The Peasants are Revolting!

indyfromaz| Speaker Nancy Pelosi 2/4/09: “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs.”
9/3/10: Obama said a recovery is taking place, but not at the speed he’d hope. “That’s why we need to take further steps to create jobs and keep the economy growing, including extending tax cuts for the middle class and investing in the areas of our economy where the potential for job growth is greatest,” Obama said Friday. “In the weeks ahead, I’ll be discussing some of these ideas in more detail.”
Doesn’t the anticipation of more Keynesian economics just make you twitch with excitement?


This is not “better than expected”; it’s worse than expected. This can be gauged not by market expectations for modest job creation, but by long-term experience watching how jobs are created in a normal recovery. By that gauge, we’re in the worst jobs slump since World War II.
Even the normally bland Surveys of Consumers, put out by Thomson Reuters and the University of Michigan, warned Friday that “the probability of a double dip (recession) is high enough for everyone to include such an event in their contingency plans.”
Job data can be misleading. Gallup’s biweekly measure of “underemployment” — the share of workers who are either unemployed or working part-time but want to work full-time — stood at 18.6% in late August, the highest level since June.
“Worse yet,” said Gallup, “(our) job data show that 28% of Americans 18 to 29, 24% of those with no college education, and 22% of women, were underemployed in August.”
For those who have no job but want one, it may be a long wait.
In 2009, President Obama vowed to create 3.5 million jobs, lifting the total by the end of this year to 137.8 million. The actual number as of August was 130.3 million — leaving, as Heritage Foundation economist J.D. Foster puts it, a “jobs deficit” of 7.5 million.
Put differently, at August’s pace of private-sector job creation — 68,000 a month — it would take more than nine years for Obama to reach his goal. And that assumes that there’s no growth in the work force at all.
If it wasn’t clear to everyone by now, it should be: All the actions this government has taken — the $700 billion TARP program, the $862 billion “stimulus,” the health care takeover, financial reform — haven’t “saved or created” 3.8 million jobs, as claimed. Instead, they’ve destroyed millions of jobs — and with them, the hopes and dreams of those who’ve lost the jobs.
But the administration remains clueless, hinting that it may seek another “stimulus” costing billions. This bunch is either willfully doing damage to the U.S. economy, or completely incompetent.
On Friday, the president actually patted himself on the back, saying the employment report was “positive news” that “reflects the steps we’ve already taken to break the back of this recession.”
If there’s one thing that marks this administration as different from others, it’s the steadfast refusal to remove its ideological blinders and learn from its mistakes.
The Democrats’ politicized housing and mortgage policies pushed our economy into its worst downturn since the Great Depression. So, of course, it’s a perfect time for the biggest tax increase in history.
Why is the economy still paralyzed after the president’s much-touted “Recovery Summer”? It may be that private investment, too, has been immobilized.
With unemployment now up to 9.6%, Americans fear that the economy won’t get moving again anytime soon. As a new report from Americans for Tax Reform shows, that fear is completely rational. The report outlines the impact of the largest-ever tax hike that’s coming in just 120 days as the Bush tax cuts expire.
On New Year’s Day, “The top income tax rate will rise from 35% to 39.6% (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10% to 15%. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.”
Of crucial importance to entrepreneurship and job creation, the top capital gains tax rate rises from 15% to 20% next year, while the top rate for taxation of dividends rises from 15% to 39.6%.
And, “These rates will rise another 3.8% in 2013,” ATR points out.
Then there are the 20 new or increased taxes dictated by the ObamaCare government takeover of the health care system. All told, Americans’ taxes will go up by $3.1 trillion, as Heartland Institute economist John Nothdurft noted in IBD last week.
With all that on the horizon for an already-crippled U.S. economy, the Obama administration has saturated the Internet with WhiteHouse.gov propaganda — like an interactive map in which you can “Roll over states to learn how many estimated jobs have been created and saved due to Recovery Act funding.”
Maybe playing with that map of fictional jobs on their computer can give unemployed breadwinners something to do.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in July sent an open letter to the president, Congress and the American people, warning: “Through their legislative and regulatory proposals — some passed, some pending, and others simply talked about — the congressional majority and the administration have injected tremendous uncertainty into economic decision making and business planning.”
“This is why banks are reluctant to lend and why American corporations are sitting on well over a trillion dollars,” the Chamber wrote. “It is why America’s small businesses and entrepreneurs, the engines of innovation and job creation, are starving for capital and are either struggling to survive or unable to expand.”
Amid all this, the president is reportedly mulling “emergency” infrastructure spending — another stimulus to throw tens of billions more in good taxpayer money after bad. (IBD)


