Unemployment Rate Ticks Up To 7.9%: Obama Remains Solidly In Last Place Since 1948

Full pdf from the BLS here.

The average report of unemployment under Obama for all months of 2009 through 2012 comes to 8.98%, the very worst record since 1948.

Obama's nearest competitor for worst performance during the period was Ronald Reagan. For all months of 1981 through 1988 Reagan's average report of unemployment was 7.53%, nearly 20% better than Obama's. Under George W. Bush, whom Obama blames for everything, unemployment averaged just 5.27% for the 8 years 2001-2008, one of the five best records since 1948.

The worst stretch of unemployment since 1948 gets even longer under Obama with today's report at 7.9%. 

Chart here.

Black Unemployment Level Stays At All Time Highs Under Obama

The prior ceiling of 2.4 million in the black unemployment level, reached briefly when Ronald Reagan was president, has become the new floor under Barack Obama.

Black unemployment has stayed at these all time highs under Obama since early 2009.

Has the first black president been good for black employment? The answer is No.

One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.

This Is Not Conservatism: Romney Will Move The Country Leftward

When liberals win, they make conservatives come in their direction. But so-called conservatives have never made liberals compromise to the right. This is why liberals detest them, because they are weak.

Ronald Reagan, former Democrat, didn't do it, and neither has anyone else since. The result has been a constant shift of politics in America to the left. It has never shifted to the right on any social, economic or foreign policy issue. Today's Republican Party is indistinguishable from the Democrat Party of 1960, except on paper, while the Democrat Party struggles mightily to remain American as more and more Democrats openly support self-consciously socialist and even communist ideas.

The country moves inexorably leftward, relaxing moral absolutes from divorce to abortion to homosexuality; growing government and government interference in our lives through mandates while defending old progressive achievements like the income tax, Social Security and Medicare; and ideologizing "democracy" and using it like a cudgel to nation-build abroad.

Mitt Romney will only contribute to this process if he is elected because he has stated explicitly, once again just two days ago in Ohio, that it will be his policy to compromise, to "get things done" as the feeble-minded everywhere like to say:

"We're going to have to do something that has been done in the past in this country and that is we're going to have to reach across the aisle we're going to have to find good Democrats, by the way Democrats love America too, we've got to reach across the aisle find ways to bring in people from the other party work together, collaborate, meet regularly and fight for the American people and we will!," Romney said.

Why conservatives will vote for this I can only answer with the example of Esau, who was so hungry that he sold his birthright for a bowl of stew.

It would be far better to elect the intransigent radical Obama and a principled Republican US House to maintain the status quo than to risk "progress", because that is what you are going to get with Mitt Romney, progress . . . to the left.

Conservatives don't have to vote for Obama to vote for gridlock. Virgil Goode will do. 

Conservatives Have Become Wrong-Headed About Taxes

Conservatives have become wrong-headed about the tax code.

Steven Malanga provides an exasperating take on "tax reform", here, which was really a liberal Democrat conceit from the beginning but became a so-called conservative one under Ronald Reagan, who was, need we remind everyone, a "former" Democrat:

Most conservatives (though certainly not most Republicans) have come to see the range of incentives and exemptions in the tax code as wrongheaded, including those for businesses which smack of little more than corporate cronyism. This is in sharp contrast to 1986, when many Republicans in Congress resisted reform until a popular GOP president came along willing to take on the business community.

Sacre bleu. The liberal Democrats are nothing if they are not great simplifiers, and if conservatives join them in that enthusiasm, it doesn't mean they are right. Little ideologues all, regardless of party.

Prior to the income tax, a president had to be a pretty smart cookie to figure out all the ins and outs of the tariff system if he wanted his federal government to have enough revenue to continue operations. By 1909, however, the whole country seemed to have wound down so far intellectually that it was just too tired to carry on any longer with that rigorous enterprise and bowed instead to the simplicity of an income tax. Tax reformers today, take note. It doesn't speak well of you that you admit the code is too much for you.

Actually real conservatism opposed the income tax way back when not because it would grow too complex but because it was wrong. When amending the constitution is necessary in order to make something legal, conservatives' first instinct is always to question the advisability of the idea before they conclude there is a defect in the constitution requiring a remedy. The income tax was one such idea. It took four years to gain ratification in the states. As an invention of progressivism the income tax eventually worked a revolution in government by allowing government to grow to gargantuan size with a ready pool of available cash, stolen by force from the population's income. And it is no coincidence that the first major expenditure financed by the income tax was US entry into The Great War. Not long after which came The Great Depression. If progressive ideas were good ones, no one seems to have paid much heed to the early evidence to the contrary.

