Republicans Cool With Country’s Failure, a/k/a – All Class

It’s like they’re in the Andrew Luck derby.  If the country sucks enough, it’s more likely their tribe will win.  Unfortunately, we’ve seen the debates. There’s no Andrew Luck in that crew. (Perry’s probably the closest – Texan with decent arm strength)

So though the country will still suck, they can sleep easy on their bed of concrete and McGriddle wrappers.

In the new CNN poll, Republicans are the only group that wants Obama’s policies to fail. From the internals:

In general, do you hope that Barack Obama’s policies will succeed or do you hope that his policies will fail?

Republicans: Succeed 39

Fail 51

By contrast, 66 percent of independents want his policies to succeed, and 67 percent of overall Americans want that, too.

Back in 2003, I was staunch in my opposition to the Iraq War.  Did that mean I didn’t want us to successfully bring glorious, oh glorious, corruption-free democracy to the Fertile Crescent? Eradicate all the (supposed) WMDs per Colin Powell’s polite request? Open up their first Citgo/Taco Bell?  Nope. I like to be right, but no correct prediction is worth $2 trillion and 100,000s of lives.

When the criminally immoral enterprise was exposed and the operation itself shown to be an absolute shitshow, did I speak about it with a sense of smug haughtiness? Yes. Yes I did. I ‘told you so’ people all over town. However, (dare I say) wanting the sitting president to fail is pretty anti-American.  You know who else wants America to fail? Terr’ists!!! and maybe the Chinese gymnastics team.

here’s the rub…

Even more interesting, when Republicans are then asked about some of the Obama policy ideas themselves — without Obama’s name attached to them — majorities support them.

So to sum it up: GOP 2011 – We’re going to scream loudly about what ails this country because it’s not sick enough to guarantee an election victory.

All class.

Way Back When Jobs Were…Something

Wall Street Journal (2009):

President George W. Bush entered office in 2001 just as a recession was starting, and is preparing to leave in the middle of a long one. That’s almost 22 months of recession during his 96 months in office.

His job-creation record won’t look much better. The Bush administration created about three million jobs (net) over its eight years, a fraction of the 23 million jobs created under President Bill Clinton’s administration and only slightly better than President George H.W. Bush did in his four years in office.

Here’s a look at job creation under each president since the Labor Department started keeping payroll records in 1939. The counts are based on total payrolls between the start of the month the president took office (using the final payroll count for the end of the prior December) and his final December in office.

Because the size of the economy and labor force varies, we also calculate in percentage terms how much the total payroll count expanded under each president. The current President Bush, once taking account how long he’s been in office, shows the worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records. –Sudeep Reddy

But don’t worry. Just keep cutting taxes for the rich and that trickle-down will start happening any decade from now. promise.

I Might Look Like A Robert Ford, But I Feel Just Like A Jesse James

Ribbit

Kevin Hassett is best known for his spectacular failure as co-author of Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. Evidently, that’s enough to be considered an economics’ expert at the American Enterprise Institute.

Back when the AEI was cheering on the Bush Admin as they made up their nuclear-unicorns-of-mass-destruction evidence for invading Iraq, they had no problem sacrificing the children of the lower and middle-class in the fight for their right to think tank. Some things never change.

Now Kevin Hassert is back with some economics lessons in an article entitled “Your Fat Paycheck Keeps Your Neighbor Unemployed.” And listen up because he’s got some news for you selfish bastards. I’m talking to you – family of four with a $50,000 household income.

So here comes the leap into ice-cold water: The biggest problem with the labor market right now is that wages are too high. As Washington again turns to government spending as a cure for unemployment, some against-the-grain thinking is in order.

Economics teaches that full employment would be reached if wages adjust downward, to a level that better reflects current circumstances. At lower wages, employers would desire more workers. Labor markets generate persistent unemployment only if wages are sticky, failing to fall as demand declines.

Of course. It’s not like wages haven’t already been slashed, pensions renegotiated and  early retirements forced. Hassert then goes on to blame the rise in minimum wage and all those greedy siphons pulling in $7.25 an hour before unloading this little gem:

Third, the natural reluctance of workers to accept lower pay is amplified by how their wage helps define their identity. A $60,000-a-year office worker might have an extra-hard time coming to terms with becoming a $40,000-a-year worker.

See? It’s a status thing! You office workers are just imbued with too much pride. It’s not about the actual money. Or the actual bills. Or the actual education of your actual children. It’s about coming to terms with your new class in America’s 21st Century caste system.

While I certainly don’t want Hassert to take a pay cut so that  the AEI dunces start multiplying, someone may be missing something…

[T]he top executives of the 50 firms with the most layoffs since the economic crisis started have taken home almost half again as much as the typical S&P 500 chieftain. The layoff crowd took home $12 million on average last year, the IPS said, compared with $8.4 million for the typical blue-chip company.“CEOs are clearly not hurting,” IPS researchers led by Sarah Anderson write in the institute’s 17^th annual executive pay survey. “But they are, as we detail in these pages, causing others to needlessly hurt — by cutting jobs to feather their own already comfortable executive nests.”

The damage done by these champions of the cutback is enormous, the institute contends.  The companies in the top 50 layoff crowd cut 531,000 jobs between November 2008 and April 2010, accounting for three-quarters of layoffs at the biggest 500 U.S. companies.

IPS takes issue with headlines that hold CEOs have taken a paycut in recent years. It says the bigger problem by far is that while the average worker’s real wages — that is, adjusted for inflation — have been stagnant since the 1970s, executive pay has continued to rise at a rapid clip.

“After adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century,” IPS writes.

The IPS study also names the 10 most heartless CEOs – those receiving the biggest 2009 paychecks while announcing the biggest layoffs over the crisis period.

Topping the list is former Schering-Plough chief Fred Hassan, who took home $49.7 million after selling the drugmaker to Merck (MRK) in a deal that led to 16,000 job cuts.

Trickle-Drown?

Prophets & Profits

From The Economist:

IF YOU need an explanation as to why political discontent is so widespread on both sides of the Atlantic,

Growth.

take a look at figures compiled by Dhaval Joshi of the hedge fund RAB Capital. This recovery has benefited companies a lot and workers not at all.

In the US, Joshi calculates that, in cash terms, national income has risen $200 billion since the depths of the recession in March 2009. But corporate profits have risen by $280 billion over that period, while wages are down by $90 billion. One would have to go back to the 1950s to find profits outperforming wages in absolute (cash) terms, and even then it was on a much smaller scale. In Britain, national income rose $27 billion in the last two quarters of last year. Profits were up £24 billion and wages just £2 billion.

The latest issue has a piece on this puzzle; US productivity has outpaced European largely because the US has been quicker to sack workers. This is a decidedly mixed blessing. In theory, it is good for resources (inclduing labour) to be relloacted to more productive use. Thus it would be OK if the workers were quickly rehired by new, growing industries or if they were at least retrained, but there is little sign of such a positive development.