FU - FairAndUNbalanced.com

In response to Ryan's
No Debate If We All March in Conservative Lockstep

A good man knows when to put his principles aside to achieve the ends that his principles are meant to achieve in the first place. What you are really saying is that core conservative principles are always good. Clearly, those conservative politicians who part with their principles do not agree with you--unless, of course, it is politically expedient to do so.

- Ryan, June 6, 2012

There is a distinct difference between being pragmatic or compromising and abandoning one’s CORE principles. It is true in politics as it is true in relationships and life in general that we must often compromise or be accommodating by moving in a direction that we would not normally proceed on our own volition in order to be a productive part of society; however, when one claims to be a stalwart conservative, or liberal, or Christian, or atheist etc. there are certain basic core beliefs that one must steadfastly adhere to or one ceases to be that very thing one claims to be at his very essence. I would submit to you that one’s core principles should not be jettisoned simply as a means to an end for political expediency or to simply get along with the in-crowd. By doing so, we ultimately end up populating the world with unprincipled buffoons who’s only goal is what is best according to whatever crowd one is hanging with at any given moment in time.

Such was the case with the self-professed “conservative” Senator Bennett. When Bennett strayed from his avowed conservatism and continuously voted for decidedly left-of-center legislation, those voters who thought that they had a conservative senator championing their causes finally had had enough. In former-Senator Bennett’s case, he was met with a Republican primary challenge by Mike Lee to whom he lost. It is not supposition on my part that Bennett was replaced, and Senator Hatch is in dire jeopardy of following suit, because of his liberal actions when he told his constituents that he was a solid core conservative principled man. Indeed, Bennett’s straying from core principles is the very reason given by the challenger in that primary election and confirmed by the voters accordingly in his defeat.

Regarding my previous statement, “The cost of regulation has been far more detrimental to growth and the economy then would have been a totally unregulated business environment," you responded, “It is impossible to prove this. Moreover, while cost-benefit analysis should be a politician's bread and butter, there is more to consider than growth and the economy. Regulations are often intended to, you know, protect people. When we can settle upon the monetary value of a person's life, health, and happiness, perhaps our analyses will be more effective.”

I would concur that it would probably be nearly impossible to quantitatively prove my initial assertion based on the fact that there are myriads of variables involved and statistics could probably be manipulated to end up with the result one wanted to prove based on their assertion; however, intuitively and from just a common sense standpoint it is easy to determine the incredible amount of money and time that are spent due to regulation. I further agree that some of those regulations to protect people, their health, and their primary well-being etc. are absolutely necessary.

It is when we start passing draconian regulations intended to satisfy some small special interest group or make laws that are economically devastating which provide no net gain to the well-being of people that is at the kernel of the issue, in my mind. For example, when the EPA considers deeming C02 a “pollutant” based on specious special-interest “science”, one has to wonder what the ultimate cost to the economy and ultimate well-being of all Americans will be in trying to curb this naturally occurring gas that is VITAL for plant life on this earth. The cost of such foolish regulations end up being drastic, and not just monetarily.

We need to adamantly avoid all unnecessary and unconstitutional laws and regulations, or amend the Constitution accordingly to accommodate such laws. Ultimately, if one were to read the Federalist Papers and a vast preponderance of the writings of our Founders, one would recognize in their brilliance that we need to govern strictly as the United States Constitution mandates. Did you know that James Madison originally argued against including a Bill of Rights in that Constitution as he thought it was unnecessary? He said that the federal government was not authorized to do anything more or less than what was specifically enumerated within that document, hence our liberties should never be in jeopardy accordingly.

Despite Madison’s brilliance, it is a good thing that the opposing Founders won the day and had the Bill of Rights amended to it. While Madison was technically right, others saw the need to specifically list those rights of all Americans that shall not be infringed upon (Obama’s attack on our first amendment liberties of freedom of exercise of religion notwithstanding). It is a good thing the Bill of Rights was included as one can clearly see that the monstrosity of the federal government today has grown far outside of those powers specifically enumerated to them in the Constitution, and indeed have usurped many of our God-given and Constitutionally mandated freedoms.

It is my contention that standing by those core principles, as conservative constitutionalists, we will restore our country to economic power and universal liberty for all Americans. Abandoning principles when one finds them to be inconvenient and ignoring the supreme law of the land in our Constitution will only ensure the further erosion and ultimate collapse of this government supposedly of We The People.

In addition to his valued contributions here, T. Paine preserves and protects Constitutional core principals on his own site.

Please visit Saving Common Sense.

After the Enron crisis, the crisis in which independent accounting firms turned out to be not so independent, when filings certifying truthfulness helped to perpetuate massive frauds, I came across a suggestion on how to prevent future Enrons. It was market based, involved few additional rules, was simple and easy to understand.

The source of the Enron policy issue was that there was no independence in the accounting firms hired by Enron, because they were ... well ... hired by Enron. Negative reports might make other large corporations reluctant to hire those same accounting firms. Who wants to hire their own nanny if that nanny has a stern reputation?

