Romney types: no to Rubio as V.P.

First George Will disses Marco Rubio by omission. Now comes Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor of the conservative National Review, which during the GOP primaries was in the tank for Romney, so seems likely to speak for the Romney camp today. Ponnuru writes:

Mitt Romney’s running mate is going to rank very low on the list of what’s on voters’ minds in November. Political journalists are obsessing . . . because it is one of the biggest remaining unknowns [and] creates opportunities for speculation. The speculators place high value on excitement[, i.e. Rubio]. They’re talking up potential vice-presidential candidates who would represent a demographic first[, i.e. Rubio].

Romney will. . . want someone he considers able to step into the role of president if needed; someone loyal; and someone with whom he feels personally comfortable.

Whoa. That means the Romney folks are, as we said, posing the vice president choice as either a Cheney type or a Palin type, which screams “No!” to the more Palin-like Rubio.

In fact, Ponnuru goes on to reject Rubio by name:

[Romney’s] criteria work against conservative heartthrob Marco Rubio. . . Romney and Rubio don’t seem to have much of a personal relationship. Rubio has no executive experience. And Romney probably considers Rubio unseasoned, which he is.

Of the seven Ponnuru calls able “to meet [Romney’s] criteria,” the three in "Intrade’s" current top six (chart) are Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, and Ohio Senator Rob Portman. Ponnuru dismisses Portman—too tied to the Bush 43 past—leaving Pawlenty and Jindal. Ponnuru ends up favoring Jindal:

Jindal is the only potential vice-presidential candidate who hits the sweet spot: He is simultaneously a conservative favorite, demographically interesting (he’s a Catholic of Indian ancestry), and a reform-minded, competent governor.

Ponnuru by implication adds that Jindal would “excite the Republican convention” as would New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whom Ponnuru rules out for other reasons.

So Ponnuru, who discounts Rubio’s excitement factor, likes Jindal for his excitement factor. And Ponnuru, who dismisses using demographics as a reason for picking Rubio, even though Republicans are already deeply concerned about losing the Hispanic vote by a wide margin, backs his fellow South Asian Jindal as “demographically interesting.”

In sum, we have George Will and Ramesh Ponnuru both advancing Bobby Jindal as the preferred alternative to Rubio. The audience of one is, of course, Romney, who seems to be, as Ponnuru suggests, leaning away from Rubio. In that context, Will and Ponnuru—probably both seriously worried Romney will over-react to pressure for Rubio by picking a (yawn) Portman type—are offering up Jindal as the safer “exciting choice.”

Especially after following Ponnuru’s twisted journey, I have little faith Romney will do the right thing and pick Rubio, who is the real thing, not some second-choice alternative.

Marco Rubio, now more than ever.

“If the president can rewrite federal laws that he doesn't like, there is no limit to his power. Then, he will not be a president. He will be a king.”

--Andrew Napolitano, Reason

The “king” is out to block the rise of Marco Rubio, Florida’s dynamic Hispanic senator, to a place on Mitt Romney’s ticket.

“Intrade” (the legal online betting service) today has Marco Rubio third at 14% odds in the race to be Romney’s vice president, behind Rob Portman (24%) and Tim Pawlenty (17%), but ahead of Paul Ryan (8%) and Bobby Jindal (6%). Conservative George Will on ABC said he preferred more excitement than Portman or Pawlenty (hardly a challenge), then completely skipped over Rubio without mentioning him to say his man was Louisiana Governor Jindal because Ryan should stay in congress.

What???!!!!

I don’t know that Romney’s veep will be Rubio. But I know it SHOULD be Rubio. And certainly in part because of what happened June 15, not in spite of it. Rubio’s odds dropped and Will skipped over him after Obama issued an unconstitutional executive order blocking deportations of illegals under 30 who have committed no crime. In his “dictator-for-life”-type action, Obama decreed a version of the Dream Act earlier rejected by Congress. Last year, Obama himself called such an executive order illegal. This year, King Obama.

Has Romney now given up on the Hispanic vote?

Obama’s Dream Act decree was aimed at Marco Rubio, in an effort to leap past Rubio’s rising appeal to the Latino vote, and his possible selection as Romney’s vice president. Listen to John Aloysius Farrell, in the liberal National Journal:

President Obama coolly pre-empted Rubio's heralded efforts to draft a version of the Dream Act that would appeal to both Hispanic voters and the GOP's conservative base. . . Obama got there first, leaving Rubio's long labors irrelevant.

Saying a rush to Dream Act passage is no longer an option for him, Farrell quotes Rubio:

"If I introduce a piece of legislation and it immediately triggers a partisan war and name calling, I set back the cause. This White House didn't reach out. If you're really serious about finding a solution to this problem, don't you work with the people interested in this? If you're really interested in a bipartisan solution and you read in the newspaper that there is a Republican senator working on an idea, don't you reach out to them? That never happened... They're not really serious."

"I was hoping this issue could be elevated above politics," Rubio said. "Obviously...I was pretty naive."

Obama’s Dream Act decree is the best thing that’s happened to his campaign in weeks. USA TODAY is out with a poll confirming Obama now leads Romney 66%-25% among Hispanics, matching his 2008 election showing. Romney now is the weakest among Latinos of any presidential contender since 1996, yet that’s 16 years during which the Hispanic voting percentage doubled.

Of course, Obama’s Dream Act decree improved his results: Hispanics support Obama’s executive order by 82% to 16%. Gloated Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, Romney

has the most conservative position on immigration reform of any nominee of our lifetime. It's not the only issue Latino voters care about, but it is an important issue that shows people whose side they are on, and it's clear that Mitt Romney's against them.

So doesn’t this all guarantee Romney will raise his campaign excitement level while grabbing a larger chunk of the Hispanic vote by making Latin American Rubio his vice president? Why are Rubio’s numbers instead down, and why does George Will pass over Rubio when talking Romney veep? What’s up?

A clue comes from MSNBC, a network, one can safely say, 100% dedicated to Obama’s re-election. MSNBC just finished a panel on why Romney won’t pick Rubio for veep. Liberal John Heilemann of New York magazine, also co-author of the inside access book Game Change about Obama’s 2008 victory, says the Romney folks want “someone on the ticket who immediately clears the bar of ready to be commander in chief on day one,” a non-distraction who will keep the focus on Obama and the economy, not someone who will “generate a lot of stories” about past “controversial aspects.”

Fellow panelist Manuel Roig-Franzia, staff writer at the liberal Washington Post and author of The Rise of Marco Rubio, a book whose publication was timed to coincide exactly with the June 19 release of Rubio’s own memoir, helpfully added that Rubio owns a house with Florida congressman David Rivera that “was about to be put into foreclosure” until they were able to “scramble and pay the bill.” Wow. What dirt. Rubio had trouble keeping a home afloat in Florida, one of the country’s worst housing markets? That ought to end his vice president dreams, right? No, of course not.