Every effort by the people since the introduction of the income tax to obtain deductions, exemptions, credits and other incentives in the tax code should be understood by conservatives as wholesome reactionary, counter-revolutionary, rear-guard opposition to what the income tax represents, but today you can hardly find a conservative who will even entertain the idea of overthrowing the income tax, let alone any other of the so-called "achievements" of the progressive era. In fact, some so-called conservatives have become veritable cheerleaders for the income tax. Rush Limbaugh, for one, can't seem even to imagine an America without one for the first 137 years of its existence. An originalist in name only is he.

The problem with so-called Reagan conservatism, then and now, is that it makes peace with the tax code, just as it does with the social welfare state, including Social Security and especially Medicare. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan actually campaign on just such a platform of preserving Medicare for future generations. As Reagan compromised in the direction of liberalism in the 1986 tax reform, so will they.

These people wouldn't know conservatism if it ran up and bit them in the ass.

Tax reform is a fool's errand. You can't "reform" something which is fundamentally wrong in the first place.

Fear: The First, Second And Third Reason NOT To Invest

Once again, the purveyors of fear make an appearance, trying to scare you into investing in stocks when stocks are again near historic highs and Shiller p/e multiples are near the top of the historical range, this time at Reuters, here.

Patience is a rule of investing, too, which requires you to stick to your reasons for investing, or not investing, in the first, second, and third place. It makes no sense to purchase investments which for good reasons seem to be overvalued, especially when based upon historically novel forms of valuation which remain in vogue despite the lessons of the great debt bull since Ronald Reagan.

Appeals to "fear" from people who are already "all-in" are therefore suspect, and should be. Nothing continues to feed a fake bull like ever more greater fools.

And don't forget that permabulls need you, too, like Larry Kudlow, who confessed on his radio show last Saturday:

"God knows I'm long. I'm long . . . I have no choice."

If it's a free country and a free market, why is there so much compulsion?

Video Of Romney Backtracking On Tax Cuts, Threatening Your Deductions

Romney will take away your deductions and exemptions

Romney the tax simplifier, tax leveler, tax backtracker, tax flipflopper, uncertain tax trumpeter was on display in Ohio this week, posing himself as a clear and present danger to the tax code's many indispensable props to middle class family life, including not just the mortgage interest deduction but also for the first time "exemptions".

The last time a Republican talked this way was in 1986 when Ronald Reagan took away deductibility of credit card interest in exchange for lower overall rates.

Those rates lasted until Clinton, when they were raised. But deductibility of credit card interest? That never came back, and never will.

The same thing is going to happen to the home mortgage interest deduction, and possibly to "married filing jointly" and other such provisions of the current tax code. You'll get lower rates . . . for a while, until they have to raise them.

And then the protections of the current provisions will be absent, exposing you to the full force of increased tax rates.

The fat cats from The Wall Street Journal and Forbes Magazine to Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, the Libertarians and the Simpson-Bowles crowd all want their greedy little hands on more revenue from the middle class . . . so they don't have to pay as much. It's just that simple.

And they are betting you are so stupid that you will vote for that!

There is nothing wrong with the current code which spending cuts cannot fix.

Story and video here.

Republicans Still Don't Get It: Obama Is Not Carter Redivivus

Until the Republican Party comes to grips with the fact that the Bushes were two of the very worst presidents for the economy in the post-war period, it is never going to understand the current problem and offer America a decent alternative, which is that Obama is continuing in the Bushes' footsteps and is actually worse than them, if that were possible.

Obama is the second coming of George Bush, not of Jimmy Carter.

If only we had an economy like Jimmy Carter's, lousy as it was for its time. But total household net worth never increased more as a percentage than under his short tenure, and he ranked third best in the post-war period for increasing housing values. Those two categories, incidentally, were also where his successor Ronald Reagan shined the brightest as well.