The suggested solution was to require some minor, but substantial, part of any publicly offered stock ownership be independently insured. Accounting firms would then be hired by the insurance company. The insurance companies would have to meet some financial requirements of stability and substance. No shadow companies that can meet requirements and then go out of business.

The idea was to replace the too cozy relationship between public accounting and private management with a more antagonistic relationship in which any funny business would be exposed. It would be exposed because it would result in loss to the insurance company if it wasn't.

The idea never went anywhere, of course. It probably never rose above the radar to any consideration at all.

Years later, the 2007 financial crash threw us into a deep and dangerous economic vortex. This generated a massive effort to save financial institutions that were "too big to fail." President Bush explained his point of view in a CNN interview:

Well, I have obviously made a decision to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse. I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system. I think when people review what’s taken place in the last six months, uh, and put it all in one, in one, you know, in one package, they’re realize how significantly we have moved.

Vietnamics: "I’ve abandoned free market principles to save the free market system."

After that, a lot of thought went into financial rules intended to prevent the practices that led to the crisis, practices ranging from reckless endangerment to outright fraud. A fair report of maneuvers by one company, Washington Mutual, leading up to the collapse can be found in Kirsten Grind's The Lost Bank. At the source of a lot of the deadly mischief was the knowledge that the feds would have no choice but to step in if things went wrong.

Unaddressed has been the source of the problem: too-big-to-fail. The recent debacle at J.P. Morgan is defended by conservatives on the basis that the corporation was big enough to survive without government help. They ignore the fact that elected officials, if they chose to act responsibly, would never have let the company go down. Couldn't afford to.

So how do we keep too-big-to-fail from happening? The Volcker rule, forcing banks to conform to some safety standards if they carry federally insured deposits, could be augmented. Institutions that grow past a certain point could be denied the ability to associate themselves with federally insured deposits. You want to deposit your funds with a mega-bank? Go for it. But any losses will be your own. Presumably, no financial institution associated with any ordinary banking would grow past that point.

So we have two simple, easy to understand proposals that are safe and uncomplicated:

• Require insurance and auditing of public stock offerings.

• Limit federal insurance to banking institutions that are not too big to fail.

Either or both proposals, or some variation, could be proposed by the Obama administration. But it's safe to predict the administration won't do it. Want to know why?

Soon after Obama took office, the administration offered a plan that originated in the conservative Heritage Foundation and had been sponsored in legislation by 19 Republicans including Orrin Hatch, Charles Grassley, Robert Bennett, and Christopher Bond. It was market based and had been tried successfully on a state level.

As soon as President Obama endorsed it, those same Republicans denounced it, and a campaign was started labeling the conservative proposals as a socialistic expansion of government. We know the plan today as Obamacare.

The reason two new reasonable, market oriented, self-regulating reforms will never see the light of day is that history has shown us exactly what will happen as soon as the Obama administration proposes them.

It's the controversy we've all been waiting for. Hizzoner Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of Gotham City, has ripped the heart out of libertarians throughout the known universe. He proposes a ban on mega-huge sugary soft drinks in restaurants, and movie theatres, and even at the little carts of street vendors.

It has caused a nationwide uproar, an eruption of a long simmering conflict between people who like soda and those who like pop. Of course, we also must tolerate those who see both sides, all sides, every side, and then some: those, like Mitt Romney, who wink at everyone. Romney tells one audience he enjoys soda, then on the same hot afternoon, tells another gathering that he prefers pop. Confronted that evening, he explains to a journalist that he actually likes soda-pop. He then accuses President Obama of dividing the nation by not convincing people like Romney himself to rally behind him. Okay, I made the entire paragraph up.

But really and truly, Mayor Bloomberg wants to outlaw large drinks.

The anti-Nanny-State folks really are up in arms about it. Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard has paused in accusing media outlets of mistreating Mitt Romney for dancing around issues so gracefully to write this: "I didn't think anything would make Mountain Dew A.M. seem appetizing, but now it tastes like freedom."

There is some precedent for interfering in the marketplace. Food processing plants are routinely inspected. Eating establishments, for the most part, are no longer using partially hydrogenated oils in cooking fried foods. The obvious difference here is that food quality and cooking ingredients are usually not within the control of consumers, except for restaurant chefs and kitchen home cooks.

Emily Epstein of the Daily Mail, looking in from London, does a fair job of summarizing the Bloomberg case:

According to the New York City Health Department, more than half of adult New Yorkers are overweight (34 per cent) or obese (22 per cent).

Obesity also kills thousands of New Yorkers every year and costs $4billion in health care costs.

The single largest driver of these alarming obesity numbers is sugary drinks, according to Mayor Bloomberg, which have grown in size.

For example, the size of individual McDonald’s drinks have increased 457 per cent since 1955.

Bloomberg explains to CBS why his approach will improve the health of the general citizenry.

Every study shows that you will eat a very big proportion of whatever's put in front of you. And if you have to make a conscious effort to go to another cup, you're less likely to do it.

