Labor Market Turmoil

The equity markets are off sharply today and you can see why.

No, it’s not that the BLS headliine employment number from the Establishment Survey is off 49,000, as published in the Employment Situation Summary.

As usual, the real story is in the Household Survey. And there you can see real turmoil in the US labor market. Let’s do the numbers.

• Civilian labor force: up 577,000
  
• Employment: down 285,000
  
• Unemployment: up 861,000
  
• Not in labor force: down 369,000
  

The net effect is that unemployment is up from 5.0 percent to 5.5 percent.

You can see what is happening. People are coming into the labor force looking for jobs, probably to increase income and avoid foreclosure on their homes, but businesses are shedding workers.

That’s what you call turmoil. Let’s hope that things turn around soon and that the Great American Job Machine gets back in gear.

What should the government do? How about stopping one wasteful and unjust program. Just one. My choice would be the ethanol subsidy. What’s yours?

Obama's Vision for America

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) gave a speech on Tuesday obviously intended to be a curtain-raiser on the general election campaign. What did he say, and what does it mean?

In his peroration, Obama declared that we would look back on this moment generations from now.

[W]e will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

This did not go down well with conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. And you can see his point. What do you mean, care for the sick and jobs for the jobless? Aren’t we already spending trillions on all that? What kind of talk is that?

Well, it sums up the content part of his speech, in which Obama established the basic problem America faces after eight years of the Bush administration:

Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college - policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

Hmm. What could he be talking about? But he has plenty of solutions.

On health care, he proposes to

pass health care plan that guarantees insurance to every American who wants it and brings down premiums for every family who needs it.

On Iraq he is starting to sheer away from the simple promise to bring our troops home.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It’s time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.

On the economy:

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It’s understanding that the struggles facing working families can’t be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation.

I know. It doesn’t sound much like change, but more of what Democrats have been doing ever since who knows when: spending money on Democratic voters.

And we know what Obama means by change. He means more power and more money to the educated liberal elite, more money going through the political system.

It means pumping more and more money into more and more rigid privileges and subsidies, and putting off, for another ten years, or maybe for a generation, the hard and thankless work of unwinding the vast, wasteful, and unjust welfare state. Over at usgovernmentspending.com you can see the numbers for government spending at all levels of government this year, 2008 in the United States.

Pensions: $911.6 billion


Health Care: $925.0 billion


Education: $848.2 billion


Defense: $730.8 billion


Welfare: $445.2 billion

If you were going to promise “change” you would be wanting to do something about that. But that’s not the kind of change that Sen. Obama is offering. His kind of change will merely trowel on another layer on the hardened and encrusted spending already not doing very much to help working Americans. In another ten years, all his new spending will be just as encrusted and just as ineffectual as all the moneys were are already spending.

Some day Americans will vote, not just for “change,” but for genuine conservative reform.

But that day is not yet.

Obama We Hardly Know Ye

As Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) becomes the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party today, The Wall Street Journal comments on just what an extraordinary moment this is.

Democrats are nominating a freshman Senator barely three years out of the Illinois legislature whom most of America still hardly knows.

It’s also remarkable that a major political party in the United States has chosen, for the first time, an African-American to be its presidential nominee.

But for me, the parallel with President Carter is palpable. I remember first hearing about Jimmy Carter a couple of years before the 1976 election, and I remember being impressed. But I also remember that the closer we got to the actual election the less I liked him. The concept was great; the details told a different story.

And so it is with Sen. Obama. He is an inspiring speaker who talks about “unity” and “change.” But all the details point to a conventional liberal with conventional liberal views on everything.

Every president, upon entering office, has the opportunity to make a difference on two or three big things. But on all the host of little things he is probably the hostage of his party activists, the up-and-comers who appear out of the campaign and the think tanks to take the executive-level appointments in the Executive Branch.

Up to now we haven’t heard about any Big Things from Barack Obama beyond the conventional liberal position on nationalizing health care and the conventional anti-war stance on the Iraq War.

In other words we have no information that gives us an indication that Obama, the product of a conventional elite education, will be anything other that conventionally liberal. Chances are he’ll expand government power in education, health care, and, of course, the environment. That means more rigidity, more subsidies directed at Democratic voters.

We conservative folks think that this century-long expansion of government is approaching its limits. Education is an expensive mess that produces little. Health care is an expensive mess that delivers little in life expectancy beyond what you could get with a robust public health program and neo-natal care. Pensions are unaffordable in the medium term.

We believe that the conservative ascendancy of the last 30 years gave Americans an opportunity to reverse direction and reduce government power and expense it was too late.

Now it looks like we are going to do it the hard way.

Because we cannot expect a President Obama to go back on all his supporters and change the whole direction of government. Not from what we already know about him.

But maybe he will surprise us.

MSM: What Took You So Long?

Conservatives are having a grand old time this election season watching the Clintons in eclipse.

Back in 1992 Bill Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope, and anyone who disagreed was a Clinton hater.

But now Barack Obama is the Great Liberal Hope and the Clintons are just a dynasty in terminal decline.

What took you so long, MSMers?

We could invent a poetical allusion, and talk, Dover Beach-like about the now retreating sea of faith in the Clintons:

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

And that tells us a lot, because the notion of the Great Liberal Hope is a substitute for religion, an “immanentizing of the eschaton,” the bringing down to Earth of transcendent hope into a faith in a mortal politician.

Columnist Rich Lowry rehearses the canonical withdrawal of faith in finger-on-the-liberal-pulse Vanity Fair.

The usual audience for Clinton excuse-making isn’t listening. Witness the long, scathing profile of the post-presidential Clinton in Vanity Fair by former New York Times White House correspondent Todd Purdum. Purdum writes that it once was "easy enough to retain an enduring affection" for Clinton, despite "his indiscipline" and "his shortcomings."

