Here’re a couple of charts that illustrate the impact on American joblessness caused by Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s economic policies.  They’re from an article last spring by Dan Mitchell, writing at The Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

This graph shows the degree of long-term joblessness extant in our present economy.

For almost the entire post-war period, long-term joblessness had been stable, if noisy, around a low rate in the range of 10%-15% of total unemployed.  But throughout the administration of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, this long-term unemployment travesty has skyrocketed into the 45% range—nearly half of all of our unemployed in the present economic dislocation have been out of work long-term—for six months or more.  Larry Summers, ex of Obama’s National Economic Council suggests a reason:

Empirical evidence shows that two causes are welfare payments and unemployment insurance.… The second way government assistance programs contribute to long-term unemployment is by providing an incentive, and the means, not to work.  Each unemployed person has a “reservation wage”—the minimum wage he or she insists on getting before accepting a job.  Unemployment insurance and other social assistance programs increase that reservation wage, causing an unemployed person to remain unemployed longer.…  Clark and I estimated [in a study using state data on registrants in Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamp programs] that the existence of unemployment insurance almost doubles the number of unemployment spells lasting more than three months.

Another reason is the inordinate spending and borrowing generally of the present administration, which I addressed in another post.

The chart below shows another effect of Obama’s policies on jobs: the size of the labor force, or the number of people working, at least part-time, or still actively looking for work.

The labor force shrank by roughly four per centage points from the start of our current economic Time of Troubles at the end of the Bush the Younger administration.  And it has remained flat, rather than recovering as it did in earlier times, throughout the Obama administration.  This also is associated with the above long-term unemployment.  After a sufficiently long period of failure, people just give up trying to find work—they don’t see that there is any to be had.  And it’s been that way for nearly four years, now.

We need to change the Federal government’s economic policy.  For that we need to change the Federal government’s Executive and Senate personnel.

My book, A Conservative’s Treatise on American Government: A Brief Discussion of what a Government, Subordinate to the Sovereign People, Must Do, has been published, and it can be found, among other places, at Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.  Links also can be found nearby in the column to the right and on the Books page.

In this book, I first offer analyses of our Declaration of Independence and of our Constitution, centering the latter on the Enumerated Powers generally and four specific clauses: Taxing and Spending, general Welfare, Commerce, and Necessary and Proper.  Then I provide a summary of our movement away from the principles contained in those founding social compact documents, which drift gained especial impetus during the FDR administration and continues through the present Obama administration.  I conclude with some specific suggestions for corrections to each branch of our Federal government and to our Constitution in order to restore us to our founding principles and to strengthen our nation and Constitution against future drift.

I hope you find this, like Conservative’s Manifesto, enjoyable and useful.

Update: Corrected the title.  Can’t even get my own ad copy right….  [sigh]

Friday, President Obama announced a modification to his HHS Department’s mandate that all employers provide health insurance policies that include free contraceptive services—which include contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients—including those employers with religious objections to this sort of thing.  One version of his announcement is here.  In sum, the modification allows religious institutions like hospitals and charities to opt out of the requirement, but if they do, their insurance provider must itself and separately provide those services to the institution’s women employees—still free of charge.  Does this solve the problem?  Where to begin….

Obama made his announcement against his usual backdrop of denigrating those who disagree with him as just playing politics; there couldn’t possibly be legitimate concerns

…as well as, frankly, the cynical desire on the part of some to make this into a political football….

and

Understand some folks in Washington may want to treat this as another political wedge issue….

which, though, is a minor aspect of his speech.  He had this to say, of a more substantive nature:

It’s a lot cheaper to prevent an illness than to treat one.  We also accepted a recommendation from the experts at the Institute of Medicine that, when it comes to women, preventive care should include coverage of contraceptive services such as birth control.

and

…find a way that protects religious liberty and ensures that every woman has access to the care that she needs.

Thus, he continues the fiction that pregnancy is a disease that needs prevention, not a conscious act with lots of very low cost mechanisms for preventing, if prevention truly is wanted.  I’m waiting for the hue and cry from yesterday’s feminists.

Nor does the federalism that is the core of our republican democracy matter to him.

This basic principle…is already the law in 28 states across the country.

And

An exemption…, by the way, that eight states didn’t already have.

If some states do something within their own boundaries, this is sufficient justification for the Federal government to impose it nation-wide.  Except when the states don’t already do that something.  Then it’s OK for the Federal government to impose it nation-wide.

There’s more.

Under the rule…if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company—not the hospital, not the charity—will be required to reach out and offer the woman contraceptive care free of charge, without copays and without hassles.  The results will be that religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly.  Let me repeat: these employers will not have to pay for or provide contraceptive services.

If you watch the video, you’ll see that he said these words with a straight face: “the insurance company—not the hospital, not the charity—will be required to [provide] contraceptive care free of charge….”  He really thinks the insurance companies won’t pass on the costs for this in the form of higher policy premiums charged those religious institutions—and the employees, since most employer-provided coverages include employee premium-sharing—and in the form of higher premiums generally to everyone.

It’s highly doubtful, also, that he’s considered the likelihood that, when the institutions opt out of the mandate, many insurance companies will simply stop offering insurance plans to those institutions in order to avoid bearing the added cost of a separate, “free” service requirement.

Indeed, why does Obama think insurance premiums already have skyrocketed since Obamacare was enacted?  His ignorance of basic economic principles is breathtaking.

It’s also clear that the University of Chicago Senior Lecturer (which the university considers to be a professor) in Constitutional Law has carefully ignored all constitutional questions related to the federal government ordering private enterprises to give away products or services.  He’s simply, blithely, ordering private companies to provide, without compensation, those products he’s decided they should provide.

He concluded with this:

We live in a pluralistic society….  That doesn’t mean that we have to choose between individual liberty and basic fairness for all Americans.

But when government presumes to dictate the parameters of “basic fairness,” that is a direct attack on individual liberty.

Can we afford another four years of such ignorant arrogance?

As President Obama pretends to channel his inner Christian and, in doing so, distorts Jesus’ message, a friend reminds me of another passage from the Bible.  Ruth 2:1-17 has many lessons, but one of them concerns the charity of Boaz toward Ruth.  Within this lesson is another.  Boaz had productive fields, else he could not have let Ruth glean from them—there would have been nothing to glean.

This new and old lesson is understood by many in our own time.  Isabel Paterson has also written about the relationship between charity and production.  In her The God of the Machine, she wrote

The great religions, which are also great intellectual systems, have always recognized the conditions of the natural order.  They enjoin charity, benevolence, as a moral obligation, to be met out of the producer’s surplus.  That is, they make it secondary to production, for the inescapable reason that without production there could be nothing to give.

Charity is a moral duty, and so of necessity a personal one.  Government cannot command our morality.  Yet President Obama’s policies add to the difficulty we have in satisfying our moral duty by taking our wealth away from us, by dictating to us our production and our exchanges among each other—and thereby reducing our ability to produce enough for our families and to have a surplus from which to offer charity to others.  Obama would have us glean our fields threadbare and give the surplus to his government so that he can engage in the wealth redistribution which he pretends is our collective charity.

Thus, Paterson also says this about that Obama-style “charity,”

If the primary objective of the philanthropist, his justification for living, is to help others, his ultimate good requires that others shall be in want. His happiness is the obverse of their misery.  If he wishes to help “humanity,” the whole of humanity must be in need.  The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others.  He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves.  The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.