"Unexpectedly"

Whenever we get good news about the economy, the media always uses the term unexpectedly. Emily Crane reports in part in the Daily Mail,

The Dow has soared 1,000 points after the US economy unexpectedly added 2.5 million jobs last month - with dentist offices, constructions workers and food services among the industries responsible for the boost in employment.

The jobless rate dropped to 13.3 percent in May from 14.7 percent in April, the Labor Department's monthly employment report showed on Friday. That figure is still on par with with what the US witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 2.5 million jobs in May after a record plunge of 20.6 million in April, according to the report.

After weeks of dire predictions by economists that unemployment in May could hit 20 percent or more, the news that the economy added millions of jobs last month was seen as evidence that the collapse caused by COVID-19 may have bottomed out and a recovery is well underway as states loosen their lockdowns.

On Wall Street, the Dow clocked up a staggering gain of more than 1,000 points in midday trading after the report was released.

Read more here.

Wall Street economy versus Main Street economy

Once again today, Sundance writes in the Conservative Treehouse about the way Trump turned our Wall Street economy into a Main Street economy.

While the Federal Reserve is perplexed, the underlying reason for monetary policy to be incapable of impacting the rate of inflation is not too complex when you think about the focus of federal economic policy reversing in the era of Trump.

For 30-years +/- U.S. economic policy was geared toward Wall Street. Corporations looked to maximize profits, manufacturing was shipped overseas, jobs were lost and Main Street suffered. The Fed monetary policy followed the economic influences of a Wall Street created outcome. U.S. multinationals benefited; U.S. main street companies did not.

A Wall St. economic engine was created. The FED policy followed the new engine. The two entirely different economic engines then detached:

The Wall Street economy, an engine of sorts, is a “service-driven” economy, with manufacturing of cheap imported goods done overseas.

The Main Street economy, again another engine, is a more balanced “manufacturing” economy; with a balance of imports and finished goods produced in the USA.

Bush, Clinton-Clinton, Bush-Bush and Obama-Obama terms focused on the Wall Street economy. However, Donald Trump focuses on the Main Street economy.

Read more here.

Better than ever!

In the Ace of Spades blog, co-blogger CBD chooses to be optimistic in his Christmas Eve post.

We live in wondrous times, and in spite of the political and social stupidity of a large swath of people across the globe, our lives are better than ever, or at least we have the possibility of that condition.

Science has given us medical breakthroughs that are unbelievable; robotic surgery, gene-therapy for previously deadly cancers, the ability to save premature babies, new wonder drugs and thousands of other marvels that were unimaginable even a generation or two ago.

The technology of communication is quite simply magical! We have computers in our pockets (some people even use them as phones!) and our cars and in our refrigerators (yeah...I don't like that one) that are connected to a world-wide network that is seamless except for political manipulation.

Our transportation is more reliable and safer than ever, and unbelievably inexpensive. What once was an expensive cross-country flight in the 1980s has dropped in price by 50% when adjusted for inflation. Fuel to run our cars and heat our homes is abundant and cleaner than ever. Our environment is much, much cleaner than it was when we were kids, in spite of the caterwauling from the lunatic left.

Food is safe and abundant and better than ever, courtesy of GMOs and the miracle of free markets. We could feed the world with ease were it not for those aforementioned political manipulations.

We are left with complaining (correctly) that some consumer products are built without the legendary American robustness that our parents came to expect. Wow...life is pretty good if we need to complain about our dishwashers and washing machines and refrigerators (that make ice for us while we sleep!).

No...my name isn't Pollyanna Brown's Dildo. Our job is to protect the fruits of 2,500 years of Western culture from the depredations of those pesky political manipulations, and that means progressivism or socialism or leftism or whatever convenient shorthand we use to describe the pinch-faced scolds of the Left, who never saw a freedom they didn't want curtailed or a new technology they didn't want to control and tax or a dissident they didn't want imprisoned, or worse.