Andy Newman, playfully I think, proposes a slippery slope of sorts. He asks for ideas on what else the good Mayor might want to ban within the borders of Metropolis. He kicks it off with a few suggestions of his own: "bingo, indoor tanning, texting while crossing the street, foot-long hot dogs, Drakkar Noir, dating while intoxicated."

Of course, not all slopes slip in the same direction. If we are to oppose on principle the mayoral ban, why not allow any and all harmful substances? Why not legalize cocaine? Why not heroin? Why not allow Rush Limbaugh his stash of Oxycontin without putting him through the trouble of incriminating his housekeeper?

After all, if we are to argue that we should be able to increase our health risks without even the inconvenience of going back for seconds, if even that enforced extra trip is too much effort for those of us already sluggish, why not go all the way? Why not allow anyone to self-poison with any substance at all? And if adult citizens are determined to poison their veins with viciously addictive drugs, the government can't stop it and shouldn't even try. Right? Right? RIGHT? Just legalize pretty much everything.

Well, yeah. I actually stand with extreme libertarians on that one. Let freedom ring. Let adult citizens self-medicate themselves into flatline land. Let people eat the sugars they buy in any amount they want.

And let Mayor Bloomberg go back to Gracie Mansion, mourn for lost souls, and comfort himself with all the diet Cokes he can absorb.

It's not the Republicans' fault if 25-year-old slackers suddenly are dropped from mom and dad’s health insurance policy.

- - Dean Clancy, conservative group FreedomWorks, May 29, 2012
    On Republican plans regarding possible repeal of Obamacare

You want a case for electing Mitt Romney? Here goes.

Deficits are good for the economy. And President Obama has dramatically increased deficits, right?

Ummmmm. Not so much. The problem with that, what everyone forgets, what Democrats don't get, what Republicans don't get, what media outlets don't get, is that the budgets for each year are passed in the previous year.

Everyone knows Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget for the first time in a generation. Want to know the previous President who got a balanced budget? It was Lyndon Johnson. Want to know the year it was done? 1969. Want to know who was in office in 1969? Richard Nixon.

Johnson got a balanced budget passed while he was still President. It took effect as he left office.

So, if you take the Bush budget out of the equation, and look at what Obama got passed, even including emergency additional expenditures in the stimulus, it wasn't all that much. In fact, it was less than President Bush. Either one. Less than Clinton (Bill didn't balance the budget until the last.) Less than President Reagan. Less than any other President in the last 3 decades. Here are the figures put together by Market Watch, not known for being anti-Republican. In fact, click on the chart, and you'll see the research.

That might make for a good campaign point, but it's lousy policy.

How about the more basic approach? Well, the budget deal everyone agreed to last year would have reduced the deficit more than it has been so far. The deal was that Democrats and Republicans would have to come to some sort of deal on cuts and/or spending decreases. If they didn't, straight, across the board, cuts in spending would happen. Everything would go. There would be some exceptions for widows and orphans and Marines. Basic keep-the-lights-on and keep-the-terrorists-out bare bones stuff. And the Bush era tax cuts would expire. So there would be your spending cuts and tax increases.

But now Republicans are saying they won't go along with all that. So Democrats, led by President Obama are insisting on it. A deal is a deal. Here's what the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan group of experts put together by Congress, says about it.

What would happen if lawmakers changed fiscal policy in late 2012 to remove or offset all of the policies that are scheduled to reduce the federal budget deficit by 5.1 per- cent of GDP between calendar years 2012 and 2013? In that case, CBO estimates, the growth of real GDP in calendar year 2013 would lie in a broad range around 4.4 percent, well above the 0.5 percent projected for 2013 under current law. However, eliminating or reducing the fiscal restraint scheduled to occur next year without imposing comparable restraint in future years would reduce output and income in the longer run relative to what would occur if the scheduled fiscal restraint remained in place.

Reducing the deficit later this year will pretty much blow away the economy.

Contrast that with what Romney promises. He wants to balance the budget by slashing taxes for the wealthy. Good luck with that balancing act.

Okay. Here's why the basic premise doesn't work.

Cutting the deficit will be a disaster if it is done this year. The deficit needs to come down. But the timing is more than important. Mitt Romney wants to cut the deficit now. Bad move. He wants to do it by vouchering Medicare and eliminating Medicaid. He wants to privatize Social Security and cut teachers out of classrooms. It isn't simply inhuman. It's dumb economics.

Deficits during recovery produce faster recovery. Deficits after recovery produce inflation. So if there isn't, by some miracle under a Romney burden, a recession, if the nation manages to stumble into a recovery anyway, he'll wait until that moment to ... slash taxes on the wealthy. A recessionary policy in a slow recover will be followed by a recovery policy after it is no longer necessary.

Pretty much the opposite of what works.

President Obama ought to have provided a much bigger stimulus. A lot of the federal increase was taken out of the economy by cutbacks at the local level. He may have done just that, increasing the size of the stimulus, if he had had the votes, thereby getting the economy to grow much faster. He didn't, so he didn't, so it didn't.

