Recently in Treasury Category

He pumped the federal fiscal pud furiously a year and a half ago, and didn't get so much as a stimulatory tingle; he's beaten the federal bishop brutally twice more this year and has nothing but bruised, dormant flaccidity to show for it.  He could allow the incendiary Bush tax cut extension Victoria's Secret model to "conduct a revival meeting," but that would be nasty and dirty and immoral.

So here comes Barack Obama's iron fist back for still another round, this time sheathed in burlap:

US President Barack Obama unveils plans Monday to spend at least fifty billion dollars to expand and renew US roads, railways and airports, in a fresh bid to fire up sluggish economic growth.

Obama, under intense pressure over November’s mid-term congressional elections in which his Democrats fear heavy losses, was set to make the announcement in a speech in Wisconsin, an official said. …

A White House official said that the “bold” infrastructure plan will be front loaded and make significant investments in the first year, in a bid to stimulate the sagging economy and boost jobs growth.

It appeared unlikely however that Obama could get the plan passed through Congress before the mid-term elections.

"Fresh"?  If that tired, wheezing, failed old fossil of a notion was any staler, it would be petrified.  It was older than the hills on Nancy's chest before Red Barry was even born, and yet somehow he's made it ancient and hoary even for his regime.  What the hell does the amount even matter?  Fifty billion, three hundred billion, seventeen bazillion and three - it's all Monopoly money to them.  Hell, that's what they're turning the dollar into.

Will the waning, fading Donk majorities pull themselves off their electoral deathbeds to pass it?  Who knows?  Ensign Ed thinks they will.  I'd like to think that Senate Republicans would filibuster it.  Either way, it won't help Dems with vote-buying because there isn't any market for what they're selling.  It's like a guy that tries to get into the prostitution business by hiring the Golden Girls to turn tricks for him.  Which makes it non-stimulative economically AND politically.

Ya gotta like Doc Zero's diagnosis, and his prescription:

In the fading days of the Democrats’ disastrous reign, we’ve come to a moment when they’re begging us to let them “create economic activity” by hiring one more team of union excavators to dig some random holes, and one more team of union construction workers to fill them right back in....

The GOP should make it clear that any further spending from this administration, including any wild schemes hatched during the lame-duck session of Congress, will be zeroed out when the new Republican Congress convenes.  It’s remarkable to note that, after two years of world-record deficits from unrestrained spending, this President has not proposed a single idea that would reduce the size or scope of our bloated government.  He needs to be sent a message that government will now be reduced. It doesn’t need to chow down on another fifty billion donuts before its crash diet begins.

"Blasphemy!!!" thunders Godbama.  And once Beltway Bob peddles his stationary bicycle long enough to generate enough "green energy," he'll cleave all those infidel Republicans in two with lightning bolts.  Shouldn't take more than two years past when he's out of office.

Maybe the NRCC should add a feature to their website pledging to gain an additional House seat for every additional ten billion dollars of proposed Hogzilla IV deficit spending, like Dick Gephardt did vis-a-vie every hundred point drop in the Dow back in 2002.  And unlike poor Dick-Les and Cap'n Limp, we'd actually have something to show for it when we were done.

After so much good economic news of late, the sunny optimism was bound to concretely manifest itself sooner or later.

Celebrate good times, my friends:

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (-54,000) in August, and the unemployment rate was about unchanged at 9.6%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Government employment fell, as 114,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. Private-sector payroll employment continued to trend up modestly (+67,000).

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) declined by 323,000 over the month to 6.2 million. In August, 42.0% of unemployed persons had been jobless for twenty-seven weeks or more. (See table A-12.)

In August, the civilian labor force participation rate (64.7 percent) and the employment-population ratio (58.5 percent) were essentially unchanged.
(See table A-1.)

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 331,000 over the month to 8.9 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

About 2.4 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August, little changed from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior twelve months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

Among the marginally attached, there were 1.1 million discouraged workers in August, an increase of 352,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.3 million persons marginally attached to the labor force had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.

A few helpful edits and elaborations:

***"The unemployment rate was about unchanged at 9.6%" is inaccurate.  "The unemployment rate rose to 9.6%" is accurate.

***The "official" unemployment rate (U-3) is propaganda horsecrap.  The REAL unemployment rate (U-5, adding back "discouraged workers" and those "marginally attached to the workforce," which should be categorized together as "the long-term unemployed") is 11.0%.  Which, ironically, would have enabled the regime's "about unchanged" lie to pass veracitical muster, as that number has held steady since April.

***Unfortunately for the White House, the underemployment rate (U-6), increased to 16.7%, or one American worker out of every six.  Which, not coincidentally, is also the proportion of Americans stuck on the federal dole in one way or another.

