A Grim Jobs Report for America
A Grim Jobs Report for America
Larry Kudlow
You would think $1 trillion in spending stimulus and $2.5 trillion of Fed pump-priming would produce an economy a whole lot stronger than 1.9 percent GDP, which was the revised first-quarter number. And you’d think all that government spending would deliver a whole lot more jobs than 69,000 in May.
But it hasn’t happened.
The Keynesian government-spending model has proven a complete failure. It’s the Obama model. And it has produced such an anemic recovery that frankly, at 2 percent growth, we’re back on the front end of a potential recession. If anything goes wrong -- like another blow-up in Europe -- there’s no safety margin to stop a new recession.
And that brings us to the grim May employment report, which generated only 69,000 nonfarm payrolls. It’s the third consecutive subpar tally, replete with downward revisions for the two prior months. It’s a devastating number for the American economy, and a catastrophic number for Obama’s reelection hopes. All momentum on jobs and the economy has evaporated.
Inside the May report, the data is just as bad. The unemployment rate rose slightly from 8.1 to 8.2 percent. The so called U6 unemployment rate, tracking the marginally employed or completely discouraged, increased to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent. And labor earnings are barely rising at 1.7 percent over the past year, almost in line with the inflation rate. In fact, through April, after-tax, after-inflation income is scarcely rising at 0.6 percent for the past year.
The private workweek also fell in May. So did the manufacturing workweek and aggregate hours worked for all employees. The small-business household survey did rise, but that follows declines in the prior two months.
Barack Obama doesn’t get this, but businesses create jobs. And firms have to be profitable in order to hire. Yet the president is on the campaign trail criticizing Mitt Romney by degrading the importance of profits. Huh?
Without profits businesses can’t expand. And if they don’t expand, they can’t hire. And if they don’t have profitable rates of return, they’re not going to attract new capital for investment.
Which brings us to a couple of important reasons for the virtual freeze in hiring.
First there’s the fiscal tax cliff. If all the Bush tax rates go up, incentives will go down and liquidity will leave the system. You can’t pick up a newspaper these days and not find a story about how the fiscal cliff is elevating uncertainty and slowing U.S. growth. House Speaker John Boehner asked Obama for help in extending the Bush tax cuts this summer. But Obama said no. Instead, he wants to raise marginal tax rates on successful upper-income earners, capital gains, dividends, estates, and many successful corporations.
Where’s the corporate tax reform that would lower rates and broaden the base and end the double-taxation of the overseas profits of American companies? A business tax cut would help enormously, but it’s nowhere in sight. Neither is the Keystone Pipeline, which is a surefire job-creator. Obama is too busy trashing Bain Capital profits and Romney’s business career, both of which, by the way, have recently been praised by former president Bill Clinton. (It was Clinton, you might recall, who lowered investment taxes and presided over an economic boom.)
A second uncertainty facing businesses is the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare due in a few weeks. If all those crazy tax-and-regulation mandates are deemed unconstitutional, it’s Katy bar the door as businesses put profits to work and hire. But they’re not going to move until they see that court decision.
Then there’s the whole European mess with the threat of banking contagion from Spain, Greece, and Italy. That could blow up the whole world economy if it goes completely sour. The Europeans should guarantee all bank deposits, interbank loans, and bank debt until this story is straightened out. But they’re not. So the problem festers.
And now European companies are withdrawing money from local banks and investing in dollars (especially through Treasury bonds that are yielding an incredibly low 1.5 percent). But the rapid rise of King Dollar is generating commodity deflation, which is a deterrent to manufacturing production. According to the May ISM report, manufacturing is slowing.
The Fed may yet launch a new quantitative easing to stop commodity deflation and accommodate the gigantic worldwide dollar demand. But the merits of this move are dubious. On the other hand, an extension of the Bush tax cuts right now would stop the economic and job slide and reestablish certainty.
In fact, all the countries around the world should move to the supply side with lower tax rates to spur economic-growth incentives. Europe, China, and Latin America ought to go back and read Ronald Reagan’s speeches and examine his actions when he faced a similar crisis 30 years ago. It would be an hour or two well spent.
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POSTED: 6:05 p.m. EST, November 8, 2006
(CNN) — Democrats promised Wednesday to lead the country in a new direction after winning control of the House for the first time in 12 years in midterm elections.