Here’s what Rubio’s chances come down to. Will the Romney people, folks heavily under the influence of their dinner-companion “frienemies” in Washington DC and New York, buy into the idea that Rubio is Sarah Palin II, the veep candidate from Hell who must be rejected in favor of a Portman or Pawlenty, folks somewhat similar to ideal vice president Dick Cheney, able to take over “on day one”? The Romney folks—to me losers in the mold of Tom Dewey (1944, 1948), Nixon-Lodge (1960), Nelson Rockefeller (1964), Jerry Ford (1976), George H.W. Bush (loser in 1980 and 1992, a winner in 1988 because “no new taxes” George ran as the Reagan-Bush junior partner), Bob Dole (1996), and John McCain (2008)—would indeed pick a Cheney over a Palin (in their view, McCain’s fatal mistake).

Sarah Palin. Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton. John Kennedy. They are all people who generated excitement and brought in new voters. Rubio would be the first Hispanic vice president, and as such, in line for the presidency. His presence on the ticket would help Romney carry Florida, Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado. For that excellent reason, Democrats don’t want Romney choosing Rubio. That’s why they are “Palinizing” Rubio—what Democrats and the legacy media do when they fear a potential Republican winner.

Rubio is young yet polished beyond his years, far more tested nationally than was Palin in 2008, and unlike Obama, Rubio would be only running for vice president, not president. Cheney was a good if highly controversial V.P., but he brought few new votes to the ticket during the super-close 2000 election. Rubio could do much more.

Do I expect the Romney folks to do the right thing?

Family Breakdown, Economic Hardship

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

That quote comes from one of our earlier discussions of culture and politics. Here’s how I would rephrase Moynihan today: “Another central conservative truth is that liberal politics can ruin a culture.”

We are focusing on the problem of a culture that endorses raising children in single-parent families. You might think this concern is strictly a conservative preoccupation. You would be wrong.

Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen are Democrats. Caddell worked closely with Jimmy Carter and Schoen with Bill Clinton. As with this blog, they too link our current economic problems to family breakdown. In “Politico,” Caddell and Schoen write:

The decline of the American family is the hidden issue in our election. . . we are now facing a crisis of serious proportions that affects all Americans, regardless of race and class. [emphasis added]

Marriage rates are down. . .The proportion of married U.S. adults dropped from 57% in 2000 to 52% in 2009, the lowest percentage . . . ever recorded. Marriage rates have declined most steeply among young adults ages 25 to 34 whose education does not exceed a high school diploma. Approximately 45% of children raised by divorced mothers, and 69% of children raised by never-married mothers lived at or near the poverty line, with few prospects of economic success.

More than 50% of all youths put in jail for criminal behavior grew up in one-parent families. Three-quarters of teenage pregnancies are to adolescents from single-parent homes. Non-high school graduates are almost four times as likely to become unemployed as college graduates. For those who do find jobs, they will most likely make less than half of what college graduates do.

We are seeing an important breakthrough when well-known Democrats are willing to discuss single parents and family breakdown in Charles Murray terms.

Perhaps not surprisingly though, while Schoen and Caddell call for “affirmative policies that strengthen the nuclear family, enhance traditional values” and “encourage young people to become responsible adults and successful employees”—in effect, a cultural solution—they also endorse government "improving the overall quality of education and job training.” If that means throwing money at existing education and job training bureaucracies, well that’s the old “Blue Model” way. And it doesn’t work.

What’s required now: a political and cultural revolution.

“It takes a marriage to raise a child.”

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of the conservative City Journal and author of Marriage and Caste in America. Her latest article contains a wealth of valuable information:

When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago. . . Critics objected that the real source of misery in the [white working class] wasn’t a lack of marriages; it was the extinction of manufacturing jobs. The disagreement was familiar to culture-war veterans: conservatives versus liberals, family breakdown versus dearth of good jobs, culture versus economics.

[Yes,] globalization, technology, and the knowledge economy have wrenchingly changed the working-class world. Still, Coming Apart is correct: you can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. . . the single-mother revolution.

[It] started in the 1960s, when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons [included] the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.

The embrace of “lone motherhood”—women bringing up kids with no dad around—has been an American specialty. “By age thirty, one-third of American women had spent time as lone mothers,” observed family scholar Andrew Cherlin in his 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round. “In European countries such as France, Sweden, and the western part of Germany, the comparable percentages were half as large or even less.” . . cohabiting relationships here, unlike those in Europe, have short shelf lives. According to [a study that] examined couples in large American cities in the 1990s, about half of cohabiting couples split before their child was five—compared with just 18% of married couples.

the single-mother revolution . . . has been an economic catastrophe. [A]mong married couples with children[,] only 8.8% [are poor], up from 6.7% since the start of the Great Recession. But over 40% of single-mother families are poor, up from 37% before the downturn . . . of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institute’s [sic] Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.

Hymowitz takes on the liberal argument that unskilled, low-earning women are hard up not because they lack husbands, but because the unskilled are more likely to become single mothers:

The Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman tried to address that objection by studying low-income women who had entered “shotgun” unions—that is, getting married after getting pregnant—on the theory that they represented a population roughly similar to those who got pregnant but didn’t marry. The married women, he found, had a significantly higher standard of living than the unmarried ones. “Even among the mothers with the least qualifications and highest risks of poverty,” Lerman concluded, “marriage effects are consistently large and statistically significant.”

How did we so fail to understand the simple truth that two incomes are better than one? And two adults at the dinner table?! “It takes two committed adults—a marriage—to raise a child.” Hymowitz continues:

many single mothers are barely getting by. . . A father’s contribution to the family income, even if it was just $15,000, would dramatically improve the mother’s lot, not to mention that of [the] children. [And if you are married], it’s still possible to move up to the middle class, despite the factory closings . . . Ron Haskins of the Economic Mobility Project [found that] “If young people do three things—graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they’re 21 before having a baby—they have an almost 75% chance of making it into the middle class.”

the single-mother revolution encouraged lower-income men and women to think that mothers could manage on their own—at the very historical moment that their children needed more education, more training, and more planning. The rise in single motherhood was ill adapted for the economic shifts of the late twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Hymowitz, like Murray, has found how profoundly different it is at upper economic levels, where parents have accommodated both their child-rearing and marital habits to the new economic reality. College-educated mothers see children and marriage as a package deal; they marry before having children, with divorce rates falling since the 1980s. Partners practice “assortative mating,” marrying those of similar educational status, in contrast to past “marrying up” of, say, nurses to doctors and secretaries to bosses.

The household income implications are obvious. Hymowitz notes “a lawyer was always likely to earn more than a plumber—but today, plenty of upper-income households are headed by two lawyers.” One study found that assortative mating brought about a 25% to 30% increase in inequality among married-couple families between 1967 and 200, with far wider gap between power couples and single-mother families.

Additionally, assortative mating pays for music and art classes, books, sports, and tutoring. Two parents actively invested in children’s well-being, living in the house, means spending more time with their kids even though mothers are more likely to be at the office during the day, with the increases especially high among college-educated parents. High-income parents of children up to six years old spent an average of 1,300 more hours than lower-income parents taking their children beyond home, day-care, or school.

Hymowitz writes that college-educated parents, unsurprisingly, are responding to college admissions competition by “building their kids’ cognitive, social, and emotional skills even in the earliest years.” This approach turns children into competitive workers in a knowledge-based economy, while below, not only do poorer children have fewer “enrichment expenditures,” they also get less mother time and involvement, reflected in educational outcomes and so future earnings.

