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You know our job creation is terrible when even the NY Times finds something wrong with the obama ‘recovery.’

The American economy may be the world’s biggest, but when it comes to job creation since the recession hit at the end of 2007, it is far from a leader.

Indeed, contrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The government reported Friday that the nation added 175,000 jobs in May, continuing a 32-month run of job gains. The unemployment rate moved up slightly to 7.6 percent, from 7.5 percent in April.

But overall employment in the United States remained 2.1 percent below where it was at the end of 2007, according to the statistics bureau. By comparison, over the same period, between December 2007 and March 2013, the number of jobs was up 8.1 percent in Australia; Germany, the biggest economy in the troubled euro zone, has managed a 5.8 percent gain in employment.

“The United States is way below where it should be,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard. “We had a massive downturn and a tepid recovery.”

Still, Friday’s jobs report appeared to be just what Wall Street was hoping for. Major stock market indexes jumped by 1.3 percent as traders bet that the modest employment gains and the uptick in joblessness meant that the Federal Reserve would be forced to keep pumping money into the economy in a bid to stimulate greater growth. …

John Hinderaker posts on the Times’ angst, and the fact our performance lags Canada and MEXICO!

We are now nearly five years into the Age of Obama, and I think pretty much everyone understands that, economically speaking, the record is poor. If you think unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty, declining labor force participation, booming food stamp use and so on are the signs of a healthy economy, then you should be satisfied with the Obama administration. Otherwise, not.

It must have hurt the New York Times to report this, but report it they did: “Many Rival Nations Surge Past the U.S. in Adding New Jobs.”

[C]ontrary to the widespread view that the United States is an island of relative prosperity in a global sea of economic torpor, employment in several other nations has bounced back more quickly, according to a new analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Where might that “widespread view” have come from? The Times takes no responsibility. …

… So how does the current recovery in the U.S. stack up, compared with the same period of time in Canada and Mexico?

Using consistent data on the United States, Canada and Mexico, I plotted GDP growth for the three countries on a quarterly basis from first quarter of 2010 to the present. That timing is significant, because in all three countries the recession was over by 2010 and recovery was in progress. So what we are comparing is the strength of the recovery in the three adjacent countries. This chart shows the quarterly increase in GDP from 2010 Q1 through Q1 of 2013:

As you can see, on a quarter by quarter basis, the U.S. has lagged behind Canada and, especially, Mexico. …

IBD Editors on the missing 7.6 million jobs.

Although somewhat better than expected, the 175,000 net jobs created in May continues the historically tepid jobs growth trend that has come to characterize the now four-year-old economic recovery.

The result has been continued high unemployment, a vast pool of long-term jobless, and an unprecedented number of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.

Highlighting the weakness of the May report is the fact that the number of unemployed climbed by nearly the same amount as jobs created — 101,000 — nudging the unemployment rate up to 7.6%.

As a result, there are still 2.4 million fewer people working than there were in January 2008, the previous jobs peak. And since the recovery started in June 2009, the number of jobs has increased a mere 3.9%, well below the post-World War II average of 9.7%.

In fact, had this jobs recovery merely kept pace with the average of the previous 10, there would be 7.6 million more people working today, and the unemployment rate would be less than half its current level. …

Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has more on the economy.

… But how bad is it, really?

Up until very recently, this was hard to quantify and thus became in large part a political argument. Today, however, enough time has passed that economists now have data points to scientifically put President Barack Obama’s economic policy in its proper place.

On the old legacy-o-meter, things aren’t looking good for Obama and his supporters, who so desperately wanted him to succeed.

I’m tempted to compare Obama’s performance on the economy to this year’s Phoenix Suns basketball team. But that might be too harsh — on the Suns.

The Suns were a crummy basketball team this season, for sure. They were pathetic from start to finish. But when things were not going well, they at least changed things up to get a better outcome. The Suns finished ahead of Cleveland and Charlotte. Had they suited up their old star, Connie Hawkins, they might have finished ahead of a few other teams, too.

President Obama, meanwhile, kept the same economic game plan and failed policies in place for 4½ years. Clear evidence is mounting to show that Obama’s stubbornness (or shall we call it ignorance) might earn him the title of Worst Economic President Ever. …

Michael Strain of American.com has another way to look at the lack of recovery.

The two numbers that will get the most attention, by far, from today’s jobs report are 7.6 and 175,000. In May, the unemployment rate increased just a bit to 7.6%, and employers added 175,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. The basic story of the labor market recovery remains the same: it is steady but too slow.

But I encourage you to pay attention to three other numbers which, to my mind, are much more important than 7.6 and 175,000. They are 2.4, 4.4., and 0.4.

We still have 2.4 million fewer jobs than when the recession officially began 66 months ago. Relative to previous downturns, this performance is quite bad.

