{"id":3956,"date":"2009-01-09T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-09T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3956"},"modified":"2009-01-09T10:05:56","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T15:05:56","slug":"oceania-has-always-run-a-deficit-winston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3956","title":{"rendered":"Oceania Has Always Run A Deficit, Winston"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dictators need to have a war to keep their nation in a state of crisis.\u00a0 If they don’t have one, they need to manufacture one.<\/p>\n

I was going to write about Obama’s state of the union<\/strike> speech yesterday – but I’m going to use King’s observations instead<\/a>, since he’s both qualified and coherent:<\/p>\n

“All we have to fear is the status quo,” I think, is how Ed characterized that. But I think much of this is hyperbole. Take for example “2 million out of work.” The context for this is a workforce over 140 million people. Through November, the 12 month percentage change in employt is a decline of 1.4%. (You can play with the data.) This doesn’t even match the 12-month percentage change in March 2002, hardly a period that called for the drama of this speech. Payroll employment declines of 2.5% or more have occured in both the 1974-75 and 1981-82 recessions. We may get to that level; I think that’s more likely than not some time in the next six months, at which point you will say “4 million out of work” rather than two. But let’s keep some perspective rather than dwell on “we could lose a generation of potential and promise.” That’s just bathos. Four million jobs lost sucks, but it’s not without recent precedent when the size of the economy is accounted for.That same perspective is needed elsewhere. 2.8 million more people involuntarily in part-time work? Take a look at the data. 25% of them are workers age 16-24. We don’t have data before 1994 for the unemployment series that includes part-time workers who wish they were full time (known as U-6), and we know it’s higher than it has been since we’ve tracked the current series. But it was pretty high in 1994, also not a date when we thought the end of the world was nigh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

King – an actual licensed economist, for those who don’t already know – goes on to show how bad the crisis at this moment is not<\/em>, at least for most Americans.\u00a0 Read the post.<\/p>\n

The question:\u00a0 why did Obama uncork a stemwinder on exactly how badly <\/em>we all need his trillion-dollar hug?<\/p>\n

Rahm Emanuel noted that the new administration didn’t want to waste a crisis, that they could pass things in crisis mode that wouldn’t get past Congress in normal times. The speech tries to elevate a normal recession into a crisis. In doing so it risks imposing a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist anymore when fiscal policy works through its lags.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See “The New Deal, Circa 1939”.<\/p>\n

(And yes, I wrote this before I read Roosh’s excellent “Trillion Dollar Hug<\/a>“, which you need to read now).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dictators need to have a war to keep their nation in a state of crisis.\u00a0 If they don’t have one, they need to manufacture one. I was going to write about Obama’s state of the union speech yesterday – but I’m going to use King’s observations instead, since he’s both qualified and coherent: “All we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}