As it is, we're edging toward recovery because the lowering of the deficit wasn't even more severe. So relax. A vote for Obama is still your best bet for the future of the flag, and the Republic for which it stands.

There was good news from an economic summit of sorts that happened at Camp David over the weekend.

Basic expansionary economics lessons, the sort that have been in the first chapters of beginning economic textbooks for more than seven decades, say that most depressions, recessions, and downturns can come to a more rapid recovery with massive infusions of money from the government. Deficits are a good thing when the economy is way below capacity.

That's not why the news from Camp David was encouraging.

You see, the key word here is "most", as in most depressions, recessions, and downturns. The exception is the presence of high interest rates. When it costs a lot to borrow, that keeps potential employers from becoming actual employers. Customers can be beating down the door. In fact, since high interest is the traditional "monetary policy" cure for high inflation, consumers often have money in hand that will be worth less tomorrow, which would be an incentive to buy, thus driving up prices.

That's also not why the news from Camp David was encouraging.

Employers are in no mood to hire and sell when profits will be eaten away by high interest rates on loans required to expand. When interest rates are high, businesses are not the only ones having a hard time justifying borrowing. Consumers think twice about borrowing on high end items.

Nope, that's not the encouraging news either.

When interest rates are high, sometimes, austerity is at least part of the answer to economic slowdown. The sometimes here is simple enough. When the economy has slowed way down and interest rates are high, governments sometimes have no other choice but to balance budgets. When the economy is roaring, balanced budgets really are the key.

On the other hand, there is another hand. When it costs very little to borrow, that means interest rates are not a barrier keeping potential employers from becoming actual employers. Customers are the problem. You can have the lowest interest rates in the world, and employers would still be crazy to hire employees and and to invest in expansion, all to meet a consumer demand that isn't there.

So, here's the simple lesson from lots of experience, what the history of depressions and interest rates and deficits and recoveries and government action have taught us.

And THAT's why the news from Camp David was encouraging. Wanna know how it works?

When the economy is lagging, you want recovery, and interest rates are low, low, low, that's when deficit spending is the way to push money into the economy. It's cheap for government, it won't make it harder for businesses to borrow when the recovery is in full swing, and pushing money in gets more in the hands of consumers. Money in the hands of consumers means businesses want some of that money, so they borrow and hire and gorw and profit, and the upward spiral begins.

YAY!

And here's the good news.

There's now an emerging consensus that more must be done to promote growth and job creation right now.

That was a quote from President Obama, issued to summarize the new direction of European leaders.

Harsh, harsh austerity has been the key strategy in Europe to creating jobs. It's been what Republicans want to copy into the United States to create jobs here.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been the leader calling for the policy. Ireland has been pushed as the ideal. Except real economic harm has been the result wherever and whenever austerity has been tried. Ireland went from being near disaster to way past disaster. Irish economy makes the Titanic attractive in comparison. England went from recovery to an economy that is actually shrinking, smaller today than it was yesterday - consistently the case during every day that ends in "day". Governments have been toppled in elections held in Greece, and France, and Spain, and now in regional elections in Germany.

Horrible economic suffering on the part of ordinary people has been a calculated part of what Chancellor Merkel still advocates. You know, have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. So the German elections against Merkel were a special embarrassment. Like a television faith healer who tells people to ignore doctors waking up one morning with appendicitis.

The destructive policy of starving the patient back to health is on the way to becoming the former policy of starving the patient back to health.

The new policy is a bit muddled right now. But it seems to be heading toward feeding the patient back to health, then going on a careful diet once the crisis is over.

Deficits now. Debt reduction when economies are thriving.

Kind of like the basic textbooks teach.

In response to Burr Deming's
Creating Jobs: The Talented Mr Romney

Adam Smith's invisible hand raises the tide. As to whether your own boat floats or is swamped by larger vessels is a combination of good luck, brains, and diligence. It's your boat and it's every boat for himself.

Mitt Romney did not screw over anyone, at least not on purpose. Just as he did not create any jobs on purpose. Destroying jobs, creating jobs, neither was Mitt Romney's aim. Jobs were not his job. Mitt's job was to create a profit, no matter who was hurt, no matter who happened to be helped along the way.

- Burr Deming, May 16, 2012

What is special about being a so-called job creator?

Republicans still sometimes elect people with little to no business experience even over others who do have it. It's clearly not an essential quality to the very people who trumpet it. In fact, most of the support for Romney has nothing to do with his business experience, but instead with getting rid of Obama. Otherwise, the likes of Perry and Santorum would never have had the lead over him.

More importantly, the label of "job creator" doesn't come with details: How were the jobs created? How long did it take? Who else deserves credit? Why were jobs created? How much money did they pay? How long did they last? Were jobs destroyed as well? Can the methods by which one created jobs be replicated today?

In any case, the only special knowledge a job creator brings to the table concerns his specific industry. Even then, a president can simply surround himself with people who are knowledgeable where he is ignorant. Romney would have to do the same.