It's an existential fight, but it isn't a new one. We have been in this battle for a very long time, and it will still be going long after we are gone, so....enjoy the festivities of an American Christmas week and be confident that we can get back to running around with our hair on fire...but after New Years!

"A tough chart for Democrats!"

This is a tough chart for Democrats. pic.twitter.com/k7FFahHNFy

— James Pethokoukis (@JimPethokoukis) December 20, 2019

Cramer: "The best numbers ever!"

Financial pundits and media narrative engineers cancel the recession!

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance brings us more good news about the economy.

Last week U.S. economic data included the Labor Department’s report on initial filings for unemployment benefits, at historically low levels. Also last week, the Commerce Department reported the U.S. housing market (new homes and permits) was the strongest since 2007. Then came the Philadelphia Fed’s index of manufacturing business activity in September, more than doubling estimates as factories continue to expand. And if that wasn’t too much winning, the Commerce Department then announced August retail sales growth was double expectations. Main Street USA is very strong.

None of the economic data supports the almost month-long ‘recession narrative’ pushed by financial pundits and media narrative engineers, and next week the second estimate of Q2 GDP growth will be released. Attempting to retain the smallest remaining whiff of credibility, the Bloomberg economists now announce they’re canceling the recession.

Yes, in a piece titled “Hold That Recession – U.S. Indicators are Trouncing Forecasts“, Bloomberg admits the economy doesn’t match their gloomy narrative:

(Bloomberg) — The U.S. economy is outperforming expectations by the most this year, offering a fresh rebuttal to last month’s resurgent recession fears fueled by the trade war and a manufacturing slump.

The Bloomberg Economic Surprise Index has reached an 11-month high after four indicators released Thursday, including existing home sales and jobless claims, each surpassed expectations.

Read more here.

#But the economy

Headline on a story at Ace of Spades:

Jobless Claims Fall to Lowest Level in 49 1/2 Years
—Ace of Spades
I thought Trump was going to destroy the US economy if he didn't follow Bush's policies (which got us an anemic growth rate and flatline wage growth), strong-form archlibertarianism that no one has ever voted in favor of, and warmed-over Nostalgia Economics.

Read more here.

Cries of economic disaster will only grow more intense as we approach the mid-terms.

At PJ Media Roger L. Simon writes,

...cries of economic disaster will only grow more intense as we approach the mid-terms. Every little statistical waver will blown way out of a proportion. Schumer and Pelosi will say that bread lines are imminent. Bernie Sanders and his new leftwing friend Ocasio-Cortez will proclaim conditions for the working class are worse than the 1930s when they have never been better. They could even go full Cloward-Piven to gain power.

The good news is -- if they fail at this, they will end up with nothing and be flailing for a long time.

As everyone knows, "It's the economy, stupid." But that doesn't mean you should be stupid about the economy

Read more here.

Exceptionally Strong Economy, Demand and Production Output…

Headline at The Conservative Treehouse:

U.S. Factory Activity Reflects Exceptionally Strong Economy, Demand and Production Output…



Pontificating economic globalists are stuck between empirical good news and their preferred anti-Trump tariff narrative. Economic media like the Wall Street Journal are filled with angst, as Trump’s manufacturing MAGAnomics continues to destroy their decades-long talking points and globalist preferences.

The analysis of June factory and manufacturing indicators from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) highlight an expanding reality: increased production, increased new orders, increased employment, and demand outpacing supplies and transportation capacity. Yes, all of this means the Main Street U.S. economic engine is firing on all cylinders. We can only imagine what the Q2 numbers will reflect when it’s all rolled up.

Read more here.

Economic national security

Sundance is busy at The Conservative Treehouse. One of his posts is, as often is the case, about economics.

...Most are not aware that in reality, Steven Mnuchin has more control over economic national security than Secretary of Defense General Mattis has over military national security. Both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Mattis are more reliant on Mnuchin than any other cabinet member.

