
The real problem is that much of our resources are not being developed because of antiquated, heavy-handed government regulations. As a consequence, the American economy is being deprived of significant job creation and new investments.
Consider this. Total recoverable oil in North America exceeds 1.7 trillion barrels, which is more oil than the entire world has used over the last 150 years. And that amount alone could meet the energy needs of the United States for the next 250 years.
An estimated 1.4 trillion of those barrels are buried under American soil. For some perspective: the total proven reserves in Saudi Arabia is just about 260 billion barrels.
And even that 1.4 trillion figure might be an underestimation. Future technological innovation may well lead to improved detection techniques, helping us locate oil deposits currently uncovered. Or innovation could improve extraction techniques, enabling us to tap into reserves previously thought unreachable. …