The idea of a job creator--a sort of savior--hides a pretty important component of job creation: demand. Without it, there is no profit; without profit, there are no jobs. Therefore, insofar as I fuel demand, I am a job creator as well. It may not be my intent to create jobs with my purchases, but that is fine; it was not Romney's intent to create them either. Such benefits were incidental to his self-interested pursuit of profit.

I already miss the days when people simply said that they have business experience. Now we have to deal with the myth of the job creator, a wise, conservative hero who acts alone and without altruistic motives but expects our praise and admiration anyway.

But perhaps Romney deserves a round of applause for his work. What is the sound of one invisible hand clapping?

Ryan writes for his own site, where wisdom is intentional and applause is robust, two-handed, and deserved.

Please visit Secular Ethics.

The recent one day ad personally approved by President Obama (he says so himself at the end) seems modeled, in part, on a series of primary ads launched against Governor Romney by his Republican opponents. The ads in the primary season, and the Democratic ad, carried a similar message. Mitt Romney was a pillager, moving in on vulnerable companies and finishing them off, throwing thousands of workers out while he made tons of cash.

A typical Gingrich run carried a narrative augmented by worker voices but, unlike the Obama ad, had melodramatic music, a sneering narrator, and brief appearances by actors portraying menacing cigar smoking job destroyers. The Obama ad lets those workers carry the narrative. There is low key music to convey sadness, and brief shots of candidate Romney giving speeches about how joblessness just breaks his heart.

The ad by the Obama campaign is more subtle than the Republican ads of the primaries in the same sense that a chainsaw massacre would be more subtle than a thermonuclear attack. The moralism is left to the viewer. And it really doesn't take much prodding to feel for those who worked hard and lost everything.

The Romney folks have responded on a number of fronts: That Obama has done his own share of damage, that the economic recovery would have been more robust if a European style austerity had been imposed, that Obama just doesn't understand a free market.

That last is a bit of shorthand, permissible in political campaigns. A more accurate response, the long form, would not have been not as effective. Complete explanations seldom are. The economic message that Mitt Romney embraces is not complex. Most certainly the President understands it. The ad featuring workers just does not convey that understanding.

On the other hand, neither do Mitt Romney's. In his campaign for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, Governor Romney claimed to have created 10,000 jobs. He made the assertion to the point where friend and foe alike could recite it from memory. It wasn't hard, it was short, it was easy. 10,000 jobs. That's what Mitt had created. How many jobs had Kennedy created? Throw him out and elect a job creator.

At the core, the economic principle that is Romney's own is straight out of Adam Smith in the 1700s. All the graphs, all the intersecting lines as supply and demand get to an equipoise of balance, all the benefits, come from self-interest. People operate selfishly. They end up doing good, a great deal of good, so much good that all boats are raised in the resulting tide. But it is incidental to each person's motivation.

The number of jobs Mitt Romney has created tends to grow in explosive force with each new campaign season. Mitt Romney has not been in the business of business since the anti-Kennedy days. But those 10,000 jobs have become a claim of 100,000 jobs in the campaign for President. A ten fold increase with no effort, in fact without a glance.

The exact number is a myth, such results being hard to measure. The deeper truth is that is exactly the way the free market works, when it works. Jobs are created without effort because there is no effort to create jobs. They are a side effect of an effort of the Mitt Romneys of the business world to create bigger bank accounts with their names on them.

In the short term, sometimes people get hurt. Overall, in the aggregate, with many thousands of Mitt Romney's at play, more people get jobs than lose them. Most of the time. Recent times are an exception, we hope. The workers whose lives were harmed so profoundly were, in theory, earlier exceptions. Even in good times, there are winners and losers.

Adam Smith's invisible hand raises the tide. As to whether your own boat floats or is swamped by larger vessels is a combination of good luck, brains, and diligence. It's your boat and it's every boat for himself.

Mitt Romney did not screw over anyone, at least not on purpose. Just as he did not create any jobs on purpose. Destroying jobs, creating jobs, neither was Mitt Romney's aim. Jobs were not his job. Mitt's job was to create a profit, no matter who was hurt, no matter who happened to be helped along the way.

Mitt Romney did his job. It is the same job he will do as President. Aside from profits for his wealthy investors, his job was to not care.

He was very good at it.

It wasn't long ago that Ireland was proposed as a model for US economic recovery. Great Britain and Germany were considered good runners up. In fact, the Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel was the preacher to the European Union regarding the path to economic prosperity. Austerity was the linchpin, the essential ingredient to that recovery.

There is an appealing intuitive lesson involved, a sort of moral hazard avoided. Those who behave irresponsibly on the economic front must eventually pay for their spendthrift ways. Time to bite the bullet. Anything else is an affront to common sense.

Germany led the way, dictating to Greece and Italy the harsh medicine they would be forced to swallow. If they were to follow Ireland on the pathway to health, they would have to endure dramatic slashes. Republicans in the United States pointed to Europe as leading the path the US must follow to get out of recession.

Belt-tightening, austerity, bravery in the face of hardship, bite the bullet until your teeth crack. Then enjoy a well earned prosperity. The key word was "earned".