Erick Erickson should know better:

"There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican. Because the opinion makers and news media these elitists hang out with have concluded Romney will not win, the elitists are in full on panic mode. They conspired to shut out others, tear down others, and prop up Romney with the electability argument. He is now not winning against the second coming of Jimmy Carter. They know there will be many conservatives, should Mitt Romney lose, who will not be satisfied until every bridge is burned with these jerks, hopefully with the elitist jerks tied to the bridge as it burns."

Mitt Romney is a fiscally conservative social liberal who doesn't really have a home in either of the two major political parties, which is why he's being attacked from all sides. It is not because of his social liberalism but because of his fiscal conservatism. Which is to say that both parties have expunged that idea from their lexicons since LBJ and no one really knows what it even means anymore.

But Romney may indeed know, and always gives the impression of knowing, which is why he is having a likeability problem. He comes off as the bad banker who won't increase your credit limit until you start catching up on your payments.

No one really likes a guy like that, but that is the kind of guy whom we most need right now, holding the veto pen. If he loses, fear of that will be the reason.

No one likes a spending party pooper.

Can Liberals Count? Can Liberals Remember?

George Bush won Ohio in 2004 by 118,000 votes, but Andrew Sullivan remembers it differently, here:

"At this point in 2004, one recalls, George W. Bush was about to see a near eight-point lead shrivel to a one-state nail-biter by Election Day."

The real nail-biters were in Iowa, where Bush won by just 10,000 popular votes (7 electoral college votes), and in New Mexico, where Bush won by just 6,000 popular votes (5 electoral college votes), neither of which separately or together would have given victory to Democrat John Kerry.

Be that as it may, the real point of Sullivan's story is this:

"If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan."

Ah, no, he'll become the Democrats' W, or maybe their George H. W. Bush. Or if he's really really lucky maybe their Richard Nixon.

Obama's economic performance in the next four years would have to improve by 40 percent in seven key categories of economic measurement in comparison with all previous presidents to achieve the fair-to-poor record achieved by Ronald Reagan, whom I have shown elsewhere scored a lousy 42, just like Jimmy Carter.

President Obama's current score after 4 years is already 2 points worse than George Bush's score of 51 after 8 years, the worst two records in the post-war period. That means Obama would have to pull out  of his hat a veritable golden age to make him look as good as Reagan, which as I've said isn't saying much. To do it Obama would have to score a 32 in the next four years just to average out to a 42.

Can you imagine an Obama second term turning in an overall performance roughly close to that of JFK/LBJ, who rank 4th best out of 10 since WWII? Because that is what it would take.

Obama would have to go from worst for unemployment to 4th (think Clinton and W), starting tomorrow. He would have to go from worst to 4th for GDP (think Reagan and Eisenhower), for the next four years. He would have to go from worst to 4th for housing values (think Harry Truman). Only George Bush has been worse for the increase in Americans' total household net worth than Obama has been. To address that Obama would have to restore at least 1960s levels of prosperity to the country, if not Clinton era levels.

Fat chance.

Despite all the ruin which one man can rain down on a country through sheer incompetence and arrogance, the American people are a resilient lot and things will improve no matter who gets elected. The economy adjusts and moves on, and in many respects there is only one way to go but up. But if it's Obama who is elected again, I don't expect him to finish much better than a 48 after 8 years overall, because the first 4 have been such a disaster.

Net Worth Up Most Under Carter, Least Under "W" Since WWII

It's shocking, but true.

Total household net worth as reported by the Federal Reserve in its Z.1 Releases of the Flow of Funds Accounts shows that Jimmy Carter wins the award, hands down, for the increase in this metric during the course of his presidential term as compared with all other presidents in the post-war period.

In point of fact, the zenith of growth in total household net worth clusters around ole Jimmy with Nixon/Ford just preceding him taking 3rd position and Ronald Reagan coming after him taking 2nd. The whole period from 1969 through 1988 represents the time when Americans made their biggest gains in overall wealth.

I measured the overall gain from January 1 of the year of inauguration to the January 1 of the year leaving office, as summarized here by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. The overall percentage gain is then divided by the number of years in office, either 4 or 8, to get an annualized score, which is not the same thing, obviously, as actual annualized performance. Data from Truman is only for three years from 10-1-1949 to 1-1-53. For Obama, who just barely beats Bush The Younger for dead last, the data is for 1-1-09 to 6-30-12 taken from the very latest Z.1 Release yesterday (here).

