The Sister Bertrille Effect

In Best of the Web today, James Taranto notes the cartoonish silliness of the latest (third? fourth?) incarnation of "anti-anti-Obama vigilance" on the Web, AttackWatch.com:

"Rick Perry's massive jobs lie." Here the source is PolitiFact.com, which said "pants on fire" to the Texas governor for the following statement: "[Obama] had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus. It created zero jobs."

AttackWatch.com counters that PolitiFact "refers to four independent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and three private assessments of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to determine that anywhere between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus—'but certainly more than zero.' "

Let's take the Obama Administration and PolitiFact and AttackWatch.com and OFA, et al, at their word and assume that ARRA indeed saved or created 3.6 million jobs. In fact, let's take that as axiomatic.

Given that the US economy lost 0.8 million additional jobs in the wake of ARRA, the inescapable conclusion is that ARRA concurrently lost or destroyed 4.4 million jobs, causing the net loss of 0.8 million jobs. If all of the changes in US employment in one direction were due to ARRA, then all of the changes in the other direction were also due to ARRA.

In the 1960s TV show "The Flying Nun," Sister Bertrille finds out that the reason the Puerto Rican breezes loft her into the air by her exotically styled, overstarched wimple can be expressed in the formula "Lift + Thrust > Load + Drag." Obamanomics recalls this aerodynamics formula, because the Obama Administration and its Democrat allies in Congress thought that ARRA would provide lift and thrust to economic activity, but instead constructed it in such a way - and accompanied it with so much other regulation - that they added massive load and drag to the economy, sending it into further decline.

The corollary formula for Obama's employment policies is: "Saved + Created < Lost + Destroyed."

President Kludge

The story goes that in WWII, a machinist's mate on a battleship fended off any work details by keeping constantly busy making a very important piece of equipment that would increase the ship's fighting efficiency. No one but he was allowed to see it.

One day, the ship's captain informed the machinist's mate that the Admiral would be inspecting the ship the following week and that he was to present his very important invention at the inspection. The mate worked feverishly to the deadline, and as the Admiral was being piped aboard, he picked up the item and rushed up to the deck.

He ran across the deck to where the Admiral was waiting, but slipped and fell, and the marvelous thing went over the side. Everyone in the crew heard it hit the water with a loud "KLUDGE!"

This is supposedly how the slang term "kludge" came into existence. It now has the connotation of something thrown together in haste, held together with chewing gum and baling wire, and just barely able to fulfill the function for which it was intended in the most inelegant and inefficient way. That's one way of looking at the Obama Administration: a huge jury-rig that's shaking itself apart.

But listening to President Obama talk about his Big Jobs Plan and how he's getting it ready for unveiling on Labor Day, it reminded me of the story of the goldbricking machinist's mate and how his fortunate stroke of bad luck ensured he'd never have to present his work for inspection.

Mr. Multi-Tasker (sort of)

Yes, the "hard pivot to jobs" is back, for the umpteenth time. The RNC notes that this is the 15th time that the Administration has announced its focus is shifting to job creation. Ben Smith at Politico (hat tip: The Campaign Spot) takes issue with the specific count, but has to admit that the observation is valid:

February 2009: In a speech to Congress, Obama says his economic plan will be focused on jobs.

November 2009, during the lull in health care debate: “This is my administration's overriding focus.”

January 2010: “What they can expect from this administration, and I know what they can expect from you, is that we are going to have a sustained and relentless focus over the next several months on accelerating the pace of job creation, because that's priority number one.”

April 2010: Post health-care, Obama goes on a bunch of “Main Street” tour stops to talk about jobs in April and May.

June 2010: The beginning of recovery summer.

December 2010: “And I think we are past the crisis point in the economy, but we now have to pivot and focus on jobs and growth.”

January 2011: Obama’s State of the Union focuses on jobs and afterward he makes a big jobs push (even though Egypt is taking up his, and the world's attention), launches “Startup America” initiative.

Obama's spokesman Jay Carney realized something really important about the pivot talk and tried to counter it:

Q: The President has repeatedly pivoted back to jobs, as he did again yesterday. Why is this time any different? Why should the Americans have any confidence this time?

MR. CARNEY: Well, let’s be clear. The President has been focusing on jobs and the economy since the day he was sworn into office, during a month that saw the loss of 800,000 -- nearly 800,000 American jobs in just one month. And that was the situation that he encountered when he took the oath. And that has been his focus since he became President.

There is no question that as President you have to deal with other problems. And in this case, the debt ceiling crisis, if you will, was a manufactured crisis. It was a self-inflicted wound. It was the linkage between something that Congress absolutely has to do -- which is extend the borrowing authority of the United States government -- to specific legislation that one-half of one body of Congress wanted passed.