To me, it’s so overwhelmingly cultural. Our upper class—Asian, Hebrew, Protestant ethic—“tiger parents” raising self-reliant children. Our lower class—dependent, “entitled” (it begins with welfare)—products of the gigantic and failed “Great Society” anti-poverty social experiment, a welfare state keeping them in dependency.

Hymowitz concludes, “At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes. . . the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat.”

The Religious Wars

"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."

--Linus, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)

We live. We die. We cope with death, each in our own way. I am not a serene person, so I like serenity. I like Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe, and his definition of serenity:

Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate.

Religion helps us cope with death, and celebrate life. We aren’t alone. We are part of something bigger; something is there to support us.

Because humans need religion, it’s been present from the beginning, helping, celebrating, providing a path to a meaningful life.  It’s there today, in science-believing secularists’ worship of the environment.

And from the dawn of civilization, the power structure, politics, has exploited religion for its own purposes. The priesthood above. The masses below.

It’s important to me that Jared Diamond, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel-searing insight into politics as kleptocracy, considered one of the four key tools leaders use to retain power to be creating a religion that justifies kleptocracy.

A force as important as religion inevitably generates its own counterforce, in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. New religions tend to arise from among the people in reaction to the perverted, top-down religion imposed by kleptocratic leaders.

So we’ve had Roman emperor-gods to Christianity to imperial Christianity and the 1000-year “Age of Faith” in Europe countered by Islam elsewhere then by the Protestant Reformation’s 1517-1688 two centuries of warfare to the rise of science to the status of a religion to the un- or anti-science 19th and 20th century religious awakenings to U.S. urban secularism’s response to Protestant/Republican era Babbittry to the 1960s final overthrow of organized religion—TIME’s “Is God Dead?” (1966).

James Taranto, in the conservative Wall Street Journal, writes about “a fascinating essay” by Jeffrey Lord for the American Spectator's website. Lord attributes Democrats' problems with the white masses to a cultural shift that took place after JFK's assassination. Lord quotes Robert Caro, the biographer of Kennedy’s successor:

The New Frontiersmen--casual, elegant, understated, in love with their own sophistication . . .--were a witty bunch, and wit does better when it has a target to aim at, and the huge, lumbering figure of Lyndon Johnson, with his carefully buttoned-up suits and slicked-down hair, his bellowing speeches and extravagant, awkward gestures, made an inevitable target. . . . When he mispronounced 'hors d'oeuvres' as 'whore doves,' the mistake was all over Georgetown in what seemed an instant.

Lord said Kennedy himself had a healthy respect for the American people and for Johnson. But after his assassination, "the attitude toward Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson that was evidenced by Kennedy's liberal leaning staff, by the Washington Georgetown set, by Washington journalists-- seeped into the sinews of liberalism itself":

Slowly this contempt for the American people spread to institutions that were not government, manifesting itself in a thousand different ways. It infected the media, academe and Hollywood, where stars identified with middle-America like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball were eclipsed in the spotlight by leftists like Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda.

In our new, hip culture, it became respectable to diss the white American majority, or more precisely, its white males along with their spouses, who in American small towns, as President Obama said, bitterly “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them.”

So here we are in 2012, where as conservative columnist Mona Charen writes,

we reached a grim milestone: The majority of births to women under the age of 30 are now outside of marriage. Among blacks, 72% of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it's rare in the African-American community, where only 31% of couples are married (In 1960, it was 61%). . . A full 85% of youths in prison come from fatherless homes, as do 80% of rapists, 71% of high school dropouts. . .90% of the change in the violent crime rate between 1973 and 1995 was traceable to the rise of illegitimate births. A large sample looking at students in 315 classrooms in 11 cities concluded that "The single most important variable (in 'gang centrality') is the family's structure ...: the greater the number of parents in the household, the lower the reported gang centrality."

In the Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that the "relationship (between single-parent families and crime) is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature."

We need religion. We need the structured, two-adult families that religion supports. So says Charles Murray, in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. Many others endorse the need for values that come from within—discipline, hard work, postponement of gratification, optimism, belief in self—values supported by religion.

These values aren’t conservative alone, but while liberals tend to practice them for themselves, they encourage dependency rather than self-reliance among those they privately believe to be unfortunate inferiors—Democrats’ entitlement constituents of minorities, unmarried women, dependent youth, and the elderly.

Isn’t that the point to where our religious wars have evolved in 2012—self-reliance supported by religion or dependency on big government?

“The Fame Monster”

 
Quotation without Comment

From conservative Matthew Continetti, writing in the “Washington Free Beacon:”

there is an American ruling class—comprising the perversely overcompensated men and women in finance, law, media, and entertainment who through a bizarre, osmotic alchemy determine the boundaries of social and political correctness. . . the president’s schedule. . . counts no less than 28 celebrity fundraisers for Obama held over the last year. . . the incumbent’s reliance on celebrity money, endorsements, solicitations, and other forms of that self-congratulatory alternative energy known as “star power” not only reveals the financial and ideological core of the Democratic party, but also the attitudes and agenda of the milieu in which Obama is most comfortable. Those attitudes are obnoxious and that agenda is totally unrelated to the daily struggles of millions of Americans.

That many of the participants at these events understood how easily they could be caricatured as limousine liberals only heightened the dramatic tension. . . San Francisco super-lawyer and Obama donor Martin Checov said that “the other candidate’s travel schedule is no more oriented to the masses,” using language better suited to an aristocrat than a Democrat. . . [A]s CBS president Leslie Moonves and his reality-show host second wife “waited patiently for their wristbands” to hear Obama[, he] acknowledged that “partisanship is very much a part of journalism now,” but don’t get the wrong idea: “I run a news division. I’ve given no money to any candidate.” [We don’t know] whether he was chuckling at his own blatant hypocrisy or simply so completely self-possessed that he told this joke un-ironically.

Michelle Obama [r]ecently . . . racked up IMDB credits with appearances on The View and The Late Show to complement turns on The Tonight Show, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Rachael Ray, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The BET Honors, The Biggest Loser, and the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. Her husband, too, is no stranger to screens large and small, most recently “slow jamming” the news with Jimmy Fallon. Together, the[ Obamas] are on track to be the most televised first couple of all time[--their 195 appearances in 8 years surpassing the first-Hollywood-couple Reagans’ 175 appearances over an 85-year span that included 99 movie and television roles from 1937 to 1996, but behind the Clintons’ 338 media appearances over 20 years and three presidential runs].

Yet the Obamas have been slow to learn that the currency of celebrity depreciates easily. . . there comes a point at which fame and admiration are no longer freely given but must be earned, lest one risk becoming nothing more than a tawdry reality television star . . . donation-grabbing shows how much Obama has been weakened. There was a time when he could fill stadiums on his own, raise great sums on his own, [but t]hat time is long past: Nearly 90% of Obama’s individual donors in 2008 have not contributed in the current cycle. . . Obama has become a prop in his own play, an empty suit that trails Robert De Niro or Jack Black or Tobey Maguire or Salma Hayek or [whoever the campaign] think[s] might bring in some dough or inspire a Millennial to vote.