Yes, it was “easy enough” back in the good old days when Clinton was the Great Liberal Hope.

But no more. Today the liberal elites have fallen out of love with the Clintons. In 2008 the Great Liberal Hope of 1992 is campaigning against the Great Liberal Hope of 2008. Now, all of a sudden, the soft focus lenses come off and the MSM gets to show us the Clintons in high-contrast black-and-white.

All in all, I’d rather be a Republican. Then you never get an even break from the mainstream media; indeed, you never expect it.

"The Metrics Pointed to Failure"

One of the key things to understand about human conflict (and that means human life in general) is that victory usually goes to the guy who gives up last.

So when you speak about Iraq in terms like this: “The Metrics Pointed to Failure,” you are missing the point.

When “you,” as Jennifer Rubin writes, are the very foolish Andrew Sullivan, you see the problem.

Of course the metrics pointed to failure. When things are going wrong, that is the time to hitch it up or quit. President Bush chose to hitch it up and double down. Now it looks like he was right.

Well, says Andrew Sullivan, no doubt the invasion was still a mistake, but it looks like it need not be a catastrophe in the medium term.

Petraeus deserves the lion’s share of the credit; luck and time and the self-defeating nihilism of the Jihadists have helped. But Bush and McCain equally merit points for pursuing the surge, even though the metrics pointed to failure. Obama needs to capitalize on these gains, not dismiss them.

“Obama needs to capitalize on these gains?” You mean, as in, take credit for them?

Anyway, General Petraeus aside, let’s get serious here. Bush is the man who made the decision, to go with the surge when everyone else (especially Andrew Sullivan) was losing their head. If the surge is a success, then Bush gets the credit.

But look for Obama to throw the anti-war left under the bus this summer after a fact-finding trip to Iraq.

Obama's Summer Trip

Our chaps have been doing a good job lately investigating Sen. Barack Obama’s lack of seriousness on Iraq.

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt says to Obama: “Meet Michael Yon. Now, Read His Book.” He is referring to Yon’s recently published Moment of Truth in Iraq.

Presidential candidate John McCain has offered to take Obama to Iraq so that he can update his 872 day old views on that embattled country.

What kind of presidential candidate would last have been in Iraq 872 days ago and counting, the conservatives ask?

Come now, fellas. The answer is pretty straightforward: A candidate who needs to keep the Angry Left quiet until he gets the Democratic Presidential nomination. He wouldn’t want to know about the success of the surge, at least not yet. Not until August.

Up until Obama clinches the Democratic nomination he must be reliably against the war and for a troop withdrawal.

But after he gets the nomination...

Well, already, having rejected John McCain’s travel offer as a cheap political trick, he is saying that he might very well go to Iraq in the summer.

Here’s a prediction. When he gets back from Iraq and his little chat with Gen. Petraeus, Obama will say, “Why, Golly Gee!”

Well he won’t say that, but he will say the equivalent in liberalspeak.

“Why did President Bush lie to me about Iraq and the facts on the ground? I have been to Iraq and I can now say that the briefings I was getting from the Pentagon were all wrong. Based on my understanding of events on the ground and my conversations with people I have met there I believe there is a chance that we can stabilize the Iraq regime and bring our troops home. But in order for this to work the Iraqi government must do better in meeting its milestones, and I will insist that all milestones be met before a single additional soldier is sent to Iraq. Despite the incompetence of the Bush administration and its failed strategy I believe that we can achieve reconciliation in Iraq, and I have a plan to achieve success, one that corrects the mistakes of the Bush administration.”

And, of course the mainstream media will swoon. Best speech on national security by an American politician in the last 50 years, they will say.

They call this sort of thing “The Turn.”

Die, Conservatives, Die!

That’s the message of George Packer in a long New Yorker piece on “The Fall of Conservatism.”

Lefty bloggers are all agog over this piece, and conservatives certainly agree in part. Obviously political conservatism in the United States is in eclipse right now.

Packer argues that conservatism has always been a divisive force. It began with the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan in the 1960s.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me... “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.”

Conservatives might be surprised to learn that the conservative movement was not about Kirk and Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, but instead a election strategy cooked up by Richard Nixon, he of wage and price controls and “we are all Keynesians now.” But you find this meme popping up a lot in liberaldom.

Liberals courageously stood up to the Solid South in the 1960s, the narrative goes, and passed the landmark civil rights acts over their dead bodies. (Actually Republicans voted about 80-20 and Democrats about 60-40 in the House and 70-30 in the Senate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The Democrats’ reward for that was that they lost the South. The evil Richard Nixon crafted a Southern Strategy to attract racist southern whites and so the conservative movement was born.

We pass quickly over the Reagan years with the usual talk about mainstreaming the “positions of the right-wing fringe” and staffing the government with “doctrinaire conservatives” and recommence the narrative in 2001 when Vice-President Dick Cheney decided on confrontation, according to liberal former Senator Lincoln Chafee.

“We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us.”

You can see the point here. Conservatives are a disruptive force that have hindered the natural evolution of beneficial governance and lack a serious attitude to governing.

But Packer has a point. The conservative movement had an agenda of economic reform, winning the cold war, and rolling back the administrative state. Republicans found, after the 1994 election that Americans were not interested in rolling anything back.

So, while allowing welfare reform, Democrats were able to cold-cock Republicans on school choice, on Social Security reform, and are still committed to enclosing the entire health care sector in the grip of the administrative state.

Until the American people are ready to reform the administrative state, there really is no point in electing Republicans. In that sense, George Packer is right. Republicans have “run out of ideas.” Because Republicans are not particularly interested in running with ideas to grow the government.