…is floundering:

It is a wonder, this faith-based (and often campus-based) conviction that the government that brought us the ethanol program can be trusted to precisely execute wise policies that will render the world predictable and progressive.

For two years, there has been one constant: As events have refuted the Obama administration’s certitudes, the administration has retained its insufferable knowingness. It knew that the stimulus would hold unemployment below 8 percent. Oops. Unemployment has been at least 9 percent in 26 of the 30 months since the stimulus was passed. Michael Boskin of Stanford says that, even if one charitably accepts the administration’s self-serving estimate of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus, each job cost $280,000 — five times America’s median pay.

And research by Garett Jones and Daniel M. Rothschild of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center indicates that just 42.1 percent of workers hired by entities receiving stimulus funds were unemployed at the time. More (47.3 percent) were poached from other organizations, and 10.6 percent came directly from school or outside the labor force.

Obama’s administration, which is largely innocent of business experience, knew its experts would be wizards at investing taxpayers’ dollars. Oops.

“Floundering” is too kind a word, I think. Can I be emancipated from this “family,” please?

…they will have to rein in ObamaCare.

[Update a few minutes later]

You don’t say: “Report: Administration ignored high costs in healthcare bill.”

…on unemployment. Even Robert Reich thinks the president isn’t serious:

Reich is still confused, though:

If the president was never really serious about getting Republican votes in the first place–if his jobs bill and the tax increase on the wealthy were always going to be part of his 2012 election year pitch–why didn’t he make his jobs bill big enough to do the job?

Let’s accept for the sake of argument the creationist premise that an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent government can create all the jobs it wants simply by borrowing and spending enough money. Let’s also assume Reich’s premise that “enough,” in this case, is some figure considerably in excess of $447 billion.

Why didn’t Obama ask for enough? That seems obvious. If the answer is “no,” and the point of asking the question is to elicit a negative response, then the practical difference between what you get if you ask for $447 billion and, say, $5 trillion is not $4.553 trillion but zero. If Obama is asking for the money only for appearance’ sake, as Reich concedes he is, then it’s more important that $447 billion appears more reasonable than $5 trillion.

Either way, Megan McArdle wishes “that Obama hadn’t wasted my Thursday evening, and that of 31 million other Americans, listening to a jobs plan that was only designed to produce one job–a second term for Barack Obama.” Most of those viewers–those of us who write about this stuff for a living being obvious exceptions–didn’t actually have to watch the speech, so we’re not able to work up much sympathy for those who didn’t have the good sense to change the channel or go out and live a little.

But let’s take this by the numbers. Obama’s speech lasted about 42 minutes. Multiply that by 31 million viewers and, say, $20 an hour, and you end up with the man-hour equivalent of about $434 million. It’s a shameful waste, but much less of one than if Stimulus Jr. actually became law.

No danger of that, fortunately. The neo-Keynesians have finally completely destroyed whatever credibility they ever had.

The Keynesian one:

Thoughts on Obama’s latest deficit-increasing blather from Jim Geraghty:

We’re a $14 trillion economy that makes everything from timber to jumbo jets to firearms to smart-phone apps to Hollywood movies to every food product under the sun. The notion that some grab bag of tax credits and federal grants is going to kick-start a hiring binge to put 14 million Americans back to work or that the economy is one tax credit for hiring veterans away from recovery is laughable.

The recession we’ve endured for the past three years is far from normal, and yet we keep getting the normal Keynesian responses. I realize I’m about to offer blasphemies and shockers on par with Rick Perry’s Ponzi-scheme comparison, but what if Obama was wrong last night, and a big issue is that some of the people of this country do not, in fact, work hard to meet their responsibilities? What if decades of a lousy education system have left us with a workforce that has too many members with no really useful skills for a globalized economy? What if way too many college students majored in liberal arts and are entering the workforce looking for jobs that will never exist? What if the massive housing bubble got Americans to condition themselves to work in an economy that’s never coming back? (How many realtors are unemployed right now?) What if we have good workers who can’t move to take new jobs because they’re underwater on their mortgages and can’t sell their house?

That’s just crazy talk. (No link because it’s from his morning email.)

And on a related note, is it the end, after decades, of the New Deal Order? I hope so, but it went on so long that the transition to sanity is going to be very painful, and perhaps very ugly, as we saw with the union thuggery in Washington state that is so far not only going completely unpunished, but its author sat in a box with the First Lady at the president’s speech.