Larry Kudlow is brain dead and he's on the radio

Like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Kudlow doesn't accurately remember the Reagan era.

It's embarrassing coming from these self-appointed spokesmen for Ronald Reagan.

Unlike Limbaugh, however, Kudlow actually served in the Reagan Administration so he really ought to know better, but today on the radio he kept saying that the jobs created in February 2018 (313,000) don't get any better than that.

Flashback to February 1984: jobs added 481,000. Or February 1988: jobs added 453,000.

Need more?

June 1983: +379,000. July 1983: +418,000. September 1983: +1.115 MILLION.

1.115 MILLION!

IN ONE MONTH!

Do I need to go on?

Yes, I think I do.

November 1983: +353,000.

December 1983: +356,000.

January 1984: +446,000.

April 1984: +363,000.

June 1984: +379,000.

July 1984: +313,000.

November 1984: +349,000.

March 1985: +346,000.

July 1986: +318,000.

September 1986: +347,000.

April 1987: +338,000.

July 1987: +347,000.

October 1987: +492,000.

June 1988: +363,000.

September 1988: +339,000.

November 1988: +339,000.

The current jobs boom isn't a boom, not yet, not by a longshot, and is NOTHING like the Reagan era, and Kudlow is doing a disservice to the historical record in which he played a part.

You've become a political hack, Larry.

Let this be a sign unto you: The era of libertarian looting ushered in by Reagan now reaching apogee will be followed by another FDR-like "progressive" era of welfare statism

Bernie tapped into the amorphous socialism clamored for by today's young people who face dim job prospects while saddled by large college debts for degrees incommensurate with what's available in the job marketplace. This is the direct result of the takeover of public education from bottom to top by the left. It never delivers what it promises, except for hope.

As "millennials" replace the Baby Boom at the polls, their vote will transform America, and already has. Obama and Bernie were signs of this. Expect a return to high taxation of the rich, even larger federal government, and the transformation of existing welfare state programs into universal systems.

Like it or not, that's the future. Patriotism will take the form of socialism for Americans instead of for the world.

Now that Republicanism has thoroughly committed itself to globalism, libertarians are advised to take the money and run. 

HaHaHa, HaHaHaHaHa: I got your "booming economy" right here, fella

The Reagan bull ended in August 2000 with final average nominal per annum return of 18.99%, real 15.28%

Taxes are about precise numbers, which means Rush Limbaugh will make you cringe

He just said Ronald Reagan lowered the top marginal rate from 90% in the 1981 tax reform.

He didn't. John F. Kennedy lowered the top rate from 90% to 70%.

Reagan lowered the top rate from 70% to 50%.

Just about everything Rush says about taxes is imprecise, and wrong, including about what he has no excuse for not knowing, namely taxes under his hero Reagan.

But hey, he can't even get the old chestnut "whose ox is gored" correct. Today it's the goose getting gored, or something.

Take another pill, Rush. Just one more hour to go before you're off for two weeks.

Update: My bad. Rush will be back tomorrow, to celebrate the tax bill passing.

HELOC interest deduction goes away under Republican tax "reform": Expect loan consolidation

You know the one, the one you take to help buy a car, fund tuition, or actually fix up the house.

When the credit card interest deduction went away under Ronald Reagan, consumers opened up Home Equity Lines of Credit in response, the interest on which was deductible. Now that HELOC interest deductibility is going away, expect those HELOCs to be refinanced under new first mortgages to recapture that.

Also expect this to impact consumer spending, negatively.

Reported here:

Individuals who take out home equity loans will no longer be able to deduct that interest under the new bill.

Sum Ting Wong: Low top marginal tax rates since 1986 have NOT delivered

Low top marginal tax rates have NOT delivered since 1986.

The average top marginal rate has been 38% for the last thirty years, 49% lower than the average rate of 75% which prevailed from 1956 until the Reagan tax reform of 1986.

After the reform, stocks have done little better than before, but gross public debt has increased at a rate 21% higher than before, growth of current dollar GDP has plunged by 66%, and growth of household net worth has slowed by 48%.

Where did the gains from the Reagan tax cuts go?

