True to Form

The headline on Yahoo this afternoon is "Analysis: Flat jobs data signal weakest recovery in decades" and the sub-headline is "The job market is defying history." My response is "true" and "bullpucky."

The "true" part is self evident as the lowest curve on the chart attests. The chart tracks the in/out for recessions going back to 1949 and the Obama curve is on the bottom and sort of floundering down there. The reason for both is the same: Keynesian economics.

If you go back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration tried the same thing that the Obama Administration is doing now - pumping enormous public expenditures into the economy. The result is the same, e.g. - nearly flat economic growth and anemic to the point of nil jobs added. It took WWII to pull the U.S. economy out of the doldrums. Hopefully that won't be necessary now.

The more typical pattern since the Great Depression for recessions is a steep curve in and a steep curve out.  That's because the government has kept its hands off the market corrections and once the market got the particular problem out of its system, the economy recovered. Reagan, for example, came in after the disaster of the Carter years and cut taxes and regulations. Within a year the economy was in a healthy climb that didn't stop until 1990 or so and there was only a mild correction at that time.

The clear conclusion is that Keynesian economics don't work. The more the government interferes, the longer the economy will stay bad and even get worse. Politicians, especially Democrats, love to think that they can defy the laws of economics. Right. We are getting an exceptionally harsh lesson right now in the error of that belief. Government has been the problem with galloping deficits, forcing unsupportable easy money policies on the lending industry, and playing footsie with all sorts of high rollers on Wall Street. It's time for a change and the sooner the better. Democrats and Republicans who don't understand this need to go.