Good News for the Economy, Bad News for Republi-CONs

UPDATE III: Of course, Obamney claims that Obama made the economy worse. But even reporters are realizing that the Republi-con "level of dishonesty is almost disarming to reporters and news orgs; it’s so brazen and ubiquitous that it’s hard to know how to attack it. " Read the Washington Post, Probing the depths of Romney’s dishonesty and Faced with good news about economy, Romney dissolves into incoherence.

Republi-cons will have to "pick up their game" and tank the economy soon, or TGWLTTGWLLT (The Guy Who Lost To The Guy Who Lost Last Time) (<-- NoBullU.com copyright claim) will lose the election this time.


UPDATE II: And bad news for Republi-cons. Read the Washington Post, U.S. adds 243K jobs in January; unemployment rate drops to 8.3%, which includes this graph:



Some argue the news has been even better, "[b]ecause for the past year, the initial jobs reports have consistently been way too pessimistic. Read the Washington Post, Earlier reports prove too pessimistic, which noted that "[i]f you paid attention only to the initial monthly estimates, the economy added just 1.38 million jobs last year. But if you paid attention to the final revisions, the economy actually added 1.82 million jobs last year — twice as much as 2010, and a difference of 440,000 jobs."


UPDATE: More bad news for Republi-cons.

"The nation’s on-and-off economic recovery has picked up its pace again, the Commerce Department reported Friday, with the U.S. economy growing at an annualized rate of 2.8 percent for the end of 2011.

That rate is the fastest recorded in a year and a half, and follows three quarters of growth below 2 percent."

Read the Washington Post, U.S. economy in fourth quarter 2011 grew at fastest pace in 1.5 years.

As I said in February 2009, tax cuts are not the answer, and again in October 2010, this downturn won't be over 'til the fat lady gets a job.

But despite the best efforts of the Republi-cons to tank the economy, "[t]he December jobs report is good news. Very good news. Payrolls increased by 200,000 -- and the growth was spread relatively evenly across the economy. Retail added 28,000 jobs. Manufacturing added 23,000 jobs. Transportation and warehousing added 50,000 jobs -- 43,000 of them in the 'couriers and messenging' subcategory, which suggests some of those gains are temporary holiday hires. Health care added 23,000 jobs. Food services added 24,000. Mining added 7,000 jobs. The only payrolls that shrunk in December were government payrolls: we lost another 12,000 public-sector jobs."

Read the Washington Post, A good jobs report — and a good year, which includes this graph for the year:



Expect a lot of panic and denial today from Republi-cons, because it is lookin like it will be Obama in 2012.

The Republi-CON Continue to Try to Tank the Economy

UPDATE II:  "The aversion to government spending, and government activity generally, which animates many Americans isn’t actually based on economics, or logic: it is an emotionally driven belief system, founded upon a cockeyed view of American history and buttressed by a variety of right-wing shibboleths.

In the real world that rarely intrudes upon conservative economists and voters, both parties (and all Presidents) are Keynesians. Whenever the economy falters and private-sector spending declines, they use the tax-and-spending system to inject more demand into the economy. In 1981, Ronald Reagan did precisely this, slashing taxes and increasing defense spending. Between 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush followed the same script, introducing three sets of tax cuts and starting two wars. In February, 2009, Barack Obama introduced his stimulus. The real policy debate isn’t about Keynesianism versus the free market, it is about magnitudes and techniques: How much stimulus is necessary? And how should it be divided between government spending and tax cuts?

On both questions, Obama took the middle ground. His $800 billion stimulus program was smaller than many Keynesians, such as Christine Romer and Paul Krugman, wanted. (Romer reportedly pushed first for a $1.8 trillion package, then for $1.2 trillion.) Concentrated over a three-year period, it amounted to 1.1 per cent of G.D.P. in 2009, 2.4 per cent of G.D.P. in 2010, and 1.2 per cent of G.D.P. in 2011. So far, some $750 billion in stimulus money has been paid out: about $300 billion went to tax breaks for individuals and firms; roughly $235 billion was dispersed in the form of government contracts, grants, and loans; and another $225 billion was spent on entitlements—unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, and so on.