You know the answer. The number of US billionaires has exploded from just 41 in 1987 to 536 in 2015, up 1,207%. The money has gone into the pockets of the few, instead of into investment. From 1960 to 1986 net domestic investment grew 846% whereas in the 30 years since 1986 the metric has grown by only 117%, a contraction of 86% under the more favorable personal income tax regime.

The lesson seems clear.

Higher marginal income tax rates force the wealthy to invest in business and derive their income from investments taxed at the preferred lower long term capital rates. Lower marginal personal income tax rates, however, entice them away from going through all the trouble, in turn depriving the economy of growth, employees of growing incomes and wealth, and the government of revenue.

Like the formerly sound public policy which invented the 30-year mortgage to force people to save for the future in the housing piggy bank, the time has come to reincentivize business owners to invest more in their businesses by making the personal income option less attractive.

Neither Republican tax bill does this. 

  

It's hard to escape the conclusion that US GDP has been highly dependent on fertility

Peak Baby Boom 1952-1957 when births per 1,000 of population averaged 25.17 (graph 1) is probably the simplest explanation for outsized GDP performance during the years when this generation turned 22 from 1974-1979. More babies in the 1950s equaled more GDP come the late 1970s.

We only wish for that GDP now.

Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, still owns the best 4-year GDP record in the post-war, despite everything you've been told (graph 2). It's nothing special he did really, it's just that in 1975, the year before his election, you had the very peak of the Baby Boom turn 18, those born in 1957 when births per 1,000 hit 25.3 for the second and final time in the post-war. They and the rest of their cohort were ready to consume in numbers never seen before. Their era spanning from Nixon/Ford from 1972 when the first of them turned 20 through Reagan in 1984 when they turned 32 represents the coming of age of America's most powerful economic demographic and the period when America's GDP performance hit its highest levels (average 46.3%).

Their failure to have enough children themselves, however, is also a big part of the explanation for the GDP trend heading south after their time. They consumed, but they did not at all produce children like their parents had. In fact, the nadir of births per 1,000 before the current period occurred from 1972 to 1977, precisely the period exactly 20 years after peak Baby Boom 1952-1957. Births per 1,000 averaged just 14.92 during this period, a rate nearly 41% lower than their parents' era. So the most prolific fruit of the Baby Boom had gone on to become themselves the least prolific, having the fewest children ever.

Not surprisingly, without enough bodies the economy inevitably began to run out of gas starting about two decades after that. Clinton era GDP performance was never as good as Reagan's, and the era was marked by various warnings, not the least of which were the bond debacles of 1994 and 1999. The great Reagan bull market ended in August 2000, a recession ensued in 2001, average S&P 500 return has been reduced to 5.2% per annum over the last 17 years, and the GDP growth rate after Clinton has averaged just half what it averaged before Carter (16% vs. 32%). No wonder the trend is down so dramatically (graph 3).

The solution?

Have LOTS more kids, and wait 20 years, if you want America to still be America, that is. Otherwise, let in even more than the 1 million immigrants we already let in annually, and prepare to kiss your country goodbye.

But don't hold your breath. Births per 1,000 have fallen to an average of just 12.5 for the five year period 2011-2015.

They don't call it the suicide of the West for nothing.

graph 1

graph 2

graph 3

Full-time job growth under Trump so far beats Obama and Bush, but that's about it

Note that employers panicked under Obama and fired people like crazy after his election, so there was a steep decline in full-time.

So far the growth of full-time shows a tentative thumbs-up to Trump, but still nothing like the vote of confidence typical after previous changes at the helm of state.

The puny 2.5% growth under George W. Bush, keep in mind, was still all pre-911 and post-Reagan bull market, which ended in August 2000. Trump is doing better than Bush, but not by much.

George Herbert Walker Bush's legacy: It took only 7 years of NAFTA to destroy hours worked in the United States

Hours of all persons grew 44% during the Reagan bull market, which ended in August 2000. Since then, hours of all persons has grown just 3%.

NAFTA went into effect in January 1994, eleven years after the Reagan bull began and a little over one year after Bush inked the deal. Seven years later hours of all persons peaked.

It reminds me of Bill Clinton's innovation, the so-called Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which blew up the housing market after just 10 years.

Republicans take away your job, then Democrats come along and take away your house.

