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Veronique de Rugy from George Mason has a revealing chart of job creation under presidents all the way back thru Truman.
… Here is what the data show:
Since President Obama took office, fewer jobs were created than were lost. Actually, some 300,000 fewer Americans are employed then when the president took office. That’s mainly because a large number of jobs were lost during 2009 and the so-called recovery is the slowest one of all time, with very meek monthly job creation and weak economic growth.
It would take Obama roughly 280,000 new jobs per month for every month from now until January 2013 to get him out of last place. [He would need 2.1 million new jobs per month for every month until January 2013 to catch up to Carter.]
While it would be unfair to compare Obama with Clinton, this chart shows that at this point President Obama’s job numbers are far worse than Presidents Carter, Kennedy, and Ford, who were in office almost as long or served much shorter periods than he has.
This chart also shows two-term presidents:
Presidents Clinton and Reagan saw the highest gains in jobs and maintained some of the lowest unemployment rates during their administrations.
President George W. Bush’s overall record is underwhelming [to say the least], especially considering that so many of the jobs created during his term were government jobs.
Here also are a few facts about our labor market.
In theory, we are exactly three years into recovery.
This is the slowest recovery in history.
Wage growth over the last twelve months is the slowest ever.
We have the slowest economic growth of any recovery.
We have had an important drop in labor-force participation that makes unemployment rates look better than they probably should.
Now, there is an important question: Under these conditions, are we really recovering? …
De Rugy alludes to another chart, this one prepared by Keith Hall of the Mercatus Center at George Mason. Here is the description of that chart.
The release of the June labor market data marks the third anniversary of the official end of the recession in June 2009. Thus, this is a good moment to look at the single best indicator of U.S. labor market health. As is so often the case, it is also one of the simplest: the employment-to-population ratio. In essence, this tells us what share of the working-age population (16-years old and above) has a job. When the ratio goes up, things are getting better. When it doesn’t, the labor market is not recovering.
So, what kind of labor market recovery have we seen over the past three years? As the graph shows, the answer is simple: NONE. Job growth hasn’t been strong enough to support our growing population. The employment-to-population ratio was 59.4% three years ago. It hit a 25-year low of 58.5% in October of 2009, and yet it remains at just 58.6% today.
To know what kind of job growth we need for economic recovery, we must first realize that the United States is still a growing nation. Each month, the working-age population grows by an estimated 180,000 people. Simply to support this growing population, we need to add at least 130,000 new jobs. With anything less, we fall further behind. No matter what the other economic data indicates, a true labor market recovery requires job growth strong enough to consistently raise the employment-to-population ratio. This would mean adding at least 250,000 new jobs per month, every month, for years.
Power Line introduces us to yet another lie from the administration.
Delphi, a General Motors company, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. When the government bailed out GM, 20,000 Delphi workers lost nearly their entire pensions. But Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.
The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.
But now, the Daily Caller has obtained emails showing that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of the 20,000 salaried Delphi retirees. According to the Daily Caller, the emails contradict testimony given to Congress by Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout. …
Ed Morrissey has more on the Delphi pensions.
… Very obviously, Treasury was at least involved in the decision-making, if not the ultimate decider of the Delphi pension termination. A Treasury spokesman insisted to the DC that the PBGC made the decision on its own, but it looks pretty clear that the PBGC was at least coordinating efforts with the Obama administration. To the extent that any officials testified differently, we may be seeing more subpoenas and Congressional hearings in the near future. One question in particular will be why the PBGC terminated the non-union pension while taxpayers absorbed the union pension obligations, and whether that outcome was coordinated all along by the White House.
Richard Epstein exposes the foolish fracking opinions of Tom Friedman.
It is amazing how quickly the technological and political landscape can change over a period of only four years. At this point during the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama was touting a promising future that featured scads of new jobs in the green energy business. The United States would be able to solve two problems with one bold stroke. It didn’t quite pan out that way. The Solyndra website leads off with its promise of “Clean and Economical Solar Power from Your Large Rooftop,” only to note that the bankrupt firm has suspended operations in order to evaluate its reorganization options.
This brutal reality reflects one insuperable difficulty with these renewable energy sources. Today, as in 2008, no one has found a way to store them except at a prohibitive cost. Unlike the much maligned fossil fuels, wind and solar power must be used when they are created, whether needed or not. Both wind and solar power sources are highly variable, so that, all too often, they are in greatest supply when they are least needed. In the absence of a seismic technological breakthrough, they are doomed to remain boutique sources of energy that cannot be counted on to power the economy going forward.
These major difficulties have not stopped the United States government from lavishing extensive subsidies on an industry that is ill-equipped to use them. These subsidies programs have failed for mundane but compelling reasons. No government has ever succeeded in trying to shape industrial policy with state subsidies, for the simple reason that it has neither the knowledge nor the incentives to pick which fields make sense to invest in or which firms in these fields have latched onto a viable technology.
No government should, of course, ban investments in solar and wind energy, but the prudent strategy is to let these investments be made by venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs who might actually know what they are doing. And currently, the smart money seems to be steering clear of renewable energy technologies.
At the same time that renewable energy sources have proved to be a stupendous bust, the fossil fuel business has undergone a mini revolution. I am not speaking of the sorry state of affairs with ethanol, whose huge subsidies, given the current drought, are now wreaking havoc in the food market because of its sheltered status as a “renewable” energy source under current regulation. No, the huge source of the new revolution is fracking, which has transformed the energy market. …
… it is disconcerting to see the environmental backlash against the expansion of fracking, as was recently defended by Thomas Friedman in a recent op-ed entitled “Getting it Right on Gas.” Relying on a set of recommendations from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Friedman takes the position that what is good news in the short run could in reality spell bad news in the long run. The great fear, we are told, is that the United States could remain “addicted to fossil fuels for decades,” which Friedman denounces as “reckless.”
Friedman’s nightmare scenario has two components. The first is that government regulators could go soft on the pollution that fracking creates in both water and air. The second is that the short-term success of fracking will dull the incentives to invest in renewables, which emit no pollution at all.
Neither objection leads to a sound energy policy. …
Ever wonder why Washington always gets it wrong? Phillip K. Howard says it is because DC is a deviant sub-culture.
Behavior that would seem grotesque to most Americans doesn’t raise an eyebrow inside the Beltway. Only radical change can fix the problem.
A deviant subculture is defined by sociologist Anthony Giddens as one “whose members have values which differ substantially from those of the majority in a society.”
American government is a deviant subculture. Its leaders stand on soapboxes and polarize the public by pointing fingers while secretly doing the bidding of special interests. Many public employees plod through life with their noses in rule books, indifferent to the actual needs of the public and unaccountable to anyone. The professionals who interact with government — lawyers and lobbyists — make sure every issue is viewed through the blinders of a particular interest, not through the broader lens of the common good. Government is almost completely isolated from the public it supposedly serves. The one link that is essential for a functioning democracy — identifiable officials who have responsibility to accomplish public goals — is nowhere to be found. Who’s in charge? It’s hard to say. The bureaucracy is a kind of Moebius strip of passing the buck. The most powerful force in this subculture is inertia: Things happen a certain way because they happened that way yesterday. Programs are piled upon programs, without any effort at coherence; there are 82 separate federal programs, for example, for teacher training. Ancient subsidies from the New Deal are treated as sacred cows. The idea of setting priorities is anathema. Nothing can get taken away, because that would offend a special interest. …