A couple of weeks ago, John Peet, an influential editor of The Economist, was asked about the economic future of Europe.

Well, I think Germany continues to be the absolutely key country in Europe. It's by far the biggest and it's also currently doing best. But the debate in Germany is not very sort of pro-growth at the moment. Some countries not in the eurozone, like Poland and Sweden are doing pretty well. And of the countries that were in trouble, I would say Ireland looks as if it's the best at the moment because Ireland has implemented very heavy austerity programs, but is now beginning to grow again. So there are some examples but when you look at countries like France, Spain, Italy, there's an awful long way to go.

Glowing references to Ireland are harder to find among US pundits these days. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman posted figures from Ireland's own Central Statistical Office, showing a shocking decline in Irish well being. (Note to our friend John Myste: the data is in chart form, so you may wish to discard it without looking.)

Xenophobic resentment toward Germany's Nazi past, resistance to cold-light-of-day economic reality, and just plain laziness were seen as major reasons for major upset elections in Greece. Hard won austerity measures necessary for economic health were in danger. Italy had already gone down.

French austerity measures as an approach to recovery were a major cause for the electoral defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy. And on Sunday, Angela Merkel, Chancellor and chief economic moralist of Europe got slapped around, as the parliamentary election in North Rhine-Westphalia got taken over by a united opposition. This part of central Germany has been politically divided since approximately the beginning of Creation. This week the Social Democrats and the Green Party together got a majority of votes cast.

It was a major embarrassment for Chancellor Merkel.

The big argument, the only real argument, at least on paper, that conservatives have presented for the anti-Keynesian measures has been investor confidence. If painful austerity measures were put into place, investors would see a seriousness of purpose. Severe grownup policies would signal an end to the self-destructive juvenile joyride. Investors would respond. Growth would come quickly.

Investor confidence turned out to be more measured than the austerity measures had been intended to produce. As more sober thinking takes over, it appears that investors had waited to see what actual numbers were produced. They didn't like the economic activity they saw. What mainstream economists derisively call "the confidence fairy" does not always produce automatic results. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" does not always translate to the opposite formula. Confidence does not always feed on a confidence that originates from a demonstration of severe resolve.

These are dicey times. The impending doom feared by the current economic masters of Europe may come true as the careful plans of mice and economists go off the charts (with more apologies to friend Myste).

Or, or, or. It may be that, just as the pleasant dreams of austerity promoters failed to materialize, so their fears might also slip away. The best outcome, the best newest hope, may be that somehow Europe will settle into textbook style Keynesian recovery. Deficits followed by recovery followed by a disciplined, but far less painful, austerity with surpluses all around.

That last part may be the harder sell. The elusiveness of austerity during good times is the best argument conservatives have. Oddly, it is never heard.

For now, the bold European experiment in harsh economic policy has given us its first tentative lesson. Starving the patient back to health has produced less health than hunger.

Interesting dialogue beginning after our publication of a chart by Kevin Drum discovered at Mother Jones. It shows job level decline as President Obama took office and subsequent reversal and growth as new jobs policies took hold.

Ryan, who writes for Secular Ethics, also graciously contributes to this site from time to time. He points to a cautionary trend, the decline of participation in the labor force. This is often raised by conservatives as evidence that things are so bad under the Obama Presidency that people have given up on finding work. Ryan's comment:

It is good that this trend has reversed, but labor force participation is another story. It has been falling since Obama took office. At that time, it was 65.8% (February of 2009); now it is 63.6% (April of 2012), which is the lowest since 1981.

Tim McGaha, who writes with a scientific bent at Tim's Thoughtful Spot, responds that labor participation is not a direct indicator of labor despair. In fact, it does not differentiate between diverse motivations:

Some of that may be due to a weaker employment picture, but some will also be due to the Baby Boom generation entering retirement. Without some way to untangle the confounding factors, I'm not sure that the participation rate is all that useful as a figure of merit.

As it happens, Tim might find some backing in research conducted by the Urban Institute and published by the Department of Labor, albeit with disclaimers. The decrease in labor participation is heavily impacted by an increase in older workers, more likely to retire, and by young adults who seek more education than ever before.

In fact, an increase in retirement was forecast by the Director of the Congressional Budget office as Obamacare was scheduled to take effect. The forecast of retirements was based on a sad fact, that many older workers continue working because they can't afford to lose their group insurance; and a happy future development, that they will be able to retire when health care becomes available. Conservatives put their own twist on that testimony, broadcasting that Obamacare would cost 800,000 jobs. That 800,000 figure was actually based on the CBO estimate of newly freed workers who could finally retire.

Ryan comments, reasonably enough, on the uncertainties of cause and effect.

Since I do not fault Obama for the decline in labor force participation, I cannot fairly credit him with restoring the total payroll employment to the level at the beginning of his term. For all I know, that number is improving despite his policies, not because of them.

He points, fairly, to the clear liberal bias of this site:

Now, Raymond did not claim that Obama's policies have had any effect at all on total payroll employment. He merely posted a graph. But this is a generally liberal blog, so it's reasonable to conclude that the intent was there.

