Panic Or Sithian Calm?

Obamunists are, as we know, Marxist-Alinskyists, not Keynesians.  Nobody who believes in demand-side economics would be so daft as to allow a gargantuan tax hike to strike a recessed economy like a plutonium bomb.

But if Keyesians they are going to persist in impersonating, they're going to need consumer confidence to be robust if any real economic recovery is ever to get off the ground.

Lesson - Marxism-Alinskyism and Keynesianism are mutually exclusive:

In the real world, skyrocketing taxes and debt coupled with rampaging statism belching out one mammoth multi-thousand page regulatory industry takeover after another are not confidence builders for ANYBODY, not just consumers.  Business get slammed with crushing new costs and restrictions, they lay off more staff and don't hire replacements, more people are relegated to the permanent unemployed/indolent/dependent class, there's less disposable income with which to consume, driving down retail sales, driving down wholesale sales, driving down manufacturing orders, prompting more layoffs, etc., etc., etc.  The fact is there's no way to break this depressionary cycle absent a complete and total reversal of economic policy in Washington, D.C., and that's about as likely to come out of this regime as KFC Double Downs on the White House residence menu.

Yet, curiously, Larry Kudlow describes this blind Obamunist zealotry as "panic":

The bottom line? Panic over this stalled economy may be setting in.

The unemployment rate is hanging stubbornly at 9.5% and economic growth looks to be slipping to only 2% to 3%. In order to get unemployment down significantly, the economy has to grow by at least 4%.

Inside July’s jobs report, small-business household employment dropped by 159,000 jobs — a very bad sign. In the three months to April, this survey produced 417,000 new jobs. In the three months to July, it fell by 151,000.

At the same time, private payrolls in the corporate survey rose by only 71,000 in July, compared with an expected gain of 100,000. In the three months to April, payrolls gained by 154,000. Over the past three months, payrolls have increased only 51,000. They need to grow at a better-than 200,000 monthly pace in order to reduce joblessness.

So just like the overall economy, the jobs recovery is faltering. It isn’t a double-dip recession. But the story is moving in the wrong direction. And if the Democrats in power push for a big-bang summer surprise that seeks even more failed stimulus spending, they will do much more harm than good.

Two caveats: (1) It isn't a double-dip recession because the "first" recession never truly ended.  We're still in that recession two and a half years after it started, the longest, severest economic downturn since the (first) Great Depression; (2) they know that more "stimulus" debt "do much more harm than good"; the only "good" they're seeking to do is bribe enough swing voters to save majority control of Congress in November.

Ensign Ed synopsizes the rest of the Marxist-Alinskyist "kitchen sink" but draws the same misconcepted conclusion:

The Fed will extend its lax monetary policy even further at its meeting this month and may announce further expansion of the money supply, a move that will further depress an already sinking dollar.  It’s a kitchen-sink, flailing approach to command-economy policies that clearly have failed to produce a real recovery and instead have delivered exactly what the same kind of approach delivered the last time it was tried in the 1970s: stagnation.

If this is an example of what the White House will do after losing a midterm election, don’t expect Barack Obama to be the second coming of Bill Clinton.  He looks a lot more like the second term of Jimmy Carter, only even more inept.

Except that Jimmy Carter did not come from a "revolutionary" background full of communist mentors and did not campaign on ushering in a "wrenching transformation" of the country.  Mr. Peanut never really sought to command events or ram a ruthlessly statist agenda down the public's throat.  He was almost pathetically passive, a metaphorical cork tossed to and fro on the rapids of national and world events, a hapless victim of his own stupendous naivete.

Not so King Hussein.  He knew what he wanted to do from years before he even rose to the U.S. Senate, and ever since his immaculation he's been a-doin' it.  You can't convince me that he's "panicking" at the total ineffectiveness and counterproductiveness of his Marxist policymaking because it is frankly inconceivable that anybody could be that stupid and not be institutionalized.  He knows EXACTLY what he's doing.  He's ALWAYS known.  Whether or not his attempt to foist that $800 billion mortgage bailout bribe on "underwater" swing voters will stem the GOP tide remains to be seen, but either way this flight even further leftward (not a very long journey) is far more calculated than ad hoc, an advance rather than a retreat.

Red Barry wants to transform America.  And as every revolutionary knows, before a New World can be born from the ashes, the old world has to first die in fire.  That ain't gonna happen by throwing in the ideological towel and resigning himself to intern-diddling, and it was never going to be brought to full realization legislatively.

Which means that the next two years figure to be a lot more "interesting" than the previous two.