No-one ever fully understood the national security trade leverage, apart from economic sanctions aspect, other than businessman Donald Trump, then candidate Donald Trump, and now President Donald Trump. His economic views/policies are specifically and intensely focused on America’s interests first. Hence, MAGA.

Team Trump (Mnuchin, Ross, Lighthizer, Tillerson etc) are using every angle and point of leverage to unraveling decades of global tentacles undermining our economy. [EXPLAINED HERE] Every single Trump policy is connected to economic security.

As we are seeing in action, the energy sector is the first beneficiary. This makes sense because it underlines all other manufacturing advantages. However, all other manufacturing sectors of a revitalized U.S. industrial economy will also benefit over time as the policies are actualized.

Read more here.

Why the bitterness, the hate?

Joel D. Hirst writes,

...things are going pretty well these days. The Supreme Court is whole – and with a remarkable, honest and gentle addition; Assad will think twice about using chemicals again; the economy is booming (yes, it has everything to do with confidence and deregulation); jobs are up, jobless claims are down; companies are reinvesting in the United States (it’s about encouragement); the healthcare challenges of a hastily passed and un-debated law are on the way to being addressed; illegal immigration is way down (no, nothing to do with a wall. Yes, everything to do with application of the rule of law). ISIS is being pushed out of Mosul. And the federal government’s thought war against half of its citizens is over.

Read more here.

Does this graph jibe with your own experience?

The Conservative Treehouse provides us with this graph and an intriguing discussion of main street economics vs. global economics.

"Less than glorious"

Joel Kotkin writes in the Orange county Register,

Like a child star who reached his peak at age 15, Barack Obama could never fulfill the inflated expectations that accompanied his election.

...Rather than stress his biracial background, Obama, once elected, chose to place his whiteness in the closet and identified almost entirely with a particular notion of the American black experience.

Whenever race-related issues came up — notably in the area of law enforcement — Obama and his Justice Department have tended to embrace the narrative that America remains hopelessly racist. As a result, he seemed to embrace groups like Black Lives Matter and, wherever possible, blame law enforcement, even as crime was soaring in many cities, particularly those with beleaguered African American communities.

Eight years after his election, more Americans now consider race relations to be getting worse, and we are more ethnically divided than in any time in recent history. As has been the case for several decades, African Americans’ economic equality has continued to slip, and is lower now than it was when Obama came into office in 2009, according to a 2016 Urban League study.

On the economy, Obama partisans can claim some successes. He clearly inherited a massive mess from the George W. Bush administration, and the fact that the economy eventually turned around, albeit modestly, has to be counted in his favor.

Yet, if there was indeed a recovery, it was a modest one, marked by falling productivity and low levels of labor participation. We continue to see the decline of the middle class, and declining life expectancy, while the vast majority of gains have gone to the most affluent, largely due to the rising stock market and the recovery of property prices, particularly in elite markets.

At the same time, Obama leaves his successor a massive debt run-up, doubling during his watch, and the prospect of steadily rising interest rates. Faith in the current economic system has plummeted in recent years, particularly among the young, a majority of whom, according to a May 2016 Gallup Poll, now have a favorable view of socialism. Economic anxiety helped spark not only the emergence of Bernie Sanders, but later the election of Donald Trump.

Yet, as his term ends, if one looks around the world, the ascendant powers — China, Russia and Iran — are all effectively enemies of America, despite Obama’s attempt to placate them all. Our perceived lack of backbone is certainly one reason why China is pursuing its policy to turn the South China Sea into its own private lake, and some of our historical allies in the area are gravitating toward the Middle Kingdom.

The most tragic of Obama’s failures has been Syria, where he refused to enforce his own “red line” against the Bashar al-Assad regime and gradually conceded control of that devastated country to Iran, Russia and assorted, often conflicting, Muslim militias. Recent talks to settle the conflict include Russia and an increasingly hostile Turkey, but not the world’s putative top superpower.