Ryan's got us on intent. We try to present facts fairly, but he is correct about our preferences.

In fact, I am comfortable making us a little more vulnerable to that criticism. As long as I can remember, Republicans have supported policies with a definite tilt. The rationale, when I was a youth, was that we all would benefit by favoring the wealthy because people with lots of money create jobs. It was called trickle down economics by detractors, pro-growth by advocates. After all, who could be against growth?

In the late 1970s a bell shaped curve was introduced by Professor Arthur Laffer, who famously drew it on a napkin at a dinner of Republican notables. Supply side economics was born, and has metastasized from tax revenue theory into economic growth theology. The primary belief now is that we all would benefit by favoring the wealthy because they create jobs.

Democrats have stayed with dreary old Keynesianism. In and out of fashion, they have stuck like glue to the pages of Economics 101. In downturn, increase government spending, in good times, cut spending and balance budgets.

Facts can be stubborn. In this case, as Ryan wisely points out, the facts don't prove either case to a moral certainty. They do tend to support only one side. The fact is that in the half century plus one year since John Kennedy took office, Democrats have produced more than twice as many jobs each year they were in office than have Republicans when they have held office. It looks worse for Republicans if you include the Great Depression and the Roosevelt recovery. So let's just look at half a century instead of a hundred years.

From Bloomberg News:

Democrats hold the edge though they occupied the Oval Office for 23 years since Kennedy’s inauguration, compared with 28 for the Republicans. Through April, Democratic presidents accounted for an average of 150,000 additional private-sector paychecks per month over that period, more than double the 71,000 average for Republicans.

But you never know. Could be coincidence. And you can't judge these things too quickly. Trickle down economics or Supply Side theology might still work. Just give Republicans a few hundred more years to prove their case.

I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.

 - - former Governor Mitt Romney, May 7, 2012

The downward spiral of the Republican Party is similar to previous lurches in American political history. In most cases, political parties that run too far from the political center get punished at the polls, go through a period of painful political introspection, and trudge back to the political center where their political recovery takes place.

Republicans have gone through it. Democrats have too. British Tories and Labourites have done their stints. Like Henry II paying penance for Beckett, they have undergone their lashings and, properly chastened, crept back to power.

Republicans have, since Ronald Reagan, avoided that process. Over the last quarter century, defeats have been larger, and successes smaller, as the tides of political fortune have come and gone. When economic winds grow to political hurricane force, the slow political tides become less apparent. But they are still there. And so we speculate here about the declining fortunes of the GOP. Races that should have been won decisively are taken narrowly. Races that should have been won narrowly are lost.

At the source is technology. The Republican base is insulated from political reality. The GOP emulates Shakespearean drama. Hamlet's Ophelia, incapable of her own distress, drowns without knowing she is drowning. And the Republican Party puts on stage makeup and follows suit. Purge follows purge as the party of Lincoln rushes toward the Old Confederacy.

One persistent question involves a sort of political symmetry. Are Democrats not subject to the same technology? Why would they be immune to the same political temptations?

We have speculated. No one answer is quite satisfying. Perhaps an accident of history, or a series of accidents, have delayed a similar pattern. The election of centrist Bill Clinton, terrorist attacks and a subsequent rallying around President Bush, the election of centrist Barack Obama, may have combined over time to push the inevitable down the road. Where Republicans go, Democrats will eventually follow, although on the other side of that wide, wide ideological road.

Newsweek columnist John Avlon acknowledges that the Republican Party has gone off the deep end with it's new bloodsport, RINO hunting. Long time arch-conservatives are attacked from the right for insufficient extremism.

But he detects a similar trend among Democrats. He finds two examples to prove his thesis, Pennsylvania Representatives Jason Altmire and Tim Holden, both Democrats who lost in primaries.

In the case of Altmire, a vote against health care reforms, which matching his constituent’s views, was nonetheless considered a hanging offense by his fellow party member. In the northeastern stretch of the state, the unions backed a trial lawyer with predictable sympathies, Matt Cartwright, over 20-year centrist incumbent Tim Holden. The decisive factor in ousting both Democrats was the financial and organizational strength of the unions, who have been as empowered as corporations by Citizens United—but with considerably less outrage on the left.

He points to the shrinking number of conservative blue-dog Democrats to hammer the point home.

Here's the problem. John Avlon is performing a bit of cherry picking. And the cherries he is picking are not the sort a discerning cherry picker would want. Neither Jason Altmire nor Tim Holden could be reasonably considered moderate. Yes, both opposed Obamacare, and did their best to block it. But that was not the only departure from Democratic orthodoxy of either representative. Both were also in open league with climate deniers.

Mr. Avalon mentions Jason Altmire's opposition to health care reform as "matching his constituent’s (sic) views..." A greater contributor to his defeat than any organized group of working people was the fact that he was re-districted out of office. He was not defeated by some insurgent. He ran against another Congressional Representative, Mark Critz.