By early Wednesday, Democrats had picked up at least 29 seats; they needed 15 to capture a majority in the House. Two Democratic seats in Georgia that were targeted by Republicans remained too close to call.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-California, is now poised to become the first female speaker of the House.
Pelosi promised to lead the nation in a new direction “in partnership, not in partisanship.”
Link
Link
Its all about how you interpret the info.......
The Tea Party Lives...in Maryland?!
By Doug Mainwaring
The loud Tea Party summer of 2009 was the visible, audible manifestation of a seismic event: the birth pangs of a huge network of grassroots activists from coast to coast.
It was the sound of unconscionable government growth and spending careening out of control, crashing against the consciences of stalwart citizens. It was the sound of a multitude of Americans suddenly and unexpectedly experiencing in unison an "Aha!" moment, as they finally began to grasp in a very real and experiential way what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, "No government can continue good, but under the control of the people."
- After a decade or more of abandonment, Montgomery County's Republican Legislative District 15 is a beehive of organized activism and serves as a model for other legislative districts in the state. In addition to creating an ever-expanding e-mail database and an enviable professional website, precinct heads now remain in frequent contact with Republican voters through the District 15 newsletter, e-mails, phone contacts, social events, and a wide range of activist endeavors.
The district is in a suburb of Washington, D.C. where currently, every single member of the county council, every state delegate and, the state senator are liberal Democrats.
Realizing that local elections are crucial for the future direction of their local communities and the state, conservatives have focused on winning campaigns for school boards and county and city elected offices. David Ferguson, executive director of the Maryland GOP, said that Republicans "now control the majority of elected offices (including commissioners, state's attorneys, sheriffs, and county clerks), 158 to 157, and we control fifteen of the 24 county councils. We had great success in 2010, and we look forward to building on that success in 2014."
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/the_tea_par ty_livesin_maryland.html#ixzz1wkMpXYuW
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/the_tea_par ty_livesin_maryland.html#ixzz1wkMDIx48
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Socialism, by Any Other Name, Is Still Socialism
By William Sullivan
The Washington Post heralded the election of François Hollande in France as the dawn of a new era, and the birth of a new breed of socialism. It is described as "free-market social democracy -- a pragmatic ideology in which nationalizations, clenched fists, and hammer and sickle are things of the past."
The implication is that the Western opinion of socialism has justifiably evolved to one of acceptance. Sure, socialism gets a bad rap for all those times in history when it went horribly wrong and, you know, killed all those millions of people. But the right people weren't in charge, you see, and their ideas were the wrong ones. What is being offered today in France is a newer, smarter socialism. The one that's never been tried before -- the one that works.
But despite the Western media's warm reception of this "pragmatic socialism" as something new, the disturbing truth is that socialism has always been always presented this way.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/socialism_b y_any_other_name_is_still_socialism.html#ixzz1wkPY mzou
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Stealth Islamic Propaganda Shown to Six Million American Students
By Larissa Scott
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/stealth_isl amic_propaganda_shown_to_six_million_american_stud ents.html#ixzz1wkUYoypS
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Do Democrat Convention city's have to deal with this?
And what does it say about the contrast in followers of each party?
Conventional Wisdom
By Larry Thornberry on 6.1.12 @ 6:08AM
Tampa becomes a living cliché, as it prepares -- with dread -- for what it asked for.
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Its long,but well worth it.
Its known to most of us but never have I seen it laid out in such form.
I wanted to cut and paste almost every other paragraph but This one is the one I chose.
JFK and the Death of Liberalism
By Jeffrey Lord on 5.31.12 @ 6:11AM
John F. Kennedy, the father of the Reagan Democrats, would have been 95 this week.
Would JFK have let the arrogant liberal elitism that was bubbling under the surface of his own administration metastasize to so many American institutions -- including his own party -- had he lived?
Would he have sat silently as the liberal culture turned against the vast American middle and working blue collar class and its values, sending JFK voters into the arms of Republicans in seven out of twelve of the elections following his own?
Please read this in its entirety.
Link
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/05/31/jfk-and- the-death-of-liberalis/3
By Peter Ferrara on 5.30.12 @ 6:09AM
Yes, Obama's spending binge did happen -- all of it, like Obama's unprecedented deficits, on his watch.
Link
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/05/30/plenty-o f-nutting/
I am under the weather today and just sharing some of the good reads I have found while trapped inside.
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