1-2- . . 3?

The revolution is here. Red is the color of revolution, and through a quirky series of steps, the media chose to color Republicans red and Democrats blue. Odd, because red and revolution are historically associated with the left.

But no longer so odd. Democrats are the party of status quo and Republicans the party of change. Revolution. Red. Republican. Blue. Status quo. Democrats.

In February of last year, we pointed to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s direct attack on public sector union power as the revolution's opening salvo.  Madison began the struggle to re-balance our economy away from government power toward private sector control. Now, after 16 months, Walker has prevailed against the union counterattacks. It’s the second of what could be three consecutive June blows to President Obama’s re-election chances. The first was last week’s terrible jobs report, coupled to other bad economic news.

Yesterday, Walker became America’s first ever governor to survive a recall election. Wisconsin’s public sector unions, and their allies throughout the nation, mounted three waves of election efforts to reverse Walker’s assault on their power. They first tried and failed to replace a Republican justice on Wisconsin’s supreme court, one who later voted with the 4-3 majority to uphold Walker’s restrictions on the public sector unions. Next, they failed to recall enough Republican senators last year to change the Wisconsin senate balance of power. Now, they have failed to recall Walker, his lieutenant governor, and three other Republican senators, though they did successfully recall a fourth.  Walker has prevailed;  the revolution to check entitlement government is underway.

The third June blow to Obama’s reelection chances will come if the U.S. Supreme Court declares unconstitutional all or part of Obamacare. After all, Obamacare is constitutional lawyer Obama’s signature accomplishment.

Back to revolution. According to James Piereson of the conservative Manhattan Institute, America is headed for its “fourth revolution.” The new revolution follows Thomas Jefferson’s “revolution of 1800,” the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Each revolution began with a crisis—the Alien and Sedition Act’s attempt to stifle political opposition led to the “revolution of 1800,” while slavery and economic collapse triggered the next two—and each revolution reshaped U.S. politics for decades.

Piereson calls today’s status quo forces “rent-seeking groups,” or those “concerned with the distribution of resources rather than with the creation of wealth.” But The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics says the term “rent seeking,” which comes from 19th century economist David Ricardo, is confusing, and should be called “privilege seeking" instead, “getting a subsidy. . . for being in a particular class of people.”

To me, that’s “entitlement seeking,” for the groups gaming the political system believe they are “entitled” to redistributed wealth. At base, though, we are talking about groups that would “re-cut the pie” rather than “grow the pie”—Democrats, liberals, seekers of fairness and justice as opposed to Republicans/conservatives focused on economic growth.

Here’s Piereson on today’s “rent-seekers,” relabeled below as “pie cutters:”

The regime of public spending has at last drawn so many groups into the public arena in search of public dollars that it has paralyzed the political process and driven governments to the edge of bankruptcy. These groups are widely varied: trade associations, educational lobbies, public employee unions, government contractors, ideological and advocacy organizations, health-care providers, hospital associations that earn revenues from Medicare and Medicaid programs, and the like.    .    . They consume rather than create wealth. These groups are highly influential in the political process because they are willing to invest large sums in lobbying and election campaigns in order to protect their sources of income. [Pie cutters] have congregated within the Democratic Party. . . one might describe the Democratic Party as a coalition of [pie cutters].

[Pie-cutting] coalitions have little interest in moderating their demands in the interests of the broader economy because, as their leaders reason, the economy will be little affected by the small share of it to which they are laying claim. In addition, they calculate that if they do not take the money, then someone else will—and so they are not inclined to be “fools” for the public interest.

As Ronald Reagan said at his first inaugural (1981), “government is the problem.” It will be until Republicans rebalance economic power toward the private sector.

Jobs: talk about bad news!

“We will come back stronger. We do have better days ahead.”

--Barack Obama  

“Good times are around the corner."

--Attributed to Herbert Hoover 

The country added just 69,000 jobs last month. The Washington Post’s Ylan Q. Mui reports the total was less than half the number economists had expected. The government also revised down its estimate of April job growth from 115,000 to only 77,000. At the same time, the unemployment rate ticked up one point to 8.2%. All bad news. Mui writes:

Friday morning’s data suggested something more like deja vu: Job growth is the weakest since [May last year], when the economy fell into a slump that lasted through the summer. Analysts say the country needs to add roughly 130,000 jobs per month for the recovery to maintain its momentum. But to truly make a dent in the unemployment rate, hiring must reach a sustained rate of 250,000 jobs per month. The country has hit that mark only three times over the past year and a half. [emphasis added]

Yesterday’s poor jobs report hit the stock market hard. The Dow fell 275 points, dropping into negative territory for 2012. Declines in both the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ were even sharper. Both indexes have fallen enough from their 2012 highs—10%—to have their drops qualify as a “technical correction,” the last stage before “bear market.”

We’ve had three bad job reports in a row. There are only four more reports before the election. I believe that if just one of the final four comes in low—in other words, is under 130,000 new jobs for the month—then because a majority of the last seven reports will have been poor, the total series will seal voter perceptions of a sick economy. Only with four strong job reports in succession will Obama be able to overcome yesterday’s bad taste.

The chart below shows how Obama is doing on his minimum job creation goals. By October’s pre-election jobs report, he is likely to be able to show some job growth for his term, though that growth will barely surpass the total jobs number the day he took office. The unemployment rate, however, may not yet match January 2009's level of 7.8%.

The drip, drip, drip of bad economic numbers.

"the governing elite . . . continue to flail about, believing in their self-anointed right to 'manage the economy' and plunder the private sector to keep their power and their government-centric world alive. . . The solution lies in restoring the balance between an over-sized public sector and the private sector. . . the repeal of overly burdensome and unnecessary regulations, and tax reform that broadens the tax base while lowering marginal tax rates. . . The time has arrived to curtail the power of the governing elite."

 --Charles Kadlec, Forbes  

Bad numbers summary:

➢ May was stock market’s worst month in two years.

➢ GDP revised downward to 1.9%.

➢ Consumer Confidence index down 4% in May.

➢ Only 75.7% of prime age workers (25-54) have jobs.

➢ Since recession began, 8.2 million fewer workers under 55 have jobs.

➢ Unemployment rate for teenagers: 25%.

➢ Recession recovery in jobs just 1.9% in 34 months.

➢ Recession recovery in GDP is worst of all 11 recessions in past 60 years, just half average rate of previous recessions.

➢ Record increase in number of people in poverty, approaching the 1960s levels that led to War on Poverty.

➢ Budget deficit and federal debt have reached their highest percentage since World War II, as has federal spending as percentage of GDP.

➢ During June 2009 to June 2011 “recovery,” median annual household income fell by 6.7%--greater decline than during recession itself.

➢ Standard of living has fallen longer and more steeply over past three years than any time since government records began 50 years ago.

➢ Housing crisis worse than during Great Depression, with home values one-third less than they were five years ago and home ownership rate lowest since 1965.

➢ Government dependency—percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit—highest in history.

