This is from the White House’s very own blog, from the personal keyboard of Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers:
The household survey showed that the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% in July (or, more precisely, the rate rose from 8.217% in June to 8.254% in July). Acting BLS Commissioner John Galvin noted in his statement that the unemployment rate was “essentially unchanged” from June to July.
And so is our economic recovery “essentially unchanged” from 2009 to 2012.
Paul H Rubin, Professor of Economics at Emory University, had some thoughts on President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” oratory. After giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and allowing that he really meant, without denigrating the accomplishments of entrepreneurs and other businessmen, that government needed to help private enterprise with infrastructure, Professor Rubin added a few items of interest in the infrastructure milieu.
Of more immediate impact, with regard to the infrastructure of roads and bridges, the administration’s attitude toward other necessary components of our transportation infrastructure is clear. It has
Concerning another area of necessary infrastructure, access to capital, there’re these:
And so on. RTWT.
Professor Alan Blinder, of Princeton University, has another laugher in The Wall Street Journal. This time he wants the Fed to “encourage” private bank lending—in an environment where the intended market is vary chary of taking on debt, new or additional—but without “without interfering in private credit-allocation decisions.”
His idea is stimulated by a scheme (in both the British and American English senses) of the Bank of England’s, itself generated out of the premise that UK banks aren’t lending enough to suit the government suits. Essentially, Blinder wants to ape the BoE scheme of giving private lenders preferential rates on central bank lending according to how much lending the private lenders are doing.
Hmm….
First, Blinder operates from a false premise. It’s impossible for government to “encourage” without “interfering in private decisions.” The whole point of government encouragement to execute exactly that interference. To claim that compliance is voluntary and so not interference is disingenuous sophistry. Banks are out to make money for their owners, just as any business must—its fiduciary duty drives it to—make money for its owners. The offer of a goodie for doing what government wants is no less a cudgel than providing a penalty for not doing.
Second, Blinder gives his game away in the penultimate paragraph of his piece:
Last, but certainly not least, there is the crucial question of what types of bank lending to subsidize.
Of course, the sole purpose of a subsidy is to drive the recipient to a government-desired behavior. The whole point of government encouragement to execute exactly that interference.
John Hinderaker, of Power Line, commented on President Obama’s plan to pay down the national debt, as demonstrated by Obama’s mid-year budget plan update. Obama also is campaigning on his plan to “pay down the debt in a balanced way.”
Here’s what his “balanced plan” does to our national debt, illustrated by the following graph from Power Line, and The Washington Times. 
That’s a rather startling increase in the size of this paid-down debt. “But wait,” some of you might object. “What about the debt as a per cent of our GDP, a perhaps better way to assess the size of our debt?”
Our 2011 GDP was some $15 trillion, and it’s projected to be in the neighborhood of $24 trillion by 2021 (my calculation based on data in Table 1-6 of the CBO’s report “Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2011 to 2021.”
That makes our national debt 98.7% of GDP in 2011, and 105.8% of GDP by 2021. This is how Obama intends to “pay down the debt in a balanced way” via Obamanomics’ New Math.
…and it’s not pretty. The costs of Obamacare are starting to come home to roost, now that its various mandates are starting to take effect. Gerri Willis has a listing; this is a brief summary.
The requirement that lets grown adultschildren stay on mummy and popsy’s health insurance policy until they’re 26 will cost $3,400 per grown adultchild per year. But there’s an additional cost: employers are beginning to not include such policies at all in their benefits package; they’re too expensive. There’s yet another cost: colleges where Buffy or Junior might go—and might have gotten coverage as students—are beginning to drop the policies: they’re too expensive.
But wait. There’s still the little 26-year-old tyke’s pre-existing condition that’s required to be covered. Except that coverage still is hard to find. Willis writes
Insurers in 20 states have given up offering child-only insurance plans.
Those child-only plans matter because that’s all that’s left after those other policies have been withdrawn from the market. RTWT.
There’s more, though. Medical equipment manufacturers are being forced to cancel plans for medical equipment manufacturing in the US. Cook Medical, the US’ largest privately held maker of medical devices, with annual revenue of more than $1.8 billion and employment of around 4,000 people in the Bloomington, IN, area and 10,000 worldwide, is an example.
Cook says it will have to cancel plans to build an additional five manufacturing plants, each employing 300 people when those plants were scheduled to open. The medical device tax that’s another important part of Obamacare, will cost Cook Medical $20 million this year alone—that’s the price of one of those additional manufacturing plants.
It gets worse—or better, if you like the Obamacare move. Follow the Fox News link to the larger article and video at Indianapolis Business Journal. Executive Vice President of Strategic Business Units at Cook Medical, Pete Yonkman, described one of those unintended consequences that are so monstrous and so ubiquitous in Obama’s centerpiece. With this medical device tax, Cook can’t economically bring a new technology to patients and hospitals in the US; Cook instead is looking to Asia. Moreover, as this technology is developed in Asia, that’s where the expertise will be developed. As a consequence of that, that’s where the engineering, and then manufacturing, jobs will appear:
It’s important to have that [engineering and scientific expertise] around your manufacturing base[.]
And this: Yonkman noted that
One of the fastest growing areas in our company every year is always our regulatory team having to deal with the increased burden coming from…increased regulation….
A medical device manufacturer’ fastest growing area has nothing to do with its device manufacturing or sales.
And finally this: Obamacare’s medical device tax is a 2.3% tax on medical devices; however, the impact is greater than just this immediate 2.3%. Yonkman said the impact on actual earnings is another 15%.
He’ll stop that from being built.