Even as Wall Street rallies on the National Bureau of Economic Research announcement that the recession ended in June 2009, Gallup finds — more than a year later — that 88% of Americans believe now is a bad time to find a quality job.
The percentage of Americans holding these views about finding a quality job is as high now as it was a year ago, and higher than it was at this time in 2008, when the recession was fully underway. Three years ago, in September 2007 — just prior to the official beginning of the recession that December — 55% held this view of the job market.
On Feb. 11, 2009, the Democrats jammed a $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act down the throat of Americans. Not one single Republican voted for it (So much for the Obama administration being a uniting force – “We won. Get over it.”) and in a supremely arrogant partisan act, the Democrats put our great grand children into debt and have brought the nation to the brink of insolvency, where we are nearing the point where we will not be able to pay the mounting interest on the debt, let alone pay for current government expenditures.
The Democrats claimed that spending this enormous amount, in an orgy of Keynesian extravagance, would keep unemployment below 8%. They were incredibly wrong. They bet the farm and lost, and now we are stuck with the mortgage and all the liens with nothing to show for it.
Die-hard believers and kool-aid drinkers insist that unemployment would have been even worse if we hadn’t spent the $787 billion. (This argument is much the same as the one about education. We continue to spend more and more for education, yet our children are no better off now than they were before the money was spent, and in many cases they are worse off. Yet, the continued acceleration in spending is rationalized by appealing to the idea that things would be much worse if we weren’t spending so much on education. There is no argument with such fideism.)
So, for those that haven’t shut down their Mark I computer and are still willing to think about things rather than become defensive, I have an honest question:
Since the “experts” were so wrong about spending $787 billion keeping the unemployment rate at or below 8%, why should anyone trust their assertion that things would have been much worse if we hadn’t spent the money? They have demonstrated that they did not understand the problem and that they did not have a viable solution, so why should anyone have confidence that their assertions are not just defensive posturing to cover their demonstrated incompetence? Further, why should we trust them to borrow from the international community so that they can place a “double or nothing” bet that unemployment will improve by spending yet another $1 Trillion in stimulus?
Previously, Keynesian theory was unproved but widely held. Now, we have empirical evidence (in the form of the failure of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to assuage unemployment) that it doesn’t work; yet the theory remains widely held. The mood of the Democrat elites is that we need to pass yet another enormous spending bill, and this time it will work! What justifies such blind faith?
I am reminded of the Charlie Brown schtick with Lucy and the football. Every year, Lucy holds the football and lures Charlie Brown to kick it, with the assurance that she will not remove it at the last moment and cause him to have a humiliating fall. Every year, Charlie Brown rationalizes trusting Lucy, not based on any empirical evidence, but rather on his hopes and desires to finally kick the football. Every year, Lucy pulls the football away. It is funny in a cartoon, but it is tragic when we do this with our economy. Sadly, only the billionaires have the luxury of being spectators. Government spending policies are forcing us all to be Charlie Brown.
Employment is a trailing indicator. It is one of the last things to improve after a recession.
This recession is not quite as bad as the Great Depression, but it is the worst we have seen since then.
The “crash” was in 1929. After some very week stimulus, there was a slight recovery. And then the long stretch of a depressed economy–sort of a double dip depression. What finally ended the Great Depression was the most massive government spending in history and a debt that soared far beyond the total GDP of the country. The government spending vastly increased production and employment. The program? World War II. The production? Guns, tanks, airplanes, ships, bombs and ammunition. The employment? Besides the factories producing the tools of destruction and death, there were some 16 million men and women “employed” in the U.S. military. We are still servicing the debt.
Let’s pray that isn’t the solution to this recession.