➢ Real business nonresidential fixed investment (RBNRFI), which triggers economic growth and job gains, was highly positive under Clinton, healthy under Bush, but is negative under Obama.  

Bad numbers details:

Stocks in May had their worst month in two years. Government revised downward the U.S. GDP growth rate for the year’s first quarter from a weak 2.2% to a weaker 1.9%. The Consumer Confidence Index dropped a sharp 4% in May after falling slightly in April, suggesting to those who calculate the index that “the pace of economic growth in the months ahead may moderate."

Deeper down, one encounters more negative hard numbers. Peter Whoriskey, in the liberal Washington Post, writes that “the proportion of Americans in their prime working years who have jobs is smaller than it has been at any time in the 23 years before the recession,” reflecting the “profound and lasting effects” the downturn has had on workers. According to Whoriskey:

The percentage of workers between the ages of 25 and 54 who have jobs now stands at 75.7%, just 1% over what it was at the downturn’s worst. . . Before the recession the proportion hovered at 80%.

Mort Zuckerman, U.S. News publisher, expands on Whoriskey’s findings:

employment for those age 55 and up has risen 3.8 million since the recession began in December 2007, whereas the ranks of the employed in the under-55 age cohort have shrunk by 8.2 million. [So] as aging baby boomers remain in their jobs, youth employment shrinks; the unemployment rate for teenagers is now at 25%.

Harvey Golub is ex-CEO of American Express. In the conservative Wall Street Journal, Golub informs us that:

Over the past 60 years, there have been 11 recessions and 11 recoveries. Sadly, this recovery is near the bottom of all 11. Cumulative nonfarm job growth is just 1.9% 34 months into recovery, the ninth-worst performance [#10 and #11 were double recessions that would have had speedier recoveries, if each double were cut in two and measured separately] and well below the average job growth of 6.5%. Cumulative GDP growth is just 6.8% 11 quarters into this recovery, less than half the average (15.2%) and the worst of all 11.

Peter Wehner, in the conservative journal Commentary, offers a grand summary of bad economic news, some familiar, but much new to me:

during the Obama presidency the number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty has seen a record increase, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. In addition, the budget deficit and federal debt have reached their highest percentage since World War II. The same is true when it comes to federal spending as a percentage of GDP. During the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the median annual household income fell by 6.7% – a more substantial decline than occurred during the Great Recession. The Christian Science Monitor points out, “The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the U.S. government began recording it five decades ago.” The housing crisis is worse than the Great Depression. Home values worth one-third less than they were five years ago. The home ownership rate is the lowest since 1965. And government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.

Wow.

There’s a less known, but equally disturbing, statistic—the rate of real business nonresidential fixed investment (RBNRFI). Louis Woodhill, writing in Forbes, has the details. The capital gains tax cut that took effect on January 1, 1997 caused RBNRFI to grow by 38.6% during the first three years of Clinton’s second presidential term. Over the same period, real GDP increased by 14.3%, and total employment increased by 5.2%. During the comparable period of Bush 43’s second term, the increases were RBNRFI: 22.7%; real GDP: 7.8%; total employment: 4.4%. During the first three years of Obama’s term, however, the figures were disastrously worse: RBNRFI: -6.6%; real GDP: 1.2%; total employment: -1.8%.

Joel Kotkin is a geographer at Chapman University. He offers a look at troubles in his state—our largest and often our national trend-setter—California:

[Governor Brown’s] November ballot initiative . . . would primarily [tax] those whom Democrats call "millionaires" (i.e., people who make more than $250,000 a year). [Yet] people who are at the very high end of the food chain, they're still going to be in Napa. They're still going to be in Silicon Valley. They're still going to be in West L.A. It's really going to hit the small business owners and the young family that's trying to accumulate enough to raise a family, maybe send their kids to private school. It'll kick them in the teeth.

According to Kotkin, upwardly mobile families are fleeing in droves. As a result, California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are the "entrenched incumbents" who inherited their wealth or came to California early and made their money. Then there's a shrunken middle class of public employees and, much farther below, a permanent welfare class. Today about 40% of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on Medicaid. The welfare recipients, Kotkin emphasizes, "aren't leaving. Why would they? They get much better benefits in California.”

Kotkin's summary: "the state is run for the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees."

And Obama wants to bring to the nation Brown’s (dare we say?) Californication of the upwardly mobile?! As Golub says:

The "animal spirits" so necessary for a true recovery have been dampened by this administration's policies and rhetoric. . . The president has said, over and over again, that he wants to increase taxes on businesses—small and large—and on financially successful individuals. He doesn't quite [use those words], but that is the effect.

Capitalism or Socialism--Your Choice

“our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. . . fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked.”

--Barack Obama

There’s more from the leader of the world’s #1 market economy. Writes Debra Saunders, house conservative at the San Francisco Chronicle,

The president explained that the goal of private investment is to "maximize profits," whereas a president's job is to make sure that everyone has "a fair shot" and that everyone pays his or her "fair share" of taxes. That's the problem with Obama; he thinks he's the fairness czar. He didn't say that a president is supposed to create an environment that nurtures business success. He said a president is supposed to make sure that nobody walks away with too much.

In his Forbes article “Is It Within Bounds To Ask: Is Obama A Socialist?”, conservative Paul Roderick Gregory points to a

remarkable overlap between Obama’s electoral platform and the Party of European Socialists, which represents leftist and socialist parties in the European parliament. . . French socialist Francois Hollande’s and Obama’s platforms are virtual carbon copies, and Hollande is quite open about and proud of being a socialist.

Obama brings to the table a deep distrust of free enterprise and a belief in government as the solution to most problems. . . Obama should make his health care reform a centerpiece of his campaign rather than pretend it does not exist.

Gregory is right to note that socialism is still a bad word in the U.S., connected in American minds more to Soviet-style Communism than to Western European social democracy. It’s the latter force that today so attracts liberal Democrats, including Obama. Rather than re-educate the country on the benign nature of democratic socialism, however, Democrats prefer to avoid the label “socialist” entirely, even though doing so is inaccurate.

Europe is a mixed economy, top-down with government in charge, and with a titanium safety net that includes universal health care. Democrats love old Europe, while Republicans are wary.

And worried.   Conservatives want a different America. They oppose democratic socialism. Here’s conservative David Brooks of the New York Times:

Private equity firms are not lovable, but they forced a renaissance that revived American capitalism. The large questions today are: Will the U.S. continue this process of rigorous creative destruction? More immediately, will the nation take the transformation of the private sector and extend it to the public sector? While American companies operate in radically different ways than they did 40 years ago, the sheltered, government-dominated sectors of the economy — especially education, health care and the welfare state — operate in astonishingly similar ways.

And Brooks again:

The American founders . . . dispersed power to encourage active citizenship, hoping that as people became more involved in local government, they would develop a sense of restraint and responsibility.

And Thomas Sowell, at Stanford’s Hoover Institution:

When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them. . . if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.

I think conservative Washington Post columnist George Will best captured the socialist state’s entitlement mentality when he reported:

Campaigning recently at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., Romney warned students about their burden from the national debt, but when he took questions, the first questioner had something else on her peculiar mind: “So you’re all for like, ‘Yay, freedom,’ and all this stuff and ‘Yay, like, pursuit of happiness.’ You know what would make me happy? Free birth control.”