Barack Obama was a master politician, but he also may end up as a largely failed one. Obama built an impressive “coalition of the ascendant” — minorities, millennials, well-educated liberals — but his current high level of popularity could not prevent his now dispirited party from suffering its worst defeats, in terms of officeholders, since the 1920s.

Following the Obama script, but without the man himself, the Democratic Party lost most of the country. Hillary Clinton may have achieved a plurality among all voters, but Republicans ran the table in most states, and received upwards of 3.5 million more votes than Democrats in congressional races. Obama’s presidency saw the virtual destruction of his own party in much of the country, notably in the South, Appalachia and the Great Plains.

His one great accomplishment, Obamacare, seems destined to be altered drastically under President-elect Donald Trump and a fiercely right-wing GOP Congress. His post-2010 achievements relied almost entirely on executive orders and regulatory rulings, most of which can be canceled out with the signature of President Trump. Obama may have soared into office based on his persona, but his denouement seems likely to be something less than glorious.

Read more here.

Can the government run the economy?

Our trajectory

At PJ Media David Solway lists nine phenomena that may portend an American collapse.

Education. American pre-university education, with its inbred pedagogical and curricular decrepitude, has been further compromised by the entrenching of the Common Core program, characterized by coercive federal intrusion and string-attached funding, monopoly publishing and testing, elimination of pivotal American figures and historical events, a leftist disposition, and a powerful pro-Muslim bias.

Higher education is in no better shape. Standards have been lowered to admit those who are unfit for the rigors of post-secondary education; the curriculum has been both diluted and politicized; the campus has become a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment and activism; debate, argument and the free exchange of ideas are no longer part of its intellectual currency as a left consensus has shut down the expression of contrary views; feminist orthodoxy has exerted a castrating effect on university teaching and policy; trigger warnings prioritize feelings over knowledge, infantilizing a student body that must be spared the slightest twitch of emotional discomfort; and draconian language laws meant to combat expressions of “micro-aggression,” no matter how vanilla, have prohibited statements like “America is the land of opportunity” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” In short, the utopian ideal of “social justice” has snookered the pursuit of truth and the formation of inquiring minds.

...The university now graduates in ever increasing volume a class of sanctimonious and indoctrinated incompetents—a recipe for social calamity.

Gender Theory. ...Putting the stamp of legitimacy on the farce-in-progress, Obama has just signaled his approval of gender dysfunction in appointing the freakish transgender aspirant Raffi Freedman-Gurspan as director of outreach and recruitment for the White House personnel office.

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan in Washington, D.C.
National Center for Transgender Equality via AP

Such aberrations follow from and go hand in hand with a longstanding, aggressive and doctrinaire feminism that has infected every important social and professional institution, leading to the legal and societal deprivileging and even the feminization of men, who must not only endure institutional inequities but must continually apologize for their existence—another recipe for social and cultural catastrophe.

Immigration. Open-door immigration, a consequence of programmatic multiculturalism conceived as a social good and justified by the contentless mantra of “diversity,” is a surefire source of disorder, tension and sporadic episodes of violence. Indeed, the incursion of Islam into the West is nothing less than the latest installment of the millennial campaign to subvert and conquer the liberal democracies of the developed world. The Islamic doctrine of hijra or migration, emulating Mohammad’s journeys to Medina (originally Yathrib) and Abyssinia, is being re-enacted before our noses. The evidence is all around us and is so convincing that only the deluded, the cowed or the complicit can deny or cosmeticize or facilitate its progress.

Europe is disintegrating before our eyes, the Commonwealth nations are gradually being destabilized, and the United States now finds itself saddled not only with a growing and restive Islamic community but with dubious Muslim officials embedded in the highest levels of its administration and a president who has modified the oath of allegiance so that immigrants [read: Muslims] need not “bear arms on behalf of the United States.”