And what impact did the stimulus have? Without rehashing the entire debate—we’ve got another five months for that—here are three things to keep in mind.

1. It gave a much-needed boost to spending and growth. . .

2. The rise in federal spending under Obama was pretty modest. . .

3. Paul Krugman is right. To some extent, we already have a Republican economy. With the flow of stimulus money having all but dried up, and with continuing budget cutbacks at the state and local levels, government spending on many goods and services—the government spending that directly impacts G.D.P.—is falling.

You don’t believe it? Take a look at Table 1 in the Commerce Department’s latest report on G.D.P., and focus upon the section labelled “Government consumption expenditures and gross investment.” In 2011, you will notice, these expenditures declined at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent. In the first three months of this year, the rate of decline accelerated—to 3.9 per cent. The cutbacks have extended to all the major areas of government. Federal non-defense spending fell at an annual rate of 0.8 per cent in the first quarter; federal defense spending declined at an annual rate of 8.3 per cent, a shocking figure; state and local spending fell at a rate of 2.5 per cent.

It is a central tenet of Keynesian economics that when the government sector cuts back its expenditures in an economy with slack resources, worried households, and cautious business enterprises, output and growth will stall. That, of course, is precisely what has happened. In a saner world, we would be talking about what should be done right now, rather than after November, to rectify the situation."

Read The New Yorker, Reagan, Bush, and Obama: We Are All Still Keynesians.  

Read also, The Myth of Expansionary Austerity.  

UPDATE:  "[T]he best argument against Republicans’ claims that they can fix the economy. The fact is that we have already seen the Republican economic future — and it doesn’t work."  Read The New York Times, This Republican Economy.  

Republi-cons well know that any good news for the economy is bad news for their election hopes.

Their attacks on the Federal Reserve are "an effort to bully the Fed into doing exactly the wrong thing. The attackers want the Fed to slam on the brakes when it should be stepping on the gas; they want the Fed to choke off recovery when it should be doing much more to accelerate recovery. Fundamentally, the right wants the Fed to obsess over inflation, when the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing."

Read The New York Times, Not Enough Inflation.

Since Obama was elected, Republi-cons have shown their willingness to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.

But there is not need to fear 'the invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes'.

Watch What You Wish For, You Might Lose Your Job, The Sequester Edition

UPDATE IV:  The March jobs reports shouldn't surprise anyone, it's Republi-con déjà vu, 1930s edition, all over again.  Read The New York Times, The Urge to Purge, which begins:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to 'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. ... It will purge the rottenness out of the system.' Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.”

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we?

How naïve we were. It turns out that the urge to purge — the urge to see depression as a necessary and somehow even desirable punishment for past sins, while inveighing against any attempt to mitigate suffering — is as strong as ever. Indeed, Mellonism is everywhere these days. Turn on CNBC or read an op-ed page, and the odds are that you won’t see someone arguing that the federal government and the Federal Reserve are doing too little to fight mass unemployment. Instead, you’re much more likely to encounter an alleged expert ranting about the evils of budget deficits and money creation, and denouncing Keynesian economics as the root of all evil.

Now, the fact is that these ranters have been wrong about everything, at every stage of the crisis, while the Keynesians have been mostly right. Remember how federal deficits were supposed to cause soaring interest rates? Never mind: After four years of such warnings, rates remain near historic lows — just as Keynesians predicted. Remember how running the printing presses was going to cause runaway inflation? Since the recession began, the Fed has more than tripled the size of its balance sheet, but inflation has averaged less than 2 percent.

But the Mellonites just keep coming . . . [demanding] liquidationism, with a strong goldbug streak. . .

But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump.

The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said, been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it.

But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less. "

If ya forgot, Hoover was a Republican.  

UPDATE III:  The March jobs report was "is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad jobs report." Read the Washington Post, Today’s jobs report is a disaster. But why?

As first predicted two months ago, 'sequester will sock a vulnerable economy.'

Too late for the election, but all part of the Republi-con effort to tank the economy. 

UPDATE II:  "Partisan gridlock is the law of the land for the foreseeable future. . .