Though the Democrats won’t call it a “stimulus” anymore. That word is persona non-grata. It’s now a “jobs bill” And how could you be against that?
But in reality, the Democrats are going into a siege mentality. The villagers are coming for them with pitchforks so they are shoring up their defenses.
It’s not like they can admit to being wrong. After all, they are the morally and intellectually superior Masters of all that they survey.

Eugene Robinson, Mega-Lefist: According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they’re ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans — for whom, according to those same polls (by Liberals no doubt) , the nation has even greater contempt. This isn’t an “electoral wave,” it’s a temper tantrum.
Maybe the american people just need a time out in the corner to think about how badly they have been treating their Intellectual Superiors.
But at this point, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats. (IBD)


It’s just a bunch of ignorant peasants wanting to storm the gates of their castle, after all.
To hold the line against Republicans, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, issued an urgent plea for members in safe districts to help their endangered colleagues by contributing money. She called out to Democrats who were delinquent on paying their party dues and instructed members with no re-election worries to tap into a combined $218 million from their campaign accounts to help save their majority.
“We need to know your commitment,” Pelosi wrote to lawmakers last week in a private letter, demanding that they call her within 72 hours to explain how they plan to help.
She added, “The day after the election, we do not want to have any regrets.”
They are circling the wagons. The hostile natives are after them and they have fight them off.
They have the liberal media to use as their ammunition.
So expect an all out nuclear war.

The following headline appeared at Time.com shortly after the release of Friday’s jobs report:

What’s Good About Rising Unemployment

What should jump out at the eagle-eyed reader is that headline didn’t end with a question mark.
Time senior writer Stephen Gandel was actually making the case that the rising unemployment rate was good news.
He also argues a fallacy: What economists know very well, but most of the rest of us do not is that the unemployment rate never hits 0%. It never even gets close.
So why are you worried now?  It’s not like we can solve the problem, so just be patient, you’re an ignoramus for being so short-sighted.
Watch just how far a liberal media member is willing to go today to make economic data look favorable for the Party currently in power, and imagine the unlikelihood of such a thing happening if a Republican was in the White House.(Newbusters)

You mean like, the uptick in unemployment is good because more people are LOOKING for work instead of sitting on their asses waiting for their Mama Government to take care of them?

Orwell would be proud of you my sons.
Not that they will find them. That doesn’t really matter in the end. Just the perception.
The Hope.
And Change.

And it won’t stop there. Many Democrats are running as “moderates” and “against Washington” and all I have to say to that is, stay tuned to see if voters remember and apply this old adage come Election Day: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

So don’t be fooled.

And if the Republicans don’t get it, the same applies.

Period.

 

Cynthia Tucker (AJC): Our long, hot summer needed another ingredient to induce a fever-like madness in the national psyche: demographic change. Over the last year and a half, many Americans have begun to see a deeper message in President Obama’s inauguration — the end of the white majority. For some,  especially those who are middle-aged and older, it’s a jarring and unwelcome message.

Then she goes on to say she’s not calling you a racist…sort of.

While some prognosticators were naïve enough to believe that Obama’s election signaled the beginning of a post-racial era, it prompted something altogether different: a backlash against the browning of America. The winds of resentment would have blown in even if the economy were booming, but an anemic recovery provided the perfect fuel for a summer of discontent.
Timing is everything. Just as many Americans came to understand that the nation they knew was undergoing a dramatic demographic change, the economy collapsed. Unable to account for the disappearance of jobs and financial security, they linked those developments as cause and effect. The backlash is now at gale force.
So we’ve seen a summer of fury over illegal immigration, despite the fact that illegal border-crossings have plunged in the last two or three years, according to a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center. Islamophobia spiked as conservatives made a case against a proposed Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero, claiming that it would represent a victory for jihadists. It didn’t seem to matter that the imam proposing the center has publicly denounced jihadists.
Just not terrorists, Iran, or Sharia Law. Nothing too big to fail.
So in the coming months as the Democrats turn up the spin to the point where the Earth should stop rotating because it, just keep it in mind this science fact:

If you raise the middle while trying to crush the top you squash the middle.