Add to this the unstanchable deluge of illegal migrants pouring across the southern border, abetted by the current government, swollen by anchor baby, “birth tourism,” and antiquated chain migration law, and encouraged by the existence of so-called sanctuary cities. As a result, we have a country losing its national character and exposing itself to mounting domestic turbulence.

Religion. ...As G.K. Chesterton is reputed to have said, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

...One becomes a social justice warrior or a warrior for Islam or some other substitute for what has been relinquished.

...Aside from the robust evangelical community, the U.S., like Europe, is turning away from its religious foundations, with the attendant loss of civil coherence.

Replacement Ratio. When a nation ceases to reproduce itself, the prognosis for long-term survival is patently negative. Every liberal democracy, with the exception of Israel, has fallen dramatically beneath the replacement ratio of 2.1, including the United States (reaching an historic low in 2013, according to Forbes ). This is a palpable sign of impending ruination that cannot be ignored.


...As Western cultures grow increasingly hedonistic , concentrating on pleasure and entertainment rather than living productive and reproductive lives—Iain Bamforth remarks in A Doctor’s Dictionary how “hedonism has turned into a kind of militancy”— as marriage becomes a failing social institution, and as pro-choice abortion is now virtually unlimited, it is only a matter of time before the regenerative mortgage forecloses.

Anti-Semitism. Although anti-Semitism and its cognate, anti-Zionism, are by no means a significant social depravity in the U.S., they flourish in three major constituencies: the elite leftist segment of the population, the Democratic Party, and, most tellingly, the administration of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy is demonstrably anti-Israel and pro-Muslim, in particular pro-Iranian. Throwing his support behind the Muslim Brotherhood while playing Doctor Faustus to a diabolical ayatollah, he has, in fact, surrendered the Middle East to prolonged Muslim insurgency, thus endangering the survival of Israel, America’s traditional and loyal ally. Former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s recent book Ally, despite its measured tones, makes this act of treachery amply clear. Similarly, “if Obama has his way,” observes James Lewis in a short but compendious article for American Thinker, “Israel will be the first national victim.”

Race. Race relations in the U.S. have markedly deteriorated under the suzerainty of the present administration, in some places resembling guerilla warfare as black-on-white violence proliferates and race riots are becoming an almost regular occurrence. Victor Davis Hanson in an article for PJ Media aptly titled “The Tragic and Complete Collapse of Racial Relations” indicates that “a small cohort of urban African-American males under fifty—no more than 3-4% of the general population—is responsible for about 50% of many of the violent crimes committed.” The racial divide is widening rather than closing and the prospect for civil upheaval metastasizes alarmingly.

The Economy. The American economy under the statist and regulatory dispensation of the present administration is plainly on the verge of implosion. Massive unemployment, the piling on of astronomical debt, the collapse of the housing market, the insensate printing of fiat money, the downgrading of the nation’s credit rating, the high cost of the carbon conspiracy fostered by the false hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, a crushing trade deficit, and the precarious status of the reserve currency all point to a looming and unprecedented fiscal cataclysm in the making.

Obama. Anyone who doubts that Barack Hussein Obama, to quote James Lewis once again, is a “false messiah” and “a cancer on the body politic,” a Marxist-trained and Alinsky-inspired radical, an Islamic sympathizer, a nuclearizing agent for Iran (thus fulfilling Carter’s legacy), a congenital liar and frivolous narcissist, a contemptible dispenser of apologies for a country that has been—or had been—a force for good in a maleficent world, and the worst and most dangerous president in American history by an order of magnitude—anyone who doubts this has not been listening or looking or is himself dedicated to America’s destruction.

