I am so relieved:

Finally, President Obama – author of two memoirs by the age of 45, speaker of the famous argument, “I won,” the man who famously assured his party that they wouldn’t endure a 1994-style shellacking because they had him, the man who gave an iPod of his speeches to the Queen of England, the man who claimed his election would trigger the falling of oceans and the healing of the sick, the man who believed the best candidate to be his chief of staff was himself – has overcome all of that crippling self-doubt.

Now, to gain the confidence of the rest of us, or at least enough to reelect him next year. That will be tough, I think, because it would require a thorough education on topics of which he seems utterly innocent (e.g. basic economics, free-market capitalism, Business 101, human nature), and a personality transplant.

Yuval Levin notes that CBO is admitting that their projections are intrinsically wrong:

What we have here, in other words, is a frank admission by CBO that their methodology ignores the effects of policy changes on the behavior of both providers and consumers—effects which must, of course, be essential to the consequences of any health-care reform.

This methodological “gap” strongly favors the left in the health-care debate, because it assumes that the economics of health care are just a matter of manipulating levels of spending, and so that crude price controls will not affect access and quality and that market competition will not reduce costs. There is, of course, ample evidence of the former effect (especially in Medicaid, which in most states pays doctors at even lower rates than Medicare, at least for now), and there is some evidence of the latter too (though market forces haven’t had much of a chance to be tried, except in the Medicare prescription-drug benefit; other experiments (like Medicare advantage) all take place in the shadow of the existing fee-for-service Medicare system and so can’t really change the behavior of providers—they therefore have neither traditional Medicare’s ability to boss doctors around nor a market system’s ability to keep costs down, so they end costing no less than traditional Medicare, and sometimes even a little more.)

It’s the same kind of scam that they pull when they statically score the effect of a change in tax rates. It’s lunacy to assume that it will have no effect on behavior, and yet they do, and so delude themselves that they can predict with any confidence the resulting revenue.

At last, a presidential candidate who understand economics and the limits of government power:

“Don’t get me wrong,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are proud of this distinction. We had a 11.6 percent job growth that occurred during our two terms in office. But the headlines that accompanied that report – referring to governors, including me, as ‘job creators’ – were just wrong.”

“The fact is, I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor,” Johnson added. Instead, “we kept government in check, the budget balanced, and the path to growth clear of unnecessary regulatory obstacles.”

And the current gang in DC is doing exactly the opposite, so there’s no reason that continuing bad economic news should be “unexpected.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

The one stimulus that the government refuses to try:

It’s almost as if Washington envisions the economy not as a complex network of billions of voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships, but as a lawn mower which could be forced to run smoothly if only they’d yank hard enough on the starter cord.

Amid government’s rush to “do something,” we forget that, on a percentage basis, the nation’s most productive years, those in which the U.S. overtook Great Britain to become the world’s leading economic power, occurred prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. What many lawmakers and regulators are not considering here is the strong possibility that the stimulus and intervention have had a deleterious effect.

No, that couldn’t possibly be.