Uncle Sam becoming Santa Claus

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter. And those who matter don’t mind. ~Dr. Seuss

Government’s role in the economy has reached an unprecedented scale by at least one measure.
A record 30 cents of every dollar in personal income comes directly from government, Commerce Department data show.
And since government produces nothing and gets it money from you and me (the private sector) and there is now 47% of the people who don’t pay taxes at all and One in six Americans receives some form of government aid because of effects of the recession that started in 2007, a review of data indicates.
More than 50 million people are on Medicaid, a program principally designed to help the poor, and nearly 10 million Americans receive unemployment benefits, USA Today said Monday in a report based on data from state officials.
“Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record,” said Vernon Smith of Health Management Associates, a company that compiles data for the Kaiser Family Foundation.
More than 40 million people now receive food stamps, a jump of nearly 50 percent since the recession began, the report said. The unemployment rate in the United States remains above 9 percent.

You have more people dependent on less people for more money!

But don’t worry, this was the “Summer of Recovery” and everything is fine. It just needs more time , according to our Harvard Educated Academic Elites — aka the Obama boys and girls.
And they just need to explain it better and suddenly you’ll have an epiphany and see how wonderful they are!
Including transfer payments (income support and health insurance benefits) and compensation to public employees, government paid out $3.8 trillion of $12.5 trillion in total personal income in July on an annualized basis.
And remember their “urgent” August bailout of state workers for  $26 billion was supposed to be partially paid by cuts in Food Stamps in 2014 (when the Health Care Mandate is set to kick in).
So if they just explain better how their Wimpy “I’ll bailout you today for a payment in 4 years” economics work for you, you’ll suddenly fall madly in love with them and bask in their greatness.
That 30.3% share of personal income compares to 25.5% before the recession and 23.5% in 2000. The level topped 27% in the wake of the 1991 recession and hit a prior peak of 28% in 1975.
So government workers personal income has risen 7.5 % SINCE the recession started (and Congress was taken over by Democrats in 2007). And you’re on the hook for it. Doesn’t that make you happy?
The government’s record share reflects the dismal state of private wages and the ramping of federal transfer payments from a historically high base.
“The private economy has been put through the wringer and thus policymakers have been working hard to fill the hole,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Real private wages remain 8.4% below their December 2007 level and just 1.3% above their February bottom. That low was a level first reached in March 2001.
The weakness in private wages reflects deep layoffs and shorter workweeks due to the recession, and the “not terribly robust” prior economic expansion, said Josh Feinman, chief economist at Deutsche Asset Management in the Americas.
Meanwhile, government income payments are up 17% in real terms since the start of the recession. The real mover has been transfer payments, which accounted for a record 18.4% of personal income in July. That’s up by nearly half from 12.7% in 2000 and more than a quarter from 14.4% in 2007.
The growth is a combination of the inexorable rise of spending on Social Security and health care entitlement programs, as well as a spike in unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid due to weak labor markets and expanded benefits included in the Recovery Act.
Real personal income less government transfer payments remains 5.5% below its December 2007 peak, yet real disposable income is up 2.7% since the start of the recession. That’s due to increases in government income payments and lower tax payments.
Too Much To Get Out?
The government’s role in supporting the recovery is already raising questions about how the economy will fare as the crutches are removed.
“Given how significant its role has become, it does make it more difficult for the government to exit out in a graceful way,” Zandi said.
The stimulus has already begun to fade, with more than a million unemployed exhausting jobless benefits of up to 99 weeks.
Zandi says even further government stimulus would be prudent, given the current slowdown.
In addition to tax cuts and spending hikes, another option would be a government-led mortgage refinancing push to make low-rate loans available to those with insufficient equity in their homes to qualify.
“To have a meaningful recovery, the private sector has to step back up to the plate,” Feinman said.
In prior recoveries, policy stimulus and inventory building eventually allowed for a handoff to a healing private sector, he says.
That handoff “is just not happening” said Feinman. He expects “a long climb back.”
The one area of private compensation that is growing, nonsalary benefits, is not as helpful as wage growth, which puts cash in people’s pockets, Zandi notes.
Real nonsalary compensation (private and government) is up 4.1%, likely reflecting rising health care costs and perhaps some catchup pension contributions.
During the Great Depression, when fiscal stabilizers and safety nets were in their infancy, the government’s share of personal income peaked at just over 16%. Even in World War II, when the government payroll ballooned, its share only briefly neared 25%, falling back below 20% until the 1960s.
The share of personal income is an incomplete gauge of government’s economic role because it doesn’t include direct spending. A better, though imperfect, measure would be the combined federal, state and local government budgets as a share of gross domestic product.
By this score, government was far bigger during World War II, when the federal budget alone topped 43% of GDP. While state and local figures are out of date, total government spending probably will be around 40% of GDP this year. (IBD)