A considerable sector of the American public is surely aware, dimly or acutely, of several, many or all of the nine signs of approaching national collapse assembled here, even though these portents are almost universally censored or deliberately misrepresented by the liberal elite, by government and academia, and by mainstream press and TV coverage. These entities operate under the aegis of what has come to be known as political correctness, the assault upon truth, honesty and candid expression that taints and devitalizes the culture. It serves a triple function, namely, to suppress anything that opposes orthodox opinion or is felt as unpleasant, no matter how crucial to our wellbeing, to flatter our exalted sense of ourselves, and to promote a political agenda by masking its underlying purpose. As George Orwell famously observed and history has abundantly demonstrated, the perversion of language is a tried and tested facet of totalitarian strategy, which seeks to destroy the ability of a subject population to think lucidly and to make reasoned judgments.

... Can the desired election of a responsible and patriotic conservative administration undo the damage and turn back the tide of devastation? Can America return to its foundations? The future, like science, is not settled. Chance—or miracle—may intervene to alter a trajectory.

Read more here.

"We are sliding very fast toward fascism"

(credit: Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)

Comedian Rob Schneider speaks out:

“Democracies don’t end well. We are sliding very fast towards fascism.

“There’s a polarization that’s happening…I do think you look can look at government and go, ‘Wow, it is out of control now,’ and if you do criticize or tend to be not directly along a liberal stand, you can get murdered,” Schneider commented.

“There’s not one segment of business under the Obama administration that hasn’t been hurt…he attacks for-profit schools, which is totally an elitist thing from a guy that went to Harvard. I think for free, by the way,” Schneider said.

He was also critical of the media for being overly influenced by the government and not standing up for the American people.

“We don’t really have freedom of the press. It’s owned by about eight different companies, and it doesn’t really express or help the average American,” Schneider stated.

Envy is getting us nowhere

John Tamney writes,

If China can rebound from Mao, the U.S. can and will surely rebound from Obama.

To be blunt, if the Republicans can't field a candidate in 2016 to beat Hillary Clinton and all her baggage, or another Democratic Party candidate carrying the heavy weight of President Obama's numerous failings on his or her shoulders, they'll only have themselves to blame. Logic dictates a Republican victory in light of Obama's implosion, and if not, a logical answer for why will be the ongoing failure on the part of the GOP to look in the mirror, and wake up to the fact that the electorate got it right in firing an aimless, increasingly statist, and largely anti-growth party in 2006 and 2008.

The late great free-market columnist Warren Brookes long ago wrote that envy "is the single most impoverishing attitude of thought." The Republicans thankfully aren't the Party of envy as their reliably dense competitors in the Democratic Party are, but as evidenced by all their wailing about President Obama and Hillary Clinton, their thinking is similarly impoverishing. Rather than spending so much time obsessing about their opponents, and elevating them in the process, they should rejoice in their failures that are discrediting big government with each passing day, and that will reward the Republicans if they develop a clue about how economies grow.

Thanks to Webutante for reposting Mr. Tamney's provocative post.

Generate economic growth!

What do the poor need? Your money redistributed to them? Or a strong, vibrant, growing economy? Robert E. Grady writes in the Wall Street Journal that

In periods of high economic growth, such as the 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of Americans gain, and have the opportunity to gain. In periods of slow growth, such as the past four and a half years since the recession officially ended, poor people and the middle class are hurt the most, and opportunity is curbed.

If the goal is to deliver higher incomes and a better standard of living for the majority of Americans, then generating economic growth—not income inequality or the redistribution of wealth—is the defining challenge of our time.

Where has the stimulus money gone?

Regarding growth, Mr. Obama claimed in his speech that we should use some money "to create good jobs rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our airports, and all the infrastructure our businesses need." Yet a recent analysis by BCA Research shows a sharp drop in real spending by the government on nondefense infrastructure since the president took office. When a Democratic Congress passed the president's massive $800 billion stimulus bill, seven-eighths of the total went to transfer payments like Medicaid, food stamps and sending a check to millions of Americans who do not pay income taxes.

Thanks to Donald Douglas for linking to the WSJ article.