If you're living in your car, you'd better watch your back.  

The Reagan GDP miracle is a complete myth: It was all government spending (on defense)

And it set a horrible precedent for the dramatic overspending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, which has sent us on a course to oblivion. You can argue it was necessary to defeat the USSR, but you can't argue that baseline spending (in black) has done anything but go up, up, up to dangerous new levels as a result (notice the baseline Jimmy Carter inherited from liberal Republicanism, for which he got the blame from Ronald Reagan, which wasn't very nice of the old man who went on to bequeath a similar giant new baseline to his successor, G.H.W. Bush).

No, the real miracle was the pathetic loser in Iran, Jimmy Carter, who spent the least in the post-war for his additional GDP, followed by Bill Clinton.

Of course, the spending is all the prerogative of the Congress. The president proposes but the Congress disposes, as the saying goes.

Beware libertarian politicians preaching balanced budgets, as well as utopian infrastructure spending enthusiasts promising the moon and liberal Republicans selling government spending as security to senior citizens at the expense of younger Americans in a time of protracted war. They have delivered little beyond $20 trillion in debt.

John O'Sullivan still refuses to accept the meaning of "ourselves and our Posterity"

Here:

Notice that Ronald Reagan did not say that the great civil ideas of the West were the property of those Notre Dame graduates who were descended from the Founding Fathers and their generation. Nor did he say that they were the property of white Anglophone Protestants who had fetched up on these shores in the meantime — since that would have excluded the son of an Irish Catholic father like himself. Nor that the children of black slaves or other non-white migrants were excluded from that same moral and intellectual Western inheritance which the black former slave and passionate reader, Frederick Douglass, so cherished and claimed as his own.

Detroit Free Press says Michigan is ground zero for the Muslim clit cutters, girls from MN brought in for secret "operation"

Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan's crazy libertarian Judge Bernard Friedman is presiding over the case. You remember Friedman. He was the judge who overturned Michigan's 2004 Marriage Act in 2014.

From the story here:

[T[he [federal] government estimates that as many as 100 girls may have had their genitals cut at the hands of a local doctor and her cohorts.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Woodward disclosed the information while trying to convince a judge to keep a doctor and his wife locked up in the historic case. It involves allegations that two Minnesota girls had their genitals cut at a Livonia clinic in February as part of a religious rite of passage and were told to keep what happened a secret. ...

Against Woodward's wishes, U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman granted bond to two other defendants in the case: Dr. Fakhruddin Attar, 53, of Farmington Hills, who is accused of letting Nagarwala use his clinic to perform genital cutting procedures on minor girls; and his wife, Farida Attar, 50, who is accused of holding the girls' hands during the procedure to keep them from squirming and to calm them. ...

The government believes the three defendants, all members of a local Indian-Muslim sect, subjected numerous girls to genital cutting procedures over a 12-year period. ...  [Dr. Attar allegedly admitted] to authorities that he let Nagarwala use his clinic up to six times a year to treat children for genital rashes. ...

The defense has argued that the Attars did not engage in any criminal  act and that the procedure at issue is a protected religious rite-of-passage that involves no cutting, but rather a scraping of genital membrane.

Robert Tracinski skewers some libertarians for the socialism in their heads, but still misses why it's there

Here, chalking it all up to "unexamined collectivist assumptions" and mistakenly allowing "a little dominion of socialism over their thinking" and the left "trying to preserve that territory they own in your head" through various schemes like the estate tax.

In other words, they're insufficiently indoctrinated. You know, like all those intractable Russians who were sent to the Gulag for nothing more than mistakenly expressing incorrect thoughts.

It never dawns on Tracinski that ideology is a coin with socialism on the one side and libertarianism on the other.

The article is amusing because the "conservatives" he skewers for being insufficiently libertarian are or were aligned with the left and leftism: Charles Murray (former labor unionist, six years in the Peace Corps, "rebel"), Ronald Reagan ("I didn't leave the Democratic Party . . ."), Stuart Butler of health mandate infamy (Brookings), Milton Friedman (FDR functionary) and Megan McArdle (self-described former "ultraliberal").