And Obama & Co’s solution, they want to spend more money and still raise taxes on 1/1/11.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
But that’s what happens when you’re in an ideological ditch and you can’t get out.

So bring out the talking points:
“In the month I took office, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month,” the president said. “This morning, new figures show the economy produced 67,000 private sector jobs in August, the eighth consecutive month of private job growth.  Additionally, the numbers for July were revised upward to 107,000. Now that’s positive news, and it reflects the steps we’ve already taken to break the back of this recession.”
The net job loss for August is largely because of the layoffs of 114,000 Census temporary workers.
When May’s job numbers showed a net increase of 431,000 jobs – 411,000 of which were Census jobs — the president did note that “most of these jobs this month that we’re seeing in the statistics represent workers who’ve been hired to complete the 2010 census.” But in those June 4 remarks the president didn’t detail just how many of the 431,000 jobs were Census jobs – 95% of them — and he cited the overall report, and its deceptively large number as evidence that businesses are “starting to hire again. Workers who were laid off, they’re starting to get their jobs back. Companies that were almost forced to close their doors are making plans to expand and invest in new equipment.” (ABC)

So you can have you’re cake and eat it too! So Let them Eat Cake!
…and said he would “in the weeks ahead” be detailing “further steps to create jobs and keep the economy growing, including extending tax cuts for the middle class and investing in the areas of our economy where the potential for job growth is greatest.”
And judging from past performance that means more government jobs and more bailouts for states and unions.
Yeah, that’s the ticket…:(


Asked to what degree he regrets his administration’s decision to call this Recovery Summer, the president stammered then said, “I don’t regret the notion that we are moving forward, but because of the steps that we’ve taken.  And I’m going to have a press conference next week, where, after you guys are able to hear where we’re at, we’ll be able to answer some specific questions.” (ABC)

Oh god, he’s going to EXPLAIN IT AGAIN! Just in case you were too stupid to understand it every other time he’s said it!
If he just explains it repeatedly enough you’ll get it.


“This is what change looks like,” Obama said on signing into law the Health Care Cram down Bill.
So in November, we have to show HIM what change looks like then we have change ourselves too because they are the pimps, and we are the ho’s.  So we have to take them out of the drug dealing business and we have to stop using them.

Mom, Can I Grow up to Be a Buraucrat

The following chart makes that case. Since the beginning of the recession (roughly January 2008), some 7.9 million jobs were lost in the private sector while 590,000 jobs were gained in the public one.  And since the passage of the stimulus bill (February 2009), over 2.6 million private jobs were lost, but the government workforce grew by 400,000.