Carter                 +16.02 percent per year

Reagan                 11.80

Nixon/Ford           10.21

Clinton                    9.74

JFK/LBJ                  8.78

Truman                   8.49

IKE                         7.39

Bush The Elder       6.17

Obama                    4.92

Bush The Younger  3.43

Mitt Romney Reaps What He Sows, Or Something

The liberal President Ronald Reagan once handed down an 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican."

He learned this rule from his life among the Democrats, whence he came to the Republican Party after he realized his former pals were getting cozy with the commies. To this day it takes forever for the Democrats to abandon one of their own to the wolves, even when they deserve it. Recent cases include Charley Rangel and that wiener guy from New York.

But Republicans still haven't learned this rule, proving the other one about old dogs. One whiff of trouble and a fellow Republican drops you like a hot potato. Hence the Rep. Todd Akin affair, even whose money they've cut off and would cut off his nuts if they could (a little Rev. Jesse Jackson humor there). Mitt Romney, being more at home with liberal Democrats, waited while everyone else piled on Akin before he decided to do so. Not exactly a profile in courage. More like a man torn about what he believes and which party he belongs in. As a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, he really is a fish out of water, seeing that the Democrats are the former and the Republicans are neither.

So it's not a little amusing to see the Republican establishment and Romney's other would be supporters now crucifying Romney for his 47 percent remarks last May, only just recently made public. If anyone will be to blame for Romney's loss in a few weeks' time, it will be the Peggy Noonans, Bill Kristols and John Tamnys of this world, not the conservatives. Rush Limbaugh rightly points out the irony that the conservatives, Romney's fiercest critics during the primaries, are his defenders today against his critics who were his liberal supporters yesterday, who insisted at the time that Romney was the only candidate who could win.

Meanwhile the clerisy rallies round the redistributionist, under whom income inequality has only increased. Spreading the wealth around all right . . . among the wealthy.

Same as it ever was.

Gov. Mitt Romney Is Exposing The Liberalism Of Presidents Reagan And Bush

Gov. Mitt Romney is forcing us to consider seriously how Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got carried away by liberal impulses and got us into troubles.

I think Romney was not a fan of Ronald Reagan in the 1990s because he realized Reagan's program was fiscally irresponsible, cutting taxes while increasing military spending to defeat Soviet Communism. The result was the largest increase in the US public debt since WWII. As a business man who can read a spread sheet, Mitt Romney can recognize fiscal insanity when he sees it.

Now a leaked video of a private fundraiser Romney addressed in Florida in May is being attacked by the left in recent hours. It shows Mitt Romney not too happy with the liberal consensus which uses the tax code as a form of welfare, primarily through the mechanism of tax credits combined with statutory tax rates which nullify income tax liability. This was not a bug in the law. It was a feature intended all along. Romney is signaling that he's not entirely on board with this form of liberalism.

The idea of getting people off welfare was an ingenious one under Reagan, effectively rebating their Social Security contributions when they went to work, instead of collecting a check directly from the federal government while unemployed. But it was fundamentally a compromise with liberalism, and the Earned Income Tax Credit later took on a life of its own, being notably expanded under Bill Clinton and under George W. Bush. Combined with the Child Tax Credit, the two credits represent transfer payments far in excess of the cost of the mortgage interest deduction, the drumbeat against which gets louder by the day. To take away the mortgage interest deduction would yield the government about $80 billion a year in new revenue. But eliminating the two tax credits would end a direct federal government expenditure in excess of $110 billion a year.

If you want to know in what world liberals like Nancy Pelosi under a liberal president like Barack Obama would find it thinkable to consent to a deliberate underfunding of Social Security, liberalism's signature program, by rolling back payroll taxes to help the working poor during the Great Recession, look to Ronald Reagan, who did basically the same thing for poor people through the EITC way back in the 1980s. In making Social Security contributions rebateable to the working poor, Reagan was nothing if not a liberal trendsetter.

Another innovation and accommodation with liberalism by Ronald Reagan was EMTALA, part of the tax reform of 1986, which made it the law that emergency rooms had to provide services regardless of ability to pay. That unfunded mandate costs approximately only $50 billion a year today. I say "only" because lying about the severity of that problem became the heart of the healthcare debate which gave us ObamaCare. The Heritage Foundation may have authored the idea of the individual healthcare mandate in 1989, but once again it was Ronald Reagan who paved the way and provided the cover for accommodating what eventually became ObamaCare's liberal tyranny.