In short, if you think this is as bad as things can get, just wait awhile."

Read the Washington Post, After the sequestration stalemate, things will only get worse.

UPDATE: "It may be hard to believe, given the intense partisan strafing already ignited by the automatic government spending cuts that begin on Friday, but this year’s budget wars have yet to get fully under way.

In the next month, Democrats and Republicans, so at odds with one another that they are not even negotiating to avert the across-the-board cuts set to kick in at the end of the week, will have to find a way to agree on spending levels for the remainder of this year. If they fail, they could risk a government shutdown starting March 27, when the current authorization for spending runs out."

Read The New York Times, Fight Over Spending Cuts a Prelude to Budget Battles Ahead.

As I said at first back in October 2010, there is an old proverb, author unknown: "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."

"The federal government, the nation’s largest consumer and investor, is cutting back at a pace exceeded in the last half-century only by the military demobilizations after the Vietnam War and the cold war.

And the turn toward austerity is set to accelerate on Friday if the mandatory federal spending cuts known as sequestration start to take effect as scheduled. Those cuts would join an earlier round of deficit reduction measures passed in 2011 and the wind-down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that already have reduced the federal government’s contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product by almost 7 percent in the last two years."

Read The New York Times, Austerity Kills Government Jobs as Cuts to Budgets Loom.

Also read the Washington Post, Sequester will sock a vulnerable economy.

Fat Lady Still Seeks Job (And Republi-CONs Couldn't Care Less)

UPDATE III:  The "president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was once a leading opponent of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to stimulate the economy" finally admits that those invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes were just his wild imagination, but "that persistent unemployment has created 'a time of testing' for the Fed comparable to the rise of inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s."

So much for the Republi-con myth of expansionary austerity.

Read the New York Times, A Fed Policy Maker, Changing His Mind, Urges More Stimulus.

UPDATE II:  "[T]he labor market has experienced neither terrific gains nor terrific crashes in the last three years. Instead, we've suffered the Curse of Goldilocks: Just fine enough to keep pressure from building in Washington for another round of intervention. . .

It makes you wonder: What kind of recovery might we have today if Washington weren't so enthusiastically trying to kill it?"

Read The Atlantic, The Goldilocks Curse: How America's Job Creation Story Got So Boring.

The link is to The Atlantic, The Greatest Risk to the U.S. Economy Is Still the People in Charge of It, which notes that "[t[he recession gave us a lost decade. Congress added a lost year. The budget wars since 2010 have cost us 12 months in job creation." 

UPDATE:  "[I]nfluential people need to stop using the future as an excuse for inaction. The clear and present danger is mass unemployment, and we should deal with it, now."

Read The New York Times, Fight the Future.  

As I said in February 2009, tax cuts are not the answer, and again in October 2010, this downturn won't be over 'til the fat lady gets a job.  And in June 2011 and Jan-Feb 2012, as well as other times -- it's jobs stupid.

But since Obama first won election, Republi-cons have been using best efforts to tank the economy and keep unemployment high.

So "just a reminder that the U.S. labor market is still in rough shape — despite the considerable improvement in recent years."  Read the Washington Post, The U.S. job market is still worse than at any point during the last downturn.

The article includes this graph:

Who Cares About the Economy, the 'Single Most Important thing is for President Obama to be a One-Term President'

For years now the Republi-cons have been sacrificing workers to appease their imaginary inflation god.  They want to crucify the middle class 'upon a cross of gold'. It's all part of the Republi-cons war on the middle class. 

So, of course, the Republi-cons have been trying to tank the economy, because good news for the economy is bad news for their election hopes.

Now others have started to notice that the Republi-cons have "blocked pro-growth policy and backed job-killing austerity – all while blaming Obama."  Read The Guardian, Did Republicans deliberately crash the US economy?

Trump's Big CON: Lacking Honesty, Empathy, and Ability, He Is Simply Not Presidential Material, CONt.

UPDATE II:  "[B]roadcast and cable producers know — and Trump knows deeply — that most Americans don’t really care that much about what they insist they care about. A few headlines will get most through the morning. Twitter and Facebook keep the curious plied with updates, and by day’s end, who really wants to plunge into tax reform?