Conventional Paul-Krugman/New York Times social democracy thinking teaches us that big government’s greatest achievement was spending our way out of the Great Depression during World War II. So now comes Forbes’ Steve Forbes' attempt to put that shibboleth to rest:

Free markets, not big government, are the true source of America’s incredible strength. They enabled us to win World War II, thereby saving Western civilization.

It’s easy to say, “Build planes in an assembly-line manner, like cars.” A typical car in those days had 15,000 parts. The B-24, which Ford eventually produced in prodigious numbers after endless difficulties, had 488,193 parts, which broke down to 30,000 components. The B-29, a plane conceived in the 1930s as a dreadnought in the sky, was a horrific nightmare to bring to reality. The engines alone required 900 modifications. The B-29 was slated for cancellation before [GM’s Bill] Knudsen [picture] was brought in to save it. Doing so broke his health.

Who knew? Bill Knudsen, not big government.
So Romney, not big government.

More “Big Flip”: Democrats “Work with” Wealthy

"High tax rates in the upper income brackets allow politicians to win votes with class warfare rhetoric, painting their opponents as defenders of the rich. Meanwhile, the same politicians can win donations from the rich by creating tax loopholes that can keep the rich from actually paying those higher tax rates -- or perhaps any taxes at all."

--Thomas Sowell, Stanford’s Hoover Institution

Sowell is being polite. Those he calls “politicians” are class warfare Democrats who both attack and take money from the rich. Jay Cost of the conservative Weekly Standard wrote more bluntly that Democrats are “a party whose leaders simultaneously press the case for ‘fairness’ while giving unfair access to wealthy donors.” According to Cost:

the Democratic party. . . has become the opposite . . .of what it claims to be today. [Its model is old] Tammany Hall, and [Tammany’s] coziness with Wall Street . . . Tammany [won] through the support of the Irish, [and] by keeping its financial sponsors on Wall Street happy. . . That is the modern Democratic party in a nutshell.

Cost’s reference to Tammany Hall’s “Irish” alludes to the Democrats' earlier base among ethnic minorities, including Italians, Poles, and Jews. Today’s Democratic base includes America's non-white—25% of the voters and rising, 80% of whom support Obama. Combined with the paid-off rich, the “modern Democratic party in a nutshell.”

Cost added that the party’s embrace of the privileged “has basically been the way of the world for the last 30 years.” What? It’s been the way of the world forever. The rich make their way under whatever system governs.

Since the old GOP collapsed under Herbert Hoover in 1932, the elite has been playing ball with Democrats. Cost corrects the record in a more recent article:

the modern Democratic party. . . was founded by General Andrew Jackson – “Old Hickory” as they used to call him – back in the 1820s to fight political privilege, on behalf of the “humble members of society,” as Jackson called them. Old Hickory was a straight shooter [who] hated the idea of the government playing favorites.

But . . .Franklin Roosevelt transformed the Democratic party . . . using the power of big government to buy off special interest groups, like the big city machines and organized labor. . . later Democratic presidents [added] African Americans, government workers, environmentalists, feminists, corporations, gay rights groups, trial lawyers and more . . . And today [Democrats have] become [the] party of special interests. . . benefit[ting] privileged groups.

Back then: the Irish + Wall Street = power.  Now: minorities (including unmarried women) + money = power.

Cost also recognizes the deep divisions we see in American politics today stem from an economy so weakened that Democrats are no longer able to seize enough wealth to care for their base constituencies:

The American political process is starting to break down because of major changes to the political economy of this country. For half a century after World War II, the economy grew at such an incredible pace that we could have low taxes, high social welfare benefits, and a low deficit. . . there could be bipartisanship [because] economic growth bankrolled . . . compromises. It had very little to do with the foresight, courage, or moderation of the pols in Washington. They were just riding the wave generated by the private sector.

Again and still: the economy, stupid.

“The Big Flip”

Todd S. Purdum, writing in the slick, liberal Vanity Fair, has quite rightly proclaimed that “over the past half-century, the two parties completely switched roles, with the G.O.P. turning into rebels and the Democrats defending the status quo.”

As Purdum says, Republicans have become

a radical insurgency bent on upending the prevailing practices of the national government . . . For most of its history the Republican Party was something else entirely: a steward of the status quo. It was the Democrats who were historically on the barricades in the fight for radical change. But the Democrats these days have turned into the stewards—beleaguered defenders of the government and country we have evolved into. The two great national parties have. . . switched roles . . .—the Big Flip—is . . . a substantial reality and it’s substantially complete.

Purdum’s attempt to characterize today’s GOP is way wide of the mark. According to Purdum, Republicans have moved so far to the right today they wouldn’t nominate either Ronald Reagan or Abraham Lincoln. It would seem that liberals—Purdum anyway—have so refashioned Reagan into a tax-raising moderate, and Lincoln into a big government hero, that they believe Republicans no longer worship the two. Wrong. Really so very wrong and so deeply removed from reality.

On today’s Democrats, Purdum says they are fighting “simply to stay in the same place.” They are “status-quo oriented, centrist protectors of government.” Right. And the reason Republicans aren’t is because our status-quo government is ruining America. We cannot afford today’s entitlement society with its annual deficits over $1 trillion, with federal government spending at 25% of GDP and rising, and with, according to House budget chair Paul Ryan, 70% of Americans getting more back from the federal government than they put in.

The two parties have flipped. Here’s what remains the same: those fighting to preserve the status quo are on history's losing side.

Regenerating America: the Next 35%

Bringing America back means caring about those just down from the top—the next 35%—those who are trying. If the next 35% succeed, so too can those below them, in a cascade, not a trickle.

Last year, we found that the top 20% (quintile) of U.S. households actually contains, because of larger households at the top, 25% of our population. We also found the top group makes up 26% of the electorate. Though this better-educated 25% tends to be liberal and vote Democratic, Republicans and conservatives are also present in the top quarter. Living there is truly competitive, with many options available. Educated, employed, involved, successful—those living at the top have a good life.

What about the bottom 75%? I believe lack of education—good education, any education—limits their options. Here are today’s educational facts (for the population over 25):

➢ we have an underclass of 12%--those who didn’t even graduate from high school;

➢ those who have achieved educational success—graduating from college—make up 30% of the population;

➢ an additional 27% have some college education, including 10% with associate (junior college) degrees, and;

➢ 31% of the population are high school graduates only.

Below the top 25%, the “next 35%” then include some college graduates--those doing less well economically--plus most of those who have education beyond high school, as well as some high school graduates with higher ambitions.

This group can benefit greatly from what the New York Times’ Tom Friedman writes about in his latest column. Friedman has found that online courses from top universities are wildly popular, highly accessible, and cheap, making superior education much more widely available. So we have an immediate, welcome, high technology payoff.

Let the upper class marinate in their club-like, ivy-covered educations. Achievement-oriented people from poorer families now can receive the benefits of a top education at a fraction of the cost.