Romney's remarks also question George Bush's two-state solution to peace in Israel, which is nothing but another unrealistic aspiration of liberalism which thinks you can put a chicken and a hungry snake in the same pen and enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon. To this Romney wisely prefers the unsteady truce of the status quo. In doing so his realism is shining through.

Mitt Romney's looking better all the time, and conservatives should reconsider whether voting for him is such a bad idea after all. 

US Gross Public Debt Grew Most Under Reagan, Least Under Truman Since WWII

The record of Ronald Reagan for increasing the US gross public debt is so bad in the post-war era it is a veritable outlier compared to everyone else.

It represents the price this country paid for hefty tax cuts at the same time defense spending was increased to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Conservatism as understood by Ronald Reagan was primarily anti-communist, not fiscal. This is more in keeping with the Democrat Party of the time which he abandoned as communist influence over it grew through the labor unions. Along with the rest of his record, it is arguable that Ronald Reagan out-liberaled the liberals in many respects, making the Republican Party the home of liberals while the Democrat Party got radicalized by the so-called progressives.

Maybe Mitt Romney had a good reason not to think of himself as a follower of Reagan back in the 1990s. This country could use a Republican in the mold of Eisenhower again to restore some credibility to the Republican Party from the fiscal side.

The 170 percent increase in the public debt metric over an 8 year period under Reagan makes his predecessor Jimmy Carter look almost moderate by comparison, who racked up a 40 percent increase in 4. And Bush The Younger was actually in the very mold of fiscally liberal Ronald Reagan, cutting Clinton's tax increases and increasing spending on The War On Terror as well as Drugs For Seniors. Bush The Younger's 99 percent increase in the debt over 8 years comes out to roughly 12.38 percent per year, but it must be remembered that some of Obama's emergency spending in early 2009 became part of Bush's fiscal record, which ended October 31, 2009, another price of electoral defeat. The winners write the history.

Harry Truman narrowly beats out his successor Dwight Eisenhower for being the king of fiscal rectitude, posting an 11 percent increase in the debt in 4 years with Ike logging 23 percent over 8 years.

The numbers on which I relied for the following come from usgovernmentdebt.us, but not for Barack Obama, for whom I relied on the very latest figures available from treasurydirect.gov, which regrettably go back only through 1993. The percentage average annual increase in the debt shown below is for illustration purposes only since the percentage increase in the debt is calculated from beginning of the fiscal period to the end, not for each individual year. Multiply by 4 or 8 to get the actual figure for the term of office (but shown values are rounded, and Obama's record will not be complete until October 31, 2013, over a year from now, in which case multiply by 3).

Reagan                     21.25 percent

Bush The Younger  12.38 percent

Nixon/Ford              11.75 percent

Obama                     11.64 percent

Bush The Elder       11.50 percent

Carter                      10.00 percent

Clinton                      4.50 percent

Kennedy/LBJ           4.38 percent

Eisenhower              2.88 percent

Truman                    2.75 percent

Over time, Republican presidents have averaged a 12 percent annual increase in the debt while in office, while Democrat presidents have averaged almost 6 percent per annum.

Neither record is good, but things are not what they seem in the Republican Party, so-called home of the fiscal conservatives. 

Obama Ranks Fourth Best For Stock Market Since WWII, George W. Bush Worst

November on November of term (Obama to last data available), dividends reinvested in the Standard and Poor's 500 Index, adjusted for inflation, annual rates of return:

1948--1952 Harry S. Truman  17.84 percent

1992--2000 Bill Clinton           15.27 percent

1952--1960 Eisenhower           13.54 percent

2008--2012 Barack Obama      12.66 percent

1988--1992 Bush The Elder     10.76 percent

1960--1968 Kennedy/LBJ          9.40 percent

1980--1988 Ronald Reagan        8.98 percent

1976--1980 Jimmy Carter           2.60 percent

1968--1976 Nixon/Ford             -3.09 percent

2000--2008 Bush The Younger -6.12 percent.

Romney Is Blowing It On ObamaCare, And With It Blowing The Election

So should warn The Weekly Standard here, which thinks Romney still has time to fix this (hope springs eternal), but he doesn't:

[I]ndependents now oppose repeal by a margin of 9 percentage points (52 to 43 percent). By a 7-point margin they now think Obamacare is good, rather than bad, for the country. That's a 28-point swing on repeal, and a 34-point swing on whether Obamacare would be good or bad for the country, in just two months—among the voting block that will likely decide this election.