Tim Holden was also largely the victim of redistricting. He did not run against another incumbent but he did find his district substantially changed. Large areas in 4 counties that he had represented since 2003 were suddenly gone, replaced with more urban, more liberal centers. His conservative stands were less popular with his very new constituents than with Mr. Avalon.

These are not perfect examples of a DINO hunt, but they are the best available to Mr. Avalon.

Indeed they are the only examples of Democratic opponents of Obamacare that lost their seats in a Democratic primary. Of 34 other Democrats who voted against health care reform, none lost renomination. None. Zero. These two were the very first. Instead, blue dog Democrats found their numbers reduced in the 2010 tea party surge.

To be fair, Mr. Avalon describes the party polarization as "asymmetrical." He devotes some journalistic effort to today's anticipated take down of conservative stalwart Senator Dick Lugar in the Indiana Republican primary. Senator Lugar is now considered insufficiently conservative. John Avalon describes the Republican RINO hunt as considerably advanced when compared with the more subdued hunting spree among Democrats for DINOs. "Democrats are amateurs compared to Republicans when it comes to taking down their own..."

Yeah.

We can learn something about a trend from this article. It touches only peripherally on politics. It is that modern journalism no longer draws conclusions from a dispassionate examination of facts. The search for truth has been supplanted. Balance is the new holy grail. Square facts can be always be pounded into round conclusions to reach that venerable standard.

President Kennedy remarked privately to aides on the structural unfairness of the Gallup Poll. Gallup would conduct polling over a three day period. The first day's results would tend toward Republicans, as conservatives were the easiest to reach. Gallup would continue polling, calling back working class Democrats until they came home, walking to the homes of those who didn't have telephones. Everyone, or nearly everyone, in a random sample was eventually reached.

At each poll, Gallup would publish the first day's results, the results that were disproportionately Republican. They would be accompanied with analysis about how this newest result reflected a new downturn. Later revisions would be published, but they were no longer news.

So each month, an artificially low polling number for President Kennedy would provoke minor headlines about a dip in popularity. A quiet revision would then update the number upward. The next month a new artificially low number would be compared with the previously higher revised number. And so it went. The public was forever being reported as growing disenchanted with the popular President.

I thought about John Kennedy's wry observation when the latest jobs report came out. April figures showed a smaller gain than was hoped, more than was feared. Unemployment dropped. A number of factors affected that.

It was the warmest April in recorded history. Never, ever, had there been an April that averaged a higher temperature in the United States. It is part of a trend. The warm winter was remarkable. A milder winter and a warmer spring means a higher level of economic activity. So there was a higher previous rate of economic activity to compare April with.

A growth in private activity was partially offset by a reduction in public sector jobs. Most of that happened at state and local levels. That is where firefighters, police officers, and teachers are employed. This reduction is Republican driven. Efforts to provide federal funds to help with these areas have been blocked by a conservative Congress. So, to some extent, Republican crowing over what GOP politicians call a failure of Obama policies is the equivalent to an appeal by a murderous child. Could Lyle and Erik Menendez have asked for mercy because they are orphans? Only if they had been Republicans.

But I find one aspect, albeit an more minor one, notable. So, what the heck! Let's note it. From Associated Press, as reported in countless publications:

The 115,000 jobs added in April were fewer than the 154,000 jobs added in March, a number the government revised up from its earlier estimate of 120,000.

In fact, the number of jobs added in February had also been revised upward after initial reporting. It is a trend in itself that extends back to the beginning of the recovery. The low, unrevised, March 120,000 figure had been compared to February after February had been revised upward. The initially lower February had been compared with higher revised figures from previous months.

It was just the opposite when there was no job growth and the numbers were heading in the opposite direction. When President Obama took office, the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 3.8 percent. That's a lot of shrinkage. That's why the administration pushed an economic program designed to stimulate the economy. Employment, growth, and job creation estimates were based on that horrible decline. It was the amazing shrinking economy.

3.8 percent shrinkage. That's close to 4 percent. Wow. We weren't comparing one level of growth to another to see if the rate of growth had gone up or down. Throw all that out the window. The economy was shrinking at ... 3.8 percent.

But that was before the revisions set in. It turned out the economy hadn't been shrinking by 3.8 percent after all. The real figure was 8.9 percent.

So Obama takes office while the economy is actually shrinking at a whisker from 9 percent. 9 percent shrinking. 4 percent shrinkage to 9 percent is one HELL of a revision.

President Kennedy looked at bias in polling as a harmless annoyance. It was no more a matter of concern for him than the hunt for bin laden later become for Republicans. Popularity in polls reflects, it does not produce, popular opinion.

All this economic revisionism is less a factor in coming election than it might seem. Or so it strikes me. People vote on the basis of the well being they experience, either themselves or vicariously through those they know: neighbors, co-workers, relatives. Economic indicators do measure something that will affect the November election. But the numbers themselves will not change how votes will be cast. Under or over report them as you will.

The talented Mr. Romney promises an unemployment rate of four percent, a number that, as President, he will revise upward. He is nothing if not flexible, his views not bound by verifiable reality.