Showing that he's a true "man of the people," while still a god-colossus towering above them, Barack Obama came down from on High today to bask in his subjects' slobbering gratitude for all his bountiful provision:

Flanked by members of his economic team – including outgoing Council of Economic Advisers Dr. Christina [The Hutt] Romer, whose replacement has yet to be named – President Obama chose to look at the silver lining in the economic clouds of today’s jobs report – not even mentioning that August saw a net job loss of 54,000 jobs.

“In the month I took office, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month,” the president said. “This morning, new figures show the economy produced 67,000 private sector jobs in August, the eighth consecutive month of private job growth. Additionally, the numbers for July were revised upward to 107,000. Now that’s positive news, and it reflects the steps we’ve already taken to break the back of this recession.”

The net job loss for August is largely because of the layoffs of 114,000 Census temporary workers. 

Another thing The One didn't mention?  That downgrade of 730,000 jobs from full-time to part-time that drove up the underemployment rate, reflecting the steps he's already taken to break the back of this economy.

B.O. acts like a man who has a pesky mole in his backyard digging holes in it.  No matter how many times he whacks the mole, it keeps coming back and digging new holes.  He thought he had "fixed" the economy with Hogzilla I.  Just borrow and waste a trillion bucks and Christina The Hutt's super-duper multipliers would kick in, the economy would roar back to life, and he could go off and do what he REALLY wanted to do: take over health care.  So that's what he did.  In his mind, he wasn't "neglecting" the economy to obsess over his ObamaCare masterpiece, because he'd already "solved" that problem.  But as with all leftwingnut Big Government schemes, it didn't work, and now he's stuck with this mole that won't go away.

And we're to understand that there are actually still Democrats who want Barack Obama to "help"?:

A Democratic strategist toiling on the party’s House efforts refers to working on the “Titanic” (though he claims there may be some hidden life rafts). “The president keeps saying it’s a tough environment,” says a Democratic House staffer. “We know that. We want to know what he’s going to do about it.”…

“He still wants to be seen as post-partisan and bipartisan,” says a House Democratic leadership aide. “But we’re in a fight here.” Democrats expect Obama to come out swinging nonstop — bashing the R’s repeatedly and proposing economic initiatives that actually register with voters. At the same time, members of the House Democratic leadership are worried that Obama will cave and yield to GOP demands that George W. Bush’s expiring tax cuts for the wealthy be extended. “If he doesn’t do something immediately, our members will be livid,” says a House Democratic aide. “And when there’s fear of a bloodbath, it’s never too early to start the blame game.”

Actually, the economic initiatives that "actually register with voters" are the ones to which "livid" Donks are afraid their tin god is going to cave.  Which is about as likely as Christina The Hutt becoming the next Miss Universe.

What baffles me is why these Jackasses want Barry to "do something" when so many of their fellow-travelers are fleeing him like the plague.  And what is it they want him to do?  More of the same crap that got them in this predicament in the first place?  Fly clockwise 'round and 'round the planet like Superman and turn back the clock two years so that Hopenchange will work "again"?  Besides, he and they already "fixed" the economy with Hogzilla I - he said so and they shouted, "So say we all!"

Isn't "salvation" supposed to be once, for all?

Pesky mole.

Christina The Hutt departs the Obama regime to return home to Varl, leaving a ringing legacy of the kind of brilliant, capable, informed, forward-thinking economic policy stewardship that is guiding our country in the "right direction":

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.”

Anybody want dessert?...

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. “To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would.” Her defense was that “almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction.”

Did I say she was a Hutt?  I should have said Rush Limbaugh's evil identical twin sister.

Speaking as somebody who minored in economics, allow me to say: This ain't Cochrane multidimensional physics.  The U.S. economy was sabotaged by the bursting of a government-induced speculative real estate bubble in order to panic and swindle voters into electing Democrats to unchecked power, after which the latter pursued depressionary statist policies of insanely unprecedented deficit spending and successful or attempted nationalization of the automotive, health care, energy, and financial sectors of the formerly private economy.  Collectively known as Obamanomics, these were the "violent reactions".  The ones the Hutt mischaracterized are "violent reactions" in the same way that people who can't "violently" escape a Category Five hurricane "violently" board up their picture windows and "violently" huddle in storm shelters and "violently" sit on their roofs (if they're still there) awaiting rescue afterwards if they don't "violently" drown.

Bryan Glover was right: When the only tool you're willing to use is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Stealing a trillion bucks from the ChiComms and pissing it down all their cronies' fiscal midden holes did nothing for the economy except add a trillion bucks to the national debt, and now the Obamanomics "brain" trust is more lost at sea than the S.S. Minnow.  Not because there aren't [AHEM] "other" economic policies that could be tried and have ALWAYS succeeded in reviving economic growth, but because there's no such thing in liberal minds as statist policies failing.  It all works on paper, on the whiteboard, in the spreadsheets, so it should work in the real world.  And when it doesn't, it CAN'T be THEIR fault; it CAN'T be because socialism doesn't work.  So they blame Us, The People, or they blame "the mess we inherited from the previous administration," or they blame the dog for eating their position papers that proved the success of Obamanomics to the umpteenth decimal point.  And apart from all that, Obamanomics is MORALLY right, Barry damn it, and capitalism is EVIL, so even if their policies don't work (which they'll never publicly admit), the moral imperative must take precedence.  Hence Hogzilla II, Hogzilla III, and calls for IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, and beyond.