It is true, nonetheless, that when Trump needs time to fidget with something that actually matters, he tosses a dead fish into the Dasani tank and waits for the media herdlings to begin their march toward the trough.

Temporarily spared the spotlight, Trump fluffs the thatched nest atop his head and invites his brain to hatch some very bad ideas. Thus, we seem to be on the brink of a nuclear confrontation with North Korea. Remember when we used to worry about Trump having his finger on the nuclear launch button? Square that. When the other antagonist is North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, the nightmare can’t be dismissed as the twisted hankie of the persistently worried.

Never have two less qualified 'leaders' been so endowed with such devastating power without the requisite impulse control upon which living civilizations depend. Not to mention that these two nuke hecklers are unmercifully coifed to resemble cartoon characters so that we, the soberly sane, are left to ponder our face-melting demise as a clown showdown between two renegade circus performers. . .

In July, Trump was typically eloquent in describing his approach to thwarting disaster:

“We’ll handle North Korea. We’ll be able to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything.”

Whew, that.

As further insult to reason, this isn’t even a conflict over something at least historically rational, such as the now nearly charming contest between communism and Americanism. No battle of wits, the U.S.-North Korea stare-down is more accurately a battle of nitwits who seem to think threatening nuclear holocaust and mutual destruction is a contest to see who has bigger hands.

No one would suggest that Trump is responsible for all the nail biting these past few months or that Kim’s missile and nuclear tests aren’t deadly serious. But Trump surely has exacerbated matters with his “fire and fury” rhetoric. The goading language of ultimatum, more than a bluffing tactic, is an inflammatory agent such that the possible moves inexorably toward the inevitable. U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, the president’s toughest-talking Cabinet member, recently said: 'We have kicked the can down the road long enough. There is no more road left.'

Perhaps Kim might argue the same. Meanwhile, a can-kicking strategy (i.e., containment and diplomacy) seems a not-irrational substitute for mutual annihilation. Have we reached a point of no return? Will the president of the United States fire Kim, or will he invent some new distraction (staffers: Watch your backs) while he becomes a stealth, wartime leader?"

Read the Washington Post, Have we reached a point of no return?

UPDATE:  "Trump kicked off September by threatening a trade war with China and South Korea and pushing to deport young people at a time when businesses are struggling to find enough workers to fill all the available jobs. . .

So far in Trump's presidency, his threats on trade just turned out to be hot air. He said he would pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Instead, his administration is renegotiating it. He talked repeatedly of putting tariffs on steel and aluminum imports this summer, but it was repeatedly put off and Trump now says it's behind several other major items on his agenda. The China rhetoric may turn out to be more of the same, but businesses are on edge amid news this weekend that Trump had instructed his senior staff to draft the documents that would end the U.S.-South Korean trade deal. . .

The U.S.-Korea trade deal was negotiated under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama. It has bipartisan support because it's not just about economics, it's about containing North Korea and China's influence in Asia. If Trump cancels the deal now, it sends a message to South Korea to deepen its relationship with China. It also plays into North Korea's hands by causing a rift between South Korea and the United States. . .

Trump has been touting how well the economy is doing lately. Unemployment is at a 16-year low, the stock market is soaring, and growth hit 3 percent in period between April and June. In a very encouraging sign, even business investment was finally picking up a bit. But Trump is putting that momentum in jeopardy by angering business leaders yet again.

Read the Washington Post, What Trump is doing with DACA and trade could backfire badly.

"President Trump in three very different settings over the past few days reminded us how unsuited he is for the job. Increasingly, his presidency is defined by blatant lies, an empathy deficit and a frightful lack of ability to navigate through dire international crises. Each has been on display. . .

One is left, still, agog at Trump’s dishonesty, narcissism and inability to project the calmness and discipline we expect from a president. Those who thought he’d grow in office or who perpetually think he’s “pivoting” or “becoming presidential” have engaged in dangerous delusion. One wonders how long we can muddle on with a president this unsuitable without provoking a constitutional or international calamity."

Read the Washington Post, Something is seriously off about this president.