We still have 4.4 million workers who have been unemployed for six months or longer. This is a very large number. Outside this downturn, the previous post-war record was under 3 million, back in the 1980s. Over 37% of the total unemployed are long-term unemployed. The previous post-war record, also back in the 1980s, was a comparatively low 26%.

When the Great Recession began in December 2007, 62.7% of the working-age population was employed; today it is a staggeringly lower 58.6%. The share of the working-age population with jobs has increased by only 0.4 percentage points since its low point in the official recovery. Though it doesn’t get much attention, many labor economists prefer the employment-to-population ratio as the best measure of the broad health of the labor market. That this measure has improved so little indicates that the economy is creating just a few more jobs than are needed to keep up with population growth. But this is not enough. We need to create enough jobs to handle the growth of the working-age population and to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. To put it simply, we are not succeeding. …

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Charles Krauthammer on the results in Syria of the United States having an irresolute and irresponsible president.

On Wednesday, Qusair fell to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Qusair is a strategic town that connects Damascus with Assad’s Alawite heartland on the Mediterranean, with its ports and Russian naval base. It’s a major strategic shift. Assad’s forces can now advance on rebel-dominated areas in central and northern Syria, including Aleppo.

For the rebels, it’s a devastating loss of territory, morale and their supply corridor to Lebanon. No one knows if this reversal of fortune will be the last, but everyone knows that Assad now has the upper hand.

What altered the tide of battle was brazen outside intervention. A hardened, well-trained, well-armed Hezbollah force — from the terrorist Shiite group that dominates Lebanon and answers to Iran — crossed into Syria and drove the rebels out of Qusair, which Syrian artillery has left a smoking ruin.

This is a huge victory not just for Tehran but also for Moscow, which sustains Assad in power and prizes its warm-water port at Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin has stationed a dozen or more Russian warships offshore, further protecting his strategic outpost and his Syrian client.

The losers? NATO-member Turkey, the major supporter of the rebels; Jordan, America’s closest Arab ally, now drowning in half a million Syrian refugees; and America’s Gulf allies, principal weapons suppliers to the rebels.

And the United States, whose bystander president, having declared that Assad must go, that he has lost all legitimacy and that his fall is just a matter of time, is looking not just feckless but clueless. …

Jennifer Rubin says Sue and Sam are unlikely to challenge their boss with any original thoughts.

I am under no illusion that Samantha Power or Susan Rice will convince the president to act in Syria or make regime change in Iran our policy or make improved human rights a condition for improved relations with China, Russia or any other country on the planet.

Susan Rice earned her stripes saying the most ludicrous things on national television because the White House wanted her to. Speak truth to power? You’ve got the wrong gal.

Nothing personal to Power, but a United Nations ambassador doesn’t make national security policy and isn’t responsible for much. (Hence, the lunacy of having Rice opine on national television on Benghazi, Libya.) We have had great ones (e.g. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, John Bolton) who spoken up for the United States and defended our values and our allies. We’ve had rotten ones who were less than competent and/or craved consensus with tyrannical regimes (e.g. Bill Richardson, Andrew Young, Rice). The good ones were put there by presidents who had a grip on national security and the bad ones by those who slept through history (ignoring the rise of al-Qaeda) or who hadn’t a clue about how to wield American power. In short, U.N. ambassadors have been mirrors of, not beacons for the presidents they served. …

Spengler, in the person of David Goldman says Muslim civil wars stem from a crisis of civilization.

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum (where I am associate fellow) replies this morning to Bret Stephens‘ June 3rd Wall Street Journal column, “The Muslim Civil War: Standing by while the Sunnis and Shiites fight it out invites disaster.” The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when the Reagan administration quietly encouraged the two sides to fight themselves to bloody exhaustion, did America no good, Stephens argues:

“In short, a long intra-Islamic war left nobody safer, wealthier or wiser. Nor did it leave the West morally untainted. The U.S. embraced Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Iran, and later tried to ply Iran with secret arms in exchange for the release of hostages. Patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner over the Gulf, killing 290 civilians. Inaction only provides moral safe harbor when there’s no possibility of action.”

Today, he adds, there comes “the whispered suggestion: If one branch of Islam wants to be at war with another branch for a few years — or decades — so much the better for the non-Islamic world. Mass civilian casualties in Aleppo or Homs is their tragedy, not ours. It does not implicate us morally. And it probably benefits us strategically, not least by redirecting jihadist energies away from the West.” This is not a good thing for the West, but a bad thing, he concludes. Pipes and Stephens are both friends of mine, and both have a point (although I come down on Pipes’ side of the argument). It might be helpful to expand the context of the discussion.

