Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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“You didn’t build that.”

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

How “You didn’t build that” became “He didn’t say that”, via Instapundit,

There is no nebulousness here. Beyond the paragraph quoted above, Obama calls government spending “the investments that grow our economy.” He ridicules the tendency of Americans to brag about being hard workers with a variant of “So’s your old man.” (“Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”) He instinctively names “a great teacher” when looking for somebody to credit for causing success in the working world. The president has boldly presented his view on how an economy works. His supporters should give him the respect of taking his words seriously.

Mitt’s response:

These hands ad:

“I BUILT IT” T-SHIRTS ON SALE

‘You Didn’t Build That!’ … Oh Yeah?

And,
The Ultimate Takedown of Obama’s ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Speech

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This is not the McCain campaign,

These People Are GOOD:

Ulsterman:

Check out this ad just released that hits Obama both on the Solyndra scandal and unemployment on the SAME DAY the media is now digesting the rise in unemployment to 8.2% for the month of May.

Speaking of unemployment,

There wasn’t much good news in the Labor Department report Friday, but the news was especially bad for Hispanics, for whom the unemployment rate spiked to 11 percent in May — up from 9.8 percent just a month ago

And 766,000 More Women Unemployed Today Than When Obama Took Office, and Core 25-54 Employment Rates Still Near Historic Lows.

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AP finds poverty, calls it “unfortunate timing”

US poverty on track to post record gain in 2009

The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

Which begs the question, isn’t it time to realize that government’s “war on poverty” measures don’t work?

Census figures for 2009 — the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat’s presidency — are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

After Democrats have been in charge of Congress for four years, AP thinks it’s “unfortunate timing” that poverty levels are the highest in five decades:

It’s unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase — from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent — would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.

Sweetness and Light asks,

Have you ever noticed how the AP sees everything through the prism of how it will affect Mr. Obama or the Democrats?

Meanwhile Obama’s tap-dancing his way into trickle-down demagoguery while doing his best to cripple the economy by spending $4.4 Trillion in 31 months, onerous taxes, healthcare mandates, legislation drafted by lobbyists which “you must pass it to know what’s in it” and later “to fix it“, and incompetent takeovers of the private sector:

“If we can grow the economy faster and create more jobs, then everybody is swept up into that virtuous cycle.”

But, as Obama himself will tell you, It’s the other guy’s fault!

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Seven? more years to recoup lost jobs

Seven if we’re lucky:


Broader U-6 Jobless Rate up to 16.7%: Why the Jump?

The U.S. jobless rate rose to 9.6% in August, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment rose even more to 16.7%, the highest rate since April.

The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs.

Peter Whener looks at what the numbers mean,

During our supposed “Recovery Summer,” we have lost 283,000 jobs (54,000 in June, 171,000 in July, and 54,000 in August). And for August, the employment-population ratio — the percentage of Americans with jobs — was 58.5 percent. We haven’t seen figures this low in nearly three decades. As Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute points out, “Since the start of this summer, nearly 400,000 Americans have entered the labor force, but only 130,000 have found jobs. … America’s adult population has risen by 2 million people since [August 2009], but the number of adults with jobs has dropped by 180,000. The unemployment rate declined slightly despite these numbers, from 9.7 percent to 9.6 percent, because over 2.3 million people have left the labor force entirely, so discouraged they are no longer even looking for work. ”Keep in mind that all this is occurring during a period when job growth should be considerably higher, at least based on past post-recession recoveries. Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Michael Boskin points out that “compared to the 6.2% first-year Ford recovery and 7.7% Reagan recovery, the Obama recovery at 3% is less than half speed.” Bear in mind, too, that today’s jobs report comes a week after the GDP for the second quarter was revised downward, from 2.4 percent to 1.6 percent. Economists generally agree that the economy needs to grow 2.5 percent to keep unemployment from going up, and a good deal better than that to begin to bring it substantially down.

What all this means, I think, is that we’re not in a recovery at all, at least not in any meaningful sense.

Indeed.

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Unexpectedly! Weekly Jobless Claims Rise

Here is that word again, “unexpectedly”!
Weekly Jobless Claims Post Surprise Jump, Hit 500,000

New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed to a nine-month high last week, yet another setback to the frail economic recovery.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 500,000 in the week ended August 14, the highest since mid-November, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

Ed Morrissey:

CNBC’s headline writer also got gobsmacked, writing this header for the Reuters story: “Weekly Jobless Claims Post Surprise Jump, Hit 500,000.” Maybe Reuters should seriously look at hiring better analysts.

Recovery summer?

More like the recovery summer’s bust. Larry Kudlow has more on the Economic Lessons of the Summer Swoon: disinflation, dropping bonds, falling stocks, and this,

And let me repeat my own mantra: The Fed can produce new money, but it cannot produce new jobs. Fiscal policy — and its threat of overtaxing, over-regulating, and overspending — is what’s ailing the economy. And that threat is reverberating through stock and bond markets. (The stock market, by the way, is still about 11 percent below its late-April peak.)

Small wonder that only 41 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance

“Unexpectedly”!, at that.

Oh, look,
Bloomberg’s also into “unexpectedly”!

UPDATE
Sing it, Don! The Unexpectedly Song

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Why they can’t hire

The president of Bogen Communications Inc. in Ramsey, N.J. explains Why I’m Not Hiring
When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally’s pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits.

When you add it all up, it costs $74,000 to put $44,000 in Sally’s pocket and to give her $12,000 in benefits. Bottom line: Governments impose a 33% surtax on Sally’s job each year.

Because my company has been conscripted by the government and forced to serve as a tax collector, we have lost control of a big chunk of our cost structure. Tax increases, whether cloaked as changes in unemployment or disability insurance, Medicare increases or in any other form can dramatically alter our financial situation. With government spending and deficits growing as fast as they have been, you know that more tax increases are coming—for my company, and even for Sally too.

Companies have also been pressed into serving as providers of health insurance. In a saner world, health insurance would be something that individuals buy for themselves and their families, just as they do with auto insurance. Now, adding to the insanity, there is ObamaCare.

Every year, we negotiate a renewal to our health coverage. This year, our provider demanded a 28% increase in premiums—for a lesser plan. This is in part a tax increase that the federal government has co-opted insurance providers to collect. We had never faced an increase anywhere near this large; in each of the last two years, the increase was under 10%.

To offset tax increases and steepening rises in health-insurance premiums, my company needs sustainably higher profits and sales—something unlikely in this “summer of recovery.” We can’t pass the additional costs onto our customers, because the market is too tight and we’d lose sales. Only governments can raise prices repeatedly and pretend there will be no consequences.

And even if the economic outlook were more encouraging, increasing revenues is always uncertain and expensive.

And now for the punch line:

As much as I might want to hire new salespeople, engineers and marketing staff in an effort to grow, I would be increasing my company’s vulnerability to government decisions to raise taxes, to policies that make health insurance more expensive, and to the difficulties of this economic environment.

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