Rep. Michele Bachmann tried to warn Republicans during the primaries that repeal of ObamaCare was the sine qua non in this election, but the Republicans didn't listen. They picked the worst candidate on the issue, mostly because they didn't really have a convincing candidate on the most important issue, or on any issue.

The Republican Party is devoid of conservatives with gravitas on ObamaCare, or on anything else for that matter. In point of fact, the The Republican Party is devoid of conservatives.

Thanks Greatest Generation! Thanks Heritage Foundation! Thanks Ann Coulter! Thanks Sean Hannity! Thanks R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr! Thanks Fox! Thanks Savage Nation! Thanks RNC! Thanks Wall Street Journal! Thanks Drudge! Thanks Newt! Thanks Ronald Reagan!

Thanks to you all for whom Party comes before principle.

You've all done a wonderful job! How can we ever thank you enough for Thomas E. Dewey redivivus?

Moments later, as the discussion over Romneycare and Obamacare continued, Romney rebuked Santorum, saying, “First of all, it's not worth getting angry about.” 

Since WWII, Stocks Have Done Much Better Under Democrats Overall

Doh!

The following table is compiled from data available here.

The results are annualized rates of return, dividends fully reinvested, adjusted for inflation. In other words, these are the real annual rates of return of the Standard and Poor's 500 Index.

Dates for each presidency are marked from November 1 of the year of election to November 1 in the year losing or leaving office. Truman's service before 1948 is excluded since it overlaps the war when he took over from FDR, who died in office. Kennedy's service is combined with LBJ's because Kennedy was assassinated in his third year. Ford's service is combined with Nixon's because Ford never was elected but finished the second term of Nixon, who resigned. Obama's performance is only to July 2012, the last available data.

2008--2012 Barack Obama        12.66 percent

2000--2008 Bush The Younger  -6.12 percent

1992--2000 Bill Clinton             15.27 percent

1988--1992 Bush The Elder      10.76 percent

1980--1988 Ronald Reagan        8.98 percent

1976--1980 Jimmy Carter           2.60 percent

1968--1976 Nixon/Ford             -3.09 percent

1960--1968 Kennedy/LBJ          9.40 percent

1952--1960 Eisenhower           13.54 percent

1948--1952 Harry S. Truman   17.84 percent

Real gains per annum under Democrats have averaged 2.06 percent for their almost 28 years in control of the executive. Real gains per annum under Republicans just .67 percent for their 36 years in control. How the gains were achieved is another matter, but clearly the Democrats have done three times better than the Republicans.

George Neumayr: Romney And His Republicans Are Not Authentic Conservatives

So says George Neumayr for The American Spectator, here, and so do I:

An authentically conservative party would find Romney's unprincipled position far more chilling than Akin's gaffe. If unborn children gain or lose their right to life depending upon the circumstances of their conception, then the party has already conceded that that right doesn't exist. Ronald Reagan understood the implications of that concession and never wavered in his defense of the right to life of all unborn children, not just some of them. ... For all the talk about "pragmatism" and "diplomacy" this week from country club Republicans, they didn't display any towards a candidate who won a primary fair and square.

David Stockman Misses An Opportunity: The Warfare State IS The Welfare State

The New York Times is only happy enough to run an op-ed from David Stockman, here, attacking the phony conservatism of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, in which he rather relishes pointing out, among other things, that when push came to shove Rep. Paul Ryan "folded like a lawn chair" and voted for TARP:

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Mr. Stockman never once calls this Republicanism what it is. I suppose if he had the Times wouldn't have printed it. And I don't know how he really could since his family is allied with liberal social positions anyway. Paul Ryan isn't the only phony conservative liberal around.

