Contra Dan Henninger of the WSJ, this is hardly the hottest job market in half a century when Obama's was actually better, which ain't sayin' much

Story of the Year:

This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories titled “Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.” As far as I’m concerned, this jobs record is the story of the year. The Journal’s articles transformed a year of economic data into the new daily reality of getting paid to work in America. ... It requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy success of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing exactly that. Conservatives should pocket the Trump presidency’s Reaganesque policies for massively matching job producers with job seekers.

There's nothing obtuse about the facts, which show that the current job recovery is nothing out of the ordinary and simply continues the recovery which began despite Obama. The fact is that since the election of Trump in 2016 there's actually been a slow down in the rate of job growth compared with the immediately preceding, more robust period from 2013-2016.

Reaganesque policy under Trump hasn't produced a better outcome for job growth compared with that period, which was the immediate result of the John Boehner-Barack Obama deal to make the Bush tax cuts permanent starting in 2013.

For all the bluster by Trump-aligned organs in the media, especially at The Wall Street Journal, Fox and on talk radio, Trump's results so far also haven't come close to matching the pre-2000 era of job creation.

The economy shrank after the end of the 20th century, and we're still trying to recover to the former glory, nineteen years later.

So far, no one has a solution. Short of a giant spending cut and an actual structural commitment to onshoring instead of offshoring, there will not be one.

Dan Henninger: The Democrats summon Hurricane Christine

Here:

Surely someone pointed out that based on what was disclosed, this accusation could not be substantiated. To which the Democrats responded: So what? Its political value is that it cannot be disproved. They saw that six weeks before a crucial midterm election, the unresolvable case of Christine Blasey Ford would sit like a stalled hurricane over the entire Republican Party, drowning its candidates in a force they could not stop. ... Republicans in the Senate shouldn’t allow it, and voters in November should not affirm it.

1962: The Year Everything in the American Political System Changed

Dan Henninger describes the origin, rise and tyranny of the new managerial revolution, the public employee unions:

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.

This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.

They broke the public's bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

Read more here.

Let Me Be Clear: I'm Projecting Again

Some nebulous "other" is treating our money like Monopoly money, but certainly not the Democrats, and certainly not Obama. Yeah, right.

From Dan Henninger:

This week brought a more troubling incident. Harry Reid's Senate had just secured its 60th vote for Mr. Obama's health-care reform. Whatever one's view, its trillion-dollar-plus cost is an agreed given. Days earlier the public saw Congress vote to raise the debt ceiling by almost $290 billion to make room for the needs of the $800 billion stimulus bill, the unprecedented $3.5 trillion budget, and the House's approval Dec. 16 of a new $154 billion jobs bill. Amid this President Obama said Monday: "We can't continue to spend . . . as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money."