Success, of course, is marked by so much more than educational attainment. We used to stream students by academic achievement and aptitude scores. Now we know humans possess many varieties of intelligence. Educational choice, multiple educational opportunities, enable each person to triumph in pursuit of the dream most inspiring to that individual.

What’s required is personal responsibility. That’s something beyond “Life of Julia” feeding at the public trough.

Stock Market Tailspin

Stocks continue their losses, down for the 11th time in 12 sessions. The FOX Index, which reached its all-time high of +1,935 just 16 days ago, has dropped to a modest +761 (see chart), closer to a negative “unhealthy” than it is to its May 1 peak (the Index tracks the distance from 15,800, a “healthy” market total of a Dow of 12,000, an S&P 500 of 1,300, and a NASDAQ of 2,500). The S&P 500, at 1,304, is just 4 points from sinking below its “healthy” minimum.

The market's problems are Greece, related bank problems in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, JP Morgan’s $3 billion in trading losses, and other economic problems at home. But Facebook’s initial public stock offering (IPO) tomorrow could set off a welcome market buying spree.

America’s hagiographic television: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, PBS

journalism is produced in “an adversary environment where the goals of the reported inherently conflict with the goals of the reporter and the reader. It is this daily conflict that gives concrete importance and meaning to the First Amendment, to freedom of the press. Without that freedom there is no conflict, and without that conflict there is no truth.”

 --Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post (1974)

Russian television (RTV) is now available in English in hotel rooms overseas, right alongside BBC and CNN. It looks quite professional, much like the other networks. Of course the news is focused on Russia (as CNN emphasizes the U.S.), and of course President Vladimir Putin is presented in a favorable light. Under its slick veneer, RTV is hagiographic television.

Back in the ex-U.S.S.R., there are three major Russian TV networks. Two are owned by the state, and the third, commercial NTV, is a Gazprom-owned network. But Gazprom in turn is majority-owned by the state. According to a study by Professor Sarah Oates, University of Glasgow, most Russians believe news reporting on their three national channels is selective and unbalanced, but view this as appropriate. The people Oates interviewed made it clear they believe state television should provide central authority and order in troubled times.

You know what? American TV today looks a lot like RTV. News shows present President Obama and his family in a hagiographic manner; they are selling the Obamas to their audience. It’s as if the state actually owned NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and a majority, not just a piece, of PBS. This happens to Democratic presidents only, and has since Newt Gingrich shut down the Federal government in 1995, turning the media from an adversary to an advocate for then-President Clinton.

We’ve come a long way from where Ben Bradlee had the Washington Post positioned in 1974, a paper hard on presidents of both parties.

America in Decline

Financial Times columnist Edward Luce has written a new book called Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. Saying “America-Descent” has “received well-deserved acclaim and recognition not only for its superb reporting of the on-ground reality of America's current economic crisis but also because it is an unflinchlingly brave book,” Foreign Policy’s latest issue features an interview with Luce, whom the magazine tells us has “followed in [Democracy in America’s Alexis de] Tocqueville's footsteps.” High praise indeed.

So what does Luce really think of us? First, Luce’s more defensible assertions:

Ø Since 2009, “very, very few jobs were created and . . . the higher value-added jobs tended for the most part to be replaced by lower paying ones.”

Ø “the education problem -- the problem of K through 12” is “a portal onto America's competitiveness problem. But it's also a cultural problem.”

Ø “American values, the first- or second-generation immigrant spirit [of] a Tiger Mom or in some Italian family in Brooklyn in which parents force kids to study at night is a truly American value.”

Ø “the swing towards celebrating the child, elevating the child, over-praising the child, boosting constantly at every opportunity the self-esteem of the child, assuming the child is a fragile little eggshell that can be broken at any moment, is something quite un-immigrant and therefore quite un-American, and also a great disservice to the child.”

Ø “Casinos, sports arenas, and convention centers don't generate income for those who've lost their jobs. The casino is a particularly apt metaphor for the intellectual bankruptcy of thinking, because, if done well, you can generate short-term income and tax revenues. But the costs are [only] pushed back a little bit further.”

Unfortunately, more of what Luce says about us seems questionable:

 Ø “there is a lot of evidence in studies of other economies that . . . you have gross, Latin American-style inequality”

FACT: The World Bank’s ranking of nations by Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, places the U.S. at 41 more equal than any Latin American country, closer to New Zealand, Australia, the U.K., and Italy than to Peru, closer to Switzerland and Ireland than to Ecuador, closer to Canada, Belgium, and France than to Costa Rica, closer to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and South Korea than to Chile and Mexico, as close to Germany as to Brazil, and closer to Japan at the top than to Bolivia, 9th from the bottom.

 Ø “The most powerful piece is also the most recent, and that is the distribution of growth since 2009 [from a] paper by Saez and Piketty from Berkeley University”

COMMENT: “Berkeley” University is a diploma mill that produces no serious academic studies. Luce most likely meant to say the University of California (Berkeley).

Ø “As America's inequality is growing to Latin American levels, social mobility has fallen to sub-European levels.”

 FACT: A 2010 OECD study of social mobility ranked (chart, p. 7) the U.S. 10th of 12 measured developed nations (not dead last), just behind France and ahead of Italy and the U.K. Germany at 7th has a larger population than any nation ranked above it; Germany’s social mobility score was just 31% better than the U.S.’s. Within the U.S., a Minneapolis Federal Reserve study of household income by quintile over 2001-2007 found that 44% of those in the bottom 20% left their quintile within 6 years, 61% of those in the 4th 20% left, 58% of those in the 3rd 20% left, 55% of those in the 2nd 20% left, while 34% of those at the top dropped down—a fair amount of social mobility.

Ø “People tend to make a fetish out of Washington and blame Washington on itself, as if somehow it is just in suspension from the society that elected it. But . . . my skepticism about how easy it will be for America to rejuvenate itself stems from that fact that Washington[‘s problems are] deeply rooted in trends beyond the Beltway, in the real America.”

COMMENT: Defending Washington at the expense of the American people scores points only with our country’s national elite and their Democratic Party supporters.

Ø “if you have a proper understanding of American history and you know what role government played in American development and in American capitalism, then [what’s happening] isn't fine at all.”

 FACT: Before the New Deal 80 years ago—that is, during America's first century and a half—private initiative built our nation far, far more than did our small Federal government.

Ø “what stops democracy from [working] in America? . . . we go back to the world of Latin Americanization of American society; [b]ut we also go back again to the American people.”

COMMENT: British observer Luce once again falsely “Latin Americanizes” our country; once again appeals to our elite at the expense of the masses. It's considered "unflinchlingly brave," apparently, for a foreigner to be able to insult ordinary Americans. Sad, sad, and certainly no Tocqueville lauding a free people.

Primitive Communism’s Appeal

“In the end, as virtually every serious political thinker from the dawn of time has agreed, republics do not long survive without virtue — in the people as a whole, and among the powerful.”

 --Walter Russell Mead, American Interest  

“to each according to his need”

--Karl Marx (1875)  

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, along with many other conservative commentators, is intrigued by the Obama campaign’s propaganda slide show “the Life of Julia.” Douthat says “Julia’s” life offers a

sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision — personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual — can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington. The condescension inherent in this vision is apparent in every step of Julia’s pilgrimage toward a community-gardening retirement.