So Carney's claim is that Obama doesn't need to pivot back to job creation because he's always been focused on it. Good attempt... but Carney then sabotages his own spin by admitting that because Obama had to "deal with other problems," he couldn't make any headway on job creation. He reiterates it later in the briefing:

What the President is saying now, and what you will be hearing him saying, is that you, the American citizen, have heard a lot of talk in Washington about debt ceilings and deficits; and while those are important issues -- very important -- and they have -- they are important in relation to our economy, and they are important in relation to jobs if they are addressed appropriately -- there are other things we can do directly that affect jobs and economic growth.

And that’s what he’s saying. This is not a -- I think “pivot” is not an appropriate word. It’s refocusing. It’s continuing the focus that we’ve had and allowing us to focus even more intently now that we have reached the compromise that was reached with Congress a couple of days ago.

Now, I seem to recall a moment in the 2008 Presidential campaign when John McCain suspended his campaign and called for postponing a debate so that he could go back to Washington to help deal with the burgeoning financial crisis. I also recall that Obama dismissed the call to postpone the debate derisively:

“It’s my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess,” Mr. Obama said. “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.”

So, riddle me this: how is it that the President who came into office knowing he had to be able to deal with more than one thing at once never seemed to be able to keep dealing with the unemployment crisis whenever some other problem arose? Where's that multi-tasking skill been for the last 30 months, Mr. President?

Maybe Obama's multi-tasking capability means he can deal with only one thing at a time in his day job as President while carrying a full fundraising schedule.

Obama's recovery, part 2: not so good for native-born OR immigrant workers

The Pew Hispanic Center has studied the impact of the recession and recovery on foreign-born workers in the USA (presumably including legal immigranthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifs, temporary resident workers and illegal immigrants). In the recovery period, foreign-born workers gained jobs even as native-born workers lost them:

In the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

As a result, the unemployment rate for immigrant workers fell 0.6 percentage points during this period (from 9.3% to 8.7%) while for native-born workers it rose 0.5 percentage points (from 9.2% to 9.7%).

But this isn't unalloyed good news for anybody. It turns out that while foreign-born workers found more jobs, they haven't found enough to make up for their losses in the recession. Moreover, the jobs they have found pay less:

But the jobs recovery for immigrants is far from complete. The 656,000 jobs gained by immigrants in the first year of the recovery are not nearly sufficient to make up for the 1.1 million jobs they lost from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. Over the two-year period from 2008 to 2010, second quarter to second quarter, foreign-born workers have lost 400,000 jobs and native-born workers have lost 5.7 million jobs. The unemployment rate for http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifimmigrants is still more than double the rate prior to the recession when it stood at 4.0% in the second quarter of 2007.

Also, even as immigrants managed to gain jobs in the recovery, they experienced a sharp decline in earnings. From 2009 to 2010, the median weekly earnings of foreign-born workers decreased 4.5%, compared with a loss of less than one percent for native-born workers. Latino immigrants experienced the largest drop in wages of all.

The Obama Administration really does look like it's going to leave individual Americans - and resident non-citizens - poorer than it found them.

Hat tip: Mark Krikorian, The Corner, NRO.

Obama's recovery: working less, for lower pay

It's swell how the Obama Administration's crack economic team is remaking work in America:

• Lower-wage industries -- things like retail and food preparation -- accounted for 23 percent of the jobs lost during the recession, but 49 percent of the jobs gained over the last year, a recent study (pdf) by the National Employment Law Program found. Higher-wage industries, by contrast, accounted for 40 percent of the jobs lost, but just 14 percent of the jobs gained. In other words, low paying jobs are increasing as a percentage of total jobs, while high-paying jobs are on the decline.

• Meanwhile, the percentage of those working who have part-time jobs and want full-time ones surged in mid-February to 19.6 percent -- almost as high as it was a year ago before the recovery began, according to Gallup numbers. That suggests, of course, that a large number of the new jobs created over the last year are part-time.

• And a recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that even though productivity rose 5.2 percent from mid 2009 to the end of 2010, wages increased by just 0.3 percent. That means only 6 percent of productivity gains were shared with workers. In past recoveries, that figure has averaged 58 percent. This time around, far more of the gains went to shareholders, in the form of profits, which are at record levels.

What this means is that even as the headline unemployment figure declines, the total wage base (on which income taxes are assessed and from which consumers spend the money that generates sales taxes) will not recover to its pre-recession levels. And, in turn, that means that Federal and State tax revenues will not recover along with nominal employment numbers.

To grow our way out of our fiscal problems, we'd need high-paying, full-time jobs. Since the Obama Recovery isn't producing those, we're left with the only alternative: cut government spending drastically. (Historical experience teaches that raising taxes reduces tax revenue in the long run.)