With the example of McArdle on the estate tax before him, one might have hoped that Tracinski had stumbled into the origin of the socialism in our heads, but no, "there is no such collective entity as 'society.'"

The man wishing to leave his estate to that little society called his family might have begged to differ.

Mark Levin won't tell you Ronald Reagan expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit in the 1986 tax reform

Hey Mark, does that make Reagan someone who "sold out his principles" for liberalism?

Well does it?

German leftist critic of Trump's America First policy proclaimed the death of rapacious English and American free markets in 2008

Boltneck shakes hands mit Steinmeier in 2014

It took less than one day after Trump's speech for Germany to wet its pants. First VW kills profits, and now Trump is going to cost Germany a fortune. Steinmeier here went on record almost immediately criticizing Trump's remarks as incoherent.

Here the leftist was prematurely celebrating eight years ago about the death of right-wing economics in the West:

[T]he Social Democrats (SPD) are shifting hard Left to protect their flank. "The rule of the radical market ideology that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan has ended with a loud bang," said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister and SPD candidate for chancellor next year. "We need a comprehensive new start, so we can reestablish our society on fresh foundations. People create value, not locusts," he said.

Ann Coulter correctly says Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election because he lost the white vote

Here yesterday:

[Stuart] Stevens says Romney tapped out every last white voter and still lost, so he says Republicans are looking for “the Lost Tribes of the Amazon” hoping to win more white votes: “In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56 percent of white voters and won a landslide victory of 44 states. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of whites and lost with 24 states.”

Apparently, no one’s told Stevens about the 50-state Electoral College. ...

Romney lost the white vote to Obama in five crucial swing states: Maine (42 percent of the white vote), Minnesota (47 percent), New Hampshire (48 percent), Iowa (48 percent) and Wisconsin (49 percent). He only narrowly beat Obama’s white vote in other important swing states — Illinois (51 percent), Colorado (52 percent), Michigan (53 percent), Ohio (54 percent) and Pennsylvania (54 percent).

Increasing the white vote in these states gives Trump any number of paths to victory.

I made similar observations here at the end of February, noting how Romney averaged under 50% of the white vote in 21 states, losing them all to Obama.

Rush Limbaugh thinks Trump's too unpopular to win, but forgets how unpopular Reagan was in 1980

Gallup presidential polls 1980

Composite of polls by John Sides

Reagan sweeps with 90% of the electoral college vote

Like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan 36 years ago tomorrow was very unpopular in this country

L.A.Times poll 3/25/80 Favorables:

John Anderson 68% (0 electoral votes in November, Independent party)

Teddy Kennedy 60% (lost primary to less popular Carter even though winning 11 states & DC with 7.3 million popular votes)

Jimmy Carter 51% (49 electoral votes in November)

Ronald Reagan 30% (489 electoral votes in November). 

Donald Trump's little known involvement as a material, early supporter of Ronald Reagan

The UK Daily Mail reported here in May 2015:

'Donald Trump was on the Reagan Finance Committee in 1979-80 when most of the New York financial elite were for George Bush or John Connally,' the former campaign aide told Daily Mail Online, on condition of anonymity.

Trump and his father Fred were in the room when Reagan announced his candidacy in New York City in 1980, he explained, adding that without Trump the 40th president might have been dead in the water.

'When the phone company said it would be 30 to 60 days before they could install our phones at the Reagan for President headquarters on 52nd street,' he recalled, 'I called Donald Trump. They installed the phones the next day.'

'Donald also let us use his helicopter to fly our delegate petitions to Albany, where we filed 15 minutes before closing at the board of elections.'

And Fred Trump 'loaned the campaign some space in a building he owned in Queens,' the Reagan veteran said. 'Donald got us space on 52nd street. They were among a handful of Reagan's earliest New York Supporters.'

1993 World Trade Center bomber got illegal immigrant amnesty from Ronald Reagan in 1986

Germany denied [Mahmud Abouhalima] political asylum and he quickly married Renate Soika, a troubled German woman, which guaranteed he could remain in the country. He divorced Soika three years later, but shortly after he married another woman named Marianne Weber in a Muslim ceremony. He flew to Brooklyn with his new wife and after his American tourist visa expired, applied for amnesty claiming to be an agricultural worker and was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.