But the truth is (someone's got to say it) the warfare state since Reagan is another consequence of liberalism, expressed as a failure of nerve with respect to conscription. Good wars are wars for which Americans more or less readily submit to the draft, fight successfully and end relatively quickly. They have the consent of the governed and are representative wars, conducted as they are by a cross-section of the population. Bad wars don't have the consent of the governed. And so these must emphasize among other things protecting warriors and civilians, not destroying the enemy's ability to make war, and are all too often fought to draws after protracted efforts. These cannot be conducted except with compliant volunteers, who come from more or less distinct sectors of American society: the South, and poor minorities. And these volunteers require enducements in addition to a commitment from government to their safety, such as citizenship, a college education, or a pension. As in the private sector, the military's single biggest cost is personnel, which explains perhaps more than anything the drive to mechanized war in a new form, the vanguard of which is drone technology. Can The Terminator be far behind?

The war in Afghanistan would be long over if we had destroyed its infrastructure, annihilated its people, and salted its poppy fields. But we couldn't do that. That would have been a war crime. And besides, where we would get our drugs then?

Liberalism, you see.


"Yet Reason frowns on war's unequal game,
Where wasted nations raise a single name,
And mortgaged states their grandsires' wreaths regret,
From age to age in everlasting debt;
Wreaths which at last the dear-bought right convey
To rust on medals, or on stones decay."

-- Samuel Johnson

Notice The Subtle Anti-Reaganism Of Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)

TARP Republican

Sen. Tom Coburn comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him, here:

"The last time Congress reformed the tax code was 26 years ago, which preceded the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history."

What's wrong with that? you say.

Well, that statement dates the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history from after 1986, ignoring that it actually began much earlier as a result of Reagan's stimulative tax cuts in the early 1980s. Now why would a Republican ignore that? Maybe because he's a Bush Republican who hates voodoo economics, the ungrateful louts who never defended the Gipper against the left's attacks then and still won't.

What's worse is that Sen. Coburn goes on to pretend that Reagan viewed tax credits with scorn like Martin Feldstein does:

Reagan’s key economic advisers such as Martin Feldstein persuasively argue that tax extenders are spending by another name. If tax carve-outs for green industry, rum makers, Eskimo whaling captains, and more, were on the other side of the ledger – such as in President Obama’s stimulus bill – they would be derided as spending, and rightly so.

Actually, Reagan defended spending through the tax code, for example, through the Earned Income Credit which he expanded considerably in the very 1986 tax reform Coburn praises, to get people off of welfare and into work.

Martin Feldstein may have been Reagan's economic advisor, but he was a deficit hawk who often collided with Reagan over spending, and left the service of the president after only two years, in 1984.

To rewrite the history of Ronald Reagan as Coburn does is completely dishonest.

Welfare Practised Through The Tax Code Is Liberalism, Not Conservatism

This is why those who call Ronald Reagan a conservative are wrong, because the intent of his tax policies has been all along to practise welfare through the tax code and thereby create a whole class of people at the bottom half in the country who are dependent on the federal government on April 15th, have no stake in policy and thus in politics because they do not pay for it, and are as a result ungrateful, unmotivated to climb higher, and are increasingly a nation apart from the Americans who do pay for it:

"Reagan and succeeding Republicans abolished federal income taxes on the working poor and on what the Left calls the working class, and they almost abolished them on the middle class.

"It began with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which grew out of then-Governor Ronald Reagan's famous testimony before the Senate Finance Committee in 1972. Reagan proposed exempting the working poor from all Social Security and income taxes as an alternative to welfare, with the credit serving as a way to offset payroll taxes for low-income workers. ...

"[B]y 2007, after 25 years of Reaganomics and before President Obama was even elected, the bottom 40 percent of earners, on net and as a group, paid less than 0 percent of federal income taxes, according to official IRS data, as reported recently by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of paying at least some income taxes to help support the federal government, the federal government paid them cash through the income tax code. That same year, the middle 20 percent, the true middle class, paid less than 5 percent of all federal income taxes."

So Peter Ferrara now, here, defending Romney's tax plan as more of the same.

These policies, now accepted by both Democrats and Republicans alike, have turned Social Security into pure welfare because a large majority of the people eventually receiving it will have effectively received refunds of everything they've put into it long before they start drawing it. Temporary reductions of contributions to Social Security during the recent financial crisis, advocated by Democrats in complete control of the government, have only underscored the point.

If nothing else it is another flip for Romney, who famously characterized himself as an independent and not in the mold of Reagan-Bush during his race for Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts in 1994.

"Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

Who knows, maybe the flipper will flop after he's elected. Stranger things have happened. After all, many of us on the right feared Obama in 2008 because we thought he was a commie. Little did we know he was a fascist.