I agree with Stephens that it is a bad thing. It not only a bad thing: it is a horrifying thing. The moral impact on the West of unrestrained slaughter and numberless atrocities flooding YouTube for years to come is incalculable, as I wrote in a May 20 essay, “Syria’s Madness and Ours.” If Syria looks bad, wait until Pakistan breaks down. The relevant questions, though, are 1) why are Sunnis and Shi’ites slaughtering each other in Syria at this particular moment in history, and 2) what (if anything) can we do about it?

Part of the answer to the first question is that Syria (like Egypt) as presently constituted simply is not viable as a country. Iraq might be viable, because it has enough oil to subsidize a largely uneducated, pre-modern population. As an economist and risk analyst (I ran Credit Strategy for Credit Suisse and all fixed income research for Bank of America), I do not believe that there is any way to stabilize either country. In the medium term, Turkey will lose national viability as well. I outlined some of the reasons for this view in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too).

Globalization ruins countries. It has done so for centuries. Tinpot dictatorships that keep their people in poverty the better to maintain political control will break down at some point. Mexico broke down during the 1970s and 1980s; the Mexican currency collapsed, the savings of the middle class were wiped out, and the economy shut down. In 1982 I wrote an evaluation of the Mexican economy for Norman Bailey, then director of plans at the National Security Council and special assistant to President Reagan. I saw a crash coming, and no way to to prevent it.

Three things prevented Mexico from dissolving into civil war (as it did during the teens of the past century at the cost of a million lives, or one out of seven Mexicans). One was the ability of Mexicans to migrate to the United States, which absorbed perhaps a fifth of the Mexican population. The second was the emergence of the drug cartels as an alternative source of employment for up to half a million people, and generating between $18 and $39 billion of annual profits. And the third is the fact that Mexico produces its own food most years. When the currencies of the Latin American banana republics collapsed, there was always enough food to maintain minimum caloric consumption. Not so in Egypt, which imports half its food and is flat broke. Egypt and Syria are banana republics but without the bananas (Daniel Pipes assures me that Egypt does grow bananas, and he personally has eaten them, but they are not grown in sufficient quantity to meet the country’s caloric deficit). Turkey was the supposed Muslim model for democracy and prosperity under moderate Islam. That idea, which I disputed for years, has gotten tarnished during the past week.

Israeli analysts have understood this from the outset. Two years ago (in an essay entitled “Israel the winner in the Arab revolts“) I quoted an Israeli study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture preceding the civil war: …

 

… If we had a Syrian elite dedicated to modernization, free markets, and opportunity, we could have an economic recovery in Syria. But the country is locked into suppurating backwardness precisely because the dominant culture holds back individual initiative and enterprise. The longstanding hatreds among Sunnis and Shi’ites, and Kurds and Druze and Arabs, turn into a fight to the death as the ground shrinks beneath them. The pre-modern culture demands proofs of group loyalty in the form of atrocities which bind the combatants to an all-or-nothing outcome. The Sunni rebels appear quite as enthusiastic in their perpetration of atrocities as does the disgusting Assad government.

What are we supposed to do in the face of such horrors? I am against putting American boots on the ground. As I wrote in the cited May 20 essay, “Westerners cannot deal with this kind of warfare. The United States does not have and cannot train soldiers capable of intervening in the Syrian civil war. Short of raising a foreign legion on the French colonial model, America should keep its military personnel at a distance from a war fought with the instruments of horror.”

The most urgent thing to do, in my judgment, is to eliminate the malignant influence of Iran …

For lighter fare, how about an interview with one of Pickerhead’s favorites; Carl Hiaasen.

Carl Hiaasen’s latest book, “Bad Monkey,” begins when a couple of tourists on a fishing trip reel in a human arm. It’s just a typical day in South Florida, the setting for Mr. Hiaasen’s best-selling novels, which both satirize and celebrate the state that he’s called home for almost all of his 60 years.

The colorful coterie of characters in Mr. Hiaasen’s new book (to be published Tuesday) includes a voodoo queen, a kinky coroner and the author’s usual assortment of corrupt politicians. He tells the story in such a matter-of-fact way that he could be reporting it—which, in fact, he did. Most of the book’s events are inspired by real places and true stories. As a longtime reporter, Mr. Hiaasen knows that reality is often stranger than fiction, especially in Florida.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say this is the most corrupt place in the country,” he says with delight.

“Bad Monkey” deals with a former cop’s quest for redemption against the backdrop of South Florida’s real-world scandals—from the Russian underworld in the Florida Keys to fugitives who escape to the Bahamas. This afternoon in late April, however, Mr. Hiaasen is relaxing in a decidedly different milieu. He’s sitting in his living room, decorated in soothing blues and soft beiges, in a two-story house on a quiet corner of Vero Beach, Fla., just across the street from the ocean. …