Michael Barone looks at the depressing (in every sense of the word) hiring numbers recently announced and writes, “with news that bad, maybe bad economic numbers will no longer be ‘unexpected.’ You can only expect a robust economic recovery for so long before you figure out, as Herbert Hoover eventually did, that it is not around the corner:”
And then there is the political posturing. On April 13 Obama delivered a ballyhooed speech at George Washington University. The man who conservatives as well as liberal pundits told us was a combination of Edmund Burke and Reinhold Niebuhr was widely expected to present a serious plan to address the budget deficits and entitlement spending.Instead the man who can call on talented career professionals at the Office of Management and Budget to produce detailed blueprints gave us something in the nature of a few numbers scrawled on a paper napkin.
The man depicted as pragmatic and free of ideological cant indulged in cheap political rhetoric, accusing Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan who was in the audience, of pushing old ladies in wheelchairs down the hill and starving autistic children.
The signal was clear. Obama had already ignored his own deficit reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97-0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election. People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May it is 1 percent.
“That is a major drop in no time at all,” wrote Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal.
After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.
They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.
The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.
One possible upside is that economic bad news may no longer be “unexpected.” Another is that voters may figure out what is going on.
While Barone namechecks Hoover, it’s also worth remembering that what Barone describes above — excessive regulation leading to regulatory uncertainty leading to a plunge in hiring, happened to his even more “progressive” successor, with even worse results, which as Barone noted last year, didn’t fully ameliorate until the late 1940s.
Of course, at MSNBC, all of the above is a feature, not a bug, as Mark Finkelstein writes at Newsbusters:
So what if the markets tank? Pushing the “progressive” agenda is the paramount goal. That’s the advice Cenk Uygur and his left-wing guest David Sirota have for President Obama. On a day when awful job growth numbers stirred fears of a double-dip recession, Uygur and Sirota still scolded Obama for suggesting that he had to be cautious in his public statements because of the possible impact on markets and the world at large.
Egged on by Uygur, Sirota said Obama should push his agenda “almost regardless” of the consequences.
View video after the jump.
Watch the two libs agree: damn the consequences, full left-wing torpedoes ahead!
Shine on, you crazy Pivens.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member