The problem is never that they're wrong; it's that "rightness" hasn't been pushed hard enough.

They'll never change that blind guide mindset.  But they are belatedly rediscovering the Clintonoid virtues of tactical deception, which explains what would otherwise be anti-Obamunist heresy:

With the recovery faltering less than two months before the November congressional elections, President Obama’s economic team is considering another big dose of stimulus in the form of tax breaks for businesses – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Among the options are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the research and development tax credit, say people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe private deliberations.

Permanently extending the research credit would cost roughly $100 billion over the next decade, tax experts said. And depending on its form and duration, a payroll tax holiday could let businesses keep more than $300 billion they would otherwise owe the Treasury.

Once again for the record, any sort of tax reduction by whatever means does not "cost" anything, because it is money that never gets collected in the first place.  And depending upon the economic elasticity of the mode of reduction, federal revenues may not be reduced at all.

Permanent extension of the R&D tax credit (which will only be as "permanent" as they have to let it be until they can recover from November's horrific electoral beating) is fine and dandy, but note what they're NOT considering: permanent extention of ALL the Bush tax cuts, which would be the quickest and most visible, and most powerful signal of the "hopenchange" the REAL economy needs to start on the road towards REAL recovery.

Now, if I may ream on my (by his own admission) less educated and decisively junior blogeague Ace for a moment, a temporary payroll tax holiday is about one step removed from George McGovern's useless idea (which, yes, George Bush emulated in 2001 and 2008) of sending every American a thousand dollar check.  It's useless because it is not stimulative; it is not stimulative because it is temporary.  What you would end up with is the very same sort of situation created by the impermanence of the Bush tax cuts: a flurry of economic activity "while the sun shines," and when the "holiday" is over, the inevitable crash.  There's a reason, after all, why Arthur Laffer is predicting a depression for next year if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.  This is artificial boom & bust policy when what is needed are policy signals of permanent growth-orientation.  It is the seeding of future economic crises to be exploited by the party sliding out of power in the here & now.  As such, it simply isn't credible.

But as a phony baloney plastic banana BS prop, it's something Dems'll take a flyer on.  At this point, it's not as if they have anything more to lose.

And in the mean time, it also makes a nice green curtain behind which to hatch their next tax-hiking schemes:

You could almost ask whose side these animals are on.  It's almost as if they're a race of large gastropods with stubby arms, wide cavernous mouths and huge eyes, who controlled a large empire.

Christina Romer simply didn't bother assuming human form. 

And he's got plenty of company:

Private sector employment decreased by 10,000 from July to August on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report® released today. The estimated change of employment from June to July was revised down slightly, from the previously reported increase of 42,000 to an increase of 37,000.

The decline in private employment in August confirms a pause in the recovery already evident in other economic data. The deceleration in employment was evident in the major sectors and by size of business. This month’s decline in employment followed six monthly increases from February through July. Over those six months the average monthly gain in employment was 37,000 with no evidence of acceleration.

Unlike the estimate of total establishment employment to be released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), today’s figure does not include the effects of federal hiring — and now firing — for the 2010 Census. Hiring for the census peaked in May. For this reason, Friday’s figure for the change in nonfarm total employment reported by the BLS might be weaker than today’s estimate for nonfarm private employment in the ADP National Employment Report.

Augusts’ ADP Report estimates nonfarm private employment in the service-providing sector rose by 30,000, the seventh consecutive monthly gain. This increase was not enough to offset an employment decline in the goods-producing sector of 40,000. Employment in the manufacturing sector decreased 6,000, the second consecutive monthly decline.

Remember how if there was so much as a net gain of a single private sector job (and at least a hundred thousand new ones a month are needed to keep REAL unemployment from increasing) False Messiah would cite it as "proof" that the economy is "heading in the right direction"?  So much for that spaghetti crutch.

It's hardly "unexpected".  An economy that never really emerged from the Obamapression and has suffered a "Recovery Summer" cascade failure of crashing sales, driven by crashing consumer demand, and reaching the expiration dates of all the Dems' statist cosmetic gimmickry was never going to conjure up the half-million jobs a month Barry instructed Slow Joe to stumble around the country idiotically promising, without which the economy will never recover no matter what the season is.

And just in time for the party of Jackassery to receive their reward from the voters, too.

Think of the following as a preview of their side of the fall campaign.

A whole lotta them will be finding Waldo too, methinks.