Plus, as you know, according to the latest numbers from Bureau of Economic Analysis, the average federal civilian worker now earns double what private-sector workers earn when factoring in wages and benefits ($119,982 vs. $59,909). And the gap is increasing.  According to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, in 2000, the average federal worker earned 66 percent more in total compensation than the average private-sector worker. By 2008, that ratio had risen to 100 percent. That’s serious money.
Peter Orszag, the soon to be leaving OMB director, has  explained the differences in pay by saying that public employees have more diplomas (probably implying that they are smarter) than private employees:

But the truth is that a comparison of federal and private-sector pay, even by occupation, is misleading because the employees hired by the federal government often have higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector — even within the same occupations.  When you factor in the education and experience of the federal workforce, there is no statistically significant difference in average pay levels.

Translation: We are better than you.

Edwards, however, shows this is nonsense. He writes:

Some people argue that the federal government has a unique high-end workforce, which deserves to be paid handsomely. But let’s consider some ordinary and mundane offices in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2010, the USDA’s Office of Communications employed 77 people and paid $9 million in wages and benefits. That works out to $117,000 each for these public relations workers, which is close to the overall federal compensation average. Or consider that the 62 employees of the USDA’s Office of Chief Economist earned an average $177,000 each in wages and benefits in 2010. It isn’t just rocket scientists that are earning high federal compensation, it is also workers in many run-of-the-mill bureaucratic jobs.
More importantly, the federal workforce has always had a heavy contingent of skilled professionals such as lawyers. So that is not new, and thus it cannot explain the dramatically faster growth in federal compensation compared to private compensation [...].

Besides, if these diplomas are what gave is the health care reform, the financial bill making its way to Congress and the stimulus, then I would argue that we would be better off if  high-school dropouts to run Congress.
That being said, if bureaucrats have job security, their workforce grows during recession, and they make increasingly more money, being a proud public sector employee should become your little ones’ dream. In this context, wanting to be a fireman or a princess is so yesterday. (Big Government)

So, government apparatchiks (“agent of the apparatus”) are prospering.
Unions get bail outs, exemptions from taxes you’ll be paying, and special deals. Because they are part of the base of the party.
Union Pensions are bankrupting companies and states everywhere. So what. Big Deal.
The Hispanics are being pandered because they are also the base of the party. So Obama’s campaign speech last week on Illegal Immigration was for them, not you.
So if you’re a party appartchik or a wanna-be apparatchik, you’re In like Flint.
But government gets it’s money from taxes.
Only 50% of people even pay taxes.
But hey, if you’re unemployed, the government will pay you to be unemployed and dependent on them.

Persistent unemployment nationwide is threatening to inhibit consumer spending. The latest figures from the government on Friday underscored the depth of the problem, with the economy adding only 83,000 private sector jobs.
There was no relief in sight from Washington, either. Congress left on recess Friday having failed to pass legislation that would have extended unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
On the small-business side, credit concerns are keeping some companies from spending. And on the consumer side, while spending and confidence numbers continue to be weak, personal income has risen for three months straight and savings rates are relatively high. That suggests people now have cash but are just sitting on it.
So they’ll just print more money. Who cares.
It’s not like they want the private sector to create jobs, not really.
Obama has been “focused on jobs” for 18 months now. And you can smell the rotting corpse of neglect and contempt from here.
But “he cares”…


When Obama could have passed comprehensive immigration reform – when he still had 60 Senate Democrats – he didn’t lift a finger to push it. Now that he can’t pass it – it is too late in the year, he doesn’t have 60 votes, and many Democrats will defect – he aggressively pushes it in a national speech.
The opportunism and hypocrisy of his attempt to manipulate America’s Latinos into forgetting his previous inaction is transparent and obvious. Polls show him losing Hispanics due to high and continuing unemployment and losing Congressional seats in the bargain, so Obama has dug up the immigration proposals of former President George W. Bush, dusted them off, and made them his own. He knows it won’t pass. But he hopes that it will reignite Latino enthusiasm for his failing presidency and anger at Republicans for frustrating immigration reform.(Dick Morris)

It was just the latest in cynical political ploys.
Pure Politics. No actual conviction.
So the bottom line is, guess what is likely to be one of  the next great “bubble” to burst.
You got it, Government Apparatchiks and their dependents.
And guess who’s going to bail them out!
Now that’s “Hope and Change” for ya…