An illuminating post. For the record, I don’t think that jobs can be created that well by a chief executive. But they can be destroyed, or prevented from being created, and the president has been doing that with a vengeance since he took office (before, in fact, with his campaign rhetoric).

…and his fiscal innumeracy. But he supports Barack Obama, so that’s OK.

[Update a while later]

Stop coddling Warren Buffett:

The statistic I would like to see is the amount of tax paid relative to consumption. By that measure, it is possible that Buffett’s tax rate was more than 100 percent.

I do not care if he pays very little tax on saving. I would rather he pay zero tax on saving. His taxes are too high, not too low.

That doesn’t fit the narrative.

I quit reading Paul Krugman long ago, so I hadn’t realized that he was now advocating a war on space. Does he have an exit strategy?

I’ll let Maguire properly lampoon it, but I would note something that people rarely do about a payroll-tax cut:

My impression of the general economic consensus is that hiring people to dig and re-fill holes, or monitor for space aliens, does not provide any more stimulus than any other cash transfer to a person likely to spend it. Handing out money on street corners, the Bernanke helicopter drop, and payroll tax cuts should all be in play.

If a proposed stimulative shovel-ready project adds social value (e.g., a usefual bridge, or a useful bridge repair), then borrow the money for it; if the project adds nothing, it won’t be more stimulative than a cash transfer. Krugman’s belief in the power of make-work and his preference for that over tax cuts, is motivated by somethig other than standard economic textbook theory.

The payroll-tax reduction that we managed to get out of the Democrats was on the employee side (as is fitting with their insistence on demand-side, rather than supply-side economics). It is extra money in the employees’ pockets, which they presumably spend. But it does nothing to ensure that they have jobs. A cut on the employer side, on the other hand, would make it cheaper to hire people. This sort of encapsulates the economic divide between the two parties.

Thoughts on the collapse of the Obama cult.

[Update a few minutes later]

The politics of “liberals” bashing Obama:

As I can fathom this August of discontent, it runs something like this: at best Barack Obama is too aloof, professorial and unable temperamentally or unwilling politically to mix it up with Republicans. Therefore he has compromised far too much on various budget deals, which in part explains his sagging ratings and the general laments in the American and European press that Obama lacks leadership qualities. The nearly $5 trillion in new debt since 2009 is a needed, if too timid, “stimulus”; and if it is seen by some as too excessive, it can be easily remedied by new taxes on the wealthy — something Obama talks about a lot but does little to enact, this buskin Theramenes who bends with the wind.

At worst, there is a sort of victimization that might be described as, “Obama mesmerized us and therefore we did not quite appreciate how inexperienced and unaccomplished he was until now when we sobered up — and when it is too late.”

…A number of us throughout 2008 and later were criticized for raising just these issues, both about Obama’s lack of experience and his Hamlet-like propensity of hesitation and his academic disengagement. But why this sudden about-face from former disciples?

They’re finally figuring out who the rubes were.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Not that it’s a shock that the president would lie, but it turns out that Joe Wilson was right:

There are between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens in the United States. The fact that immigration status will not be checked at these health centers means illegal aliens will be treated, at American taxpayer expense, and in contradiction to what President Obama said. He lied in the service of passing a bill that a majority opposed and which is helping sink the US economy.

Hey, the ends justify the means.

[Update mid morning]

The growing bipartisan consensus on Obama:

My favorite panegyric to Obama comes from the Times’s columnist David Brooks, recalling his first interview with then Senator Obama. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” says Brooks, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense that he knew both better than me.” Brooks went on to make this invaluable observation, “I remember distinctly an image — we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, (a) he’s going to be president and (b) he’ll be a very good president.” What would this precious Washington insider have reported if Senator Obama had been wearing pantyhose?

There are several things that the president could do to save both the country and his presidency. In no particular order, they would be: 1) Agree that the health-care bill is both unconstitutional and a mistake, and offer to sign a repeal; 2) Do the same for Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley; 3) Come up with a serious proposal to reform Medicare and Social Security to put it on a sound footing; 4) Come up with a serious proposal to reform the tax code, eliminating subsidies, the AMT and flattening the rate structure; 5) Sign an executive order ending all federal restrictions on the exploration and production of energy — in the Gulf, in Alaska and in the Mountain West; 6) Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency on carbon emissions; 7) Conduct a serious review of federal regulations in general, using Iain Murray’s book as a guide.

He could do those things, but he can’t, because he is too bound to his ideology. And so the country will continue to suffer another year and a half of his lack of leadership, and he will go down in history as a presidential failure on a monumental scale.