Of course nothing in the slide show even hints at how all these government programs will be paid for. But, Douthat warns,

in an increasingly atomized society, where communities and families are weaker than ever before, such a vision may have more appeal — to both genders — than many of the conservatives mocking the slide show might like to believe.

People—voters—long for security, and government is ready to promise it, whether or not it can deliver.

More surprising, perhaps, than Douthat’s sympathy for “Julia” is Lee Harris’ defense, in the pages of the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s journal American, of David Graeber, dubbed the “Anti-Leader” of “Occupy Wall Street.” Harris calls Graeber a “brilliant economic anthropologist;” the author of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Harris says the central idea in Graeber’s book is his claim that

communism should not be seen as an alternative system to capitalism[,] but rather as a mode of social life that has always been present and that is a fact of life even in the most advanced capitalist nations, such as the United States. Or, to put it as Graeber likes to: We are all communists already.

As Graeber writes,

People of all cultures, including our own, invariably practice the communism of everyday life when dealing with their family and close friends. A mother does not expect her child to pay her for her baby-sitting services. A brother does not rent out his baseball glove to his brother on an hourly basis. If a friend is sick and needs something from the store, we pick it up for her and would never think of asking for gas money in return. . . during a crisis, such as a natural disaster. . . people will voluntarily, even cheerfully, extend a helping hand to those who are most in need of one.

Harris notes two big obstacles should prevent voluntary communism from actually working. One is criminals using violence to seize what they want. Graeber recognizes violence does exist, but so too do laws and police to control criminal behavior. The other obstacle is freeloaders taking what they are offered, but giving nothing back in return. Freeloaders are beyond law’s reach—they commit no crime, but ultimately, their actions bring down a system based upon voluntary reciprocity. Graeber’s book unfortunately fails to grapple with the freeloader problem.

The answer, ironically for Communists who believe religion is the opiate of the masses, may be religion. Graeber is the unusual radical who is positive about religion. He recognizes religions rely on individuals who live the spirit of everyday communism, with their own shining example inspiring others to do the same.

Austerity in Western Europe?

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

 --Margaret Thatcher (1976)

Liberal E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post is apparently a disciple of Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Krugman.  Krugman, from his lofty perch at the New York Times editorial page, has blessed America with the word “austerity”—budget cutting instead of Keynesian deficit spending to boost economic output. Now Dionne tells us:

it's conservatives who want to follow the Western European path of austerity that voters in France and Greece rejected last weekend. The Obama administration, by contrast, has chosen a distinctly American path that kept austerity at bay. As a result, the American economy has climbed out of the Great Recession more quickly than most of Europe. Had Obama accepted the right wing's assertions that cutting government is the one and only route to prosperity, we would have gone the way of Britain, which is slipping toward recession again. . . Obama's thoroughly moderate economic policies are an excellent example of a practical American exceptionalism. [emphasis added]

Setting aside his assertion--challenged  here--that Obamanomics is actually working, Dionne is going beyond Krugman to claim that Obama, like Krugman and Dionne an unabashed admirer of European democratic socialism (see Obamacare), is in fact the polar opposite of our European friends—he is an American exceptionalist! What hogwash, a Goebbles-like “big lie” except Dionne is just playfully pulling our leg.

Michael Tanner, in the conservative National Review, gives us a more objective slant on what’s actually happening in Europe. Most of the “austerity”—the budget cuts—are small, set in the future, and easily overwhelmed by tax increases on the rich and even new spending. The European record is a chronicle of the very soak-the-rich tax hikes Krugman, Dionne, and Obama so love. Country by country:

➢ Portugal . . . pumped more than €2.2 billion into [its] economy in 2009, 1.25% of its GDP. The result[:] economic growth stayed negative, while unemployment rose by roughly 3 million.

➢ France [imposed] a 3% surtax on incomes above €500,000, an increase of 1% in the top marginal tax rate (from 40% to 41%), and [halted] automatic indexation of tax brackets for inheritance, wealth, and income taxes. [It hiked] the corporate income tax on businesses with revenue of more than €250 million, . . . the capital-gains tax, and [closed] several corporate tax breaks. And [t]here was an increase in the Value Added Tax (VAT) and the excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol.

➢ Britain [hiked] the personal income tax to 50% for those earning more than £150,000 a year[, which decreased] income-tax revenues by £509 million. . . British government spending still consumes more than 49% of GDP. Government spending actually increased by £59.2 billion from 2009 to 2011.

➢ Spain imposed a “wealth tax” on citizens with €700,000 of assets, and a 7% income tax on those earning more than €300,000 per year; capital-gains taxes were also hiked.

➢ Italy imposed a “Solidarity Tax” of 3% on all taxpayers who earn more than €300,000.

➢ Greece increased taxes by nearly twice as much as it cut spending, including a 5% surtax on the wealthy.

Tanner also notes that governments boosted the infamous European VATs (value added taxes), along with fuel, alcohol, and tobacco taxes, nearly everywhere, all of which hit the average Jacques. Tanner concludes,

It should come as no surprise that all those new taxes, combined with a lack of spending restraint, has threatened to throw Europe back into a double-dip recession. Is it any wonder that French, Greek, and British voters were anxious to “throw the bums out”? 

So, setting the record straight, Europe did what Obama wants by taxing the rich, it didn’t work, and Europe responded by voting their leaders out.

Yet another weak jobs report.

American employers added 115,000 workers in April, the smallest increase in six months. Bloomberg News-surveyed economists had estimated a 160,000 advance. The March total, however, was revised upward from 120,000 to 154,000. At the same time, the jobless rate unexpectedly fell to 8.1%, but only because more people left the labor force, adding to concern the economic expansion is cooling. The unemployment rate has exceeded 8% since February 2009, the longest such stretch since monthly records began in 1948. Average hourly earnings were unchanged from the month before, the first time without a wage increase since August, and the average employee workweek held at 34.5 hours. Growth in both figures would have suggested future job gains.

Stocks are down, reflecting the negative jobs news. The FOX Index, which defines a “healthy” market as above 15,800—a total formed from adding a Dow of 12,000, an S&P 500 of 1,300, and a NASDAQ of 2,500—is positive at +1,325 (chart), but has dropped over 600 points from its all-time high of +1,935 reached on May 1, when each component had topped the next level, meaning a Dow over 13,000, an S&P over 1,400, and a NASDAQ over 3,000. Currently, the numbers are down to Dow 12,835, S&P 1,355, and NASDAQ 2,935.

Nevertheless, our chart measuring progress toward Obama’s unemployment goals (below) continues showing he likely will be able to claim (very slight) net job growth by the time the pre-election October jobs report comes out.

Partly because Obama will be able to claim net job growth, conservatives are increasingly focusing on America’s awful labor force participation rate. That rate, which documents the total share of working-age people actually in the labor force, has fallen to 63.6%, its lowest level since December 1981.  That was a time when women were still joining the workforce, thereby sending the labor participation rate higher. Now, as the chart below shows, the participation rate is moving ever more depressingly lower.

It’s our labor force’s frowny face.