“Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I have enough money to buy food.”

NYT: “I want people to understand, the face of the needy is different now,” said Ms. Cazimero, who has joined a new class of Americans who never imagined they would have to take a spot in a modern-day bread line. “Just because I have a car doesn’t mean I have enough money to buy food.”

I don't have much to say about this, except the need for a more robust safety net seems both obvious and unreachable for America, and it's aggravating. And I'm old enough to remember stories like this.

One in eight Americans receives food stamps One in four American children now depends on food stamps. Among all Americans, one in eight is receiving food stamps, and as unemployment drops middle-class people into poverty, 20,000 additional people are signing up each day.

That's from 2009. Seems we should have learned a lesson during the Great Recession that we didn't.

No, Democrats are not going to bring about a socialist utopia

Steve Pearlstein offers up a list of Democratic priorities to rein in the business community if they take control of government -- go read it -- and it sounds really expansive. "To the business lobby, they represent a nightmare scenario," he writes. "But whatever your view, there can be little doubt that in the short and medium run — the time horizon of most investors and corporate executives — these policy changes will reduce the profits of businesses and the incomes of those who own them."

I'm skeptical. While Democrats as a group are as progressive as they've been in awhile -- and Joe Biden is following suit -- it's also true the party has been mostly on-board the train that has produced greater inequality in America over the last generation or two. If Democrats take the Senate, it will probably be Chuck Schumer -- no enemy of high finance -- who shepherds the party's agenda through that chamber. Business interests may not get everything they want from Democratic governance (and if history is any guide, they'll pout and scream about socialism the whole way) but in all likelihood they'll still be doing pretty well. 

The NYT says American productivity is stagnant. Here's a theory why.

The New York Times observes that American productivity is stagnant, and considers three theories why.

During the 2008 recession, labor productivity soared. Was this because employers laid off their least productive workers first? Because everybody worked harder, fearful for their jobs? Or was it a measurement problem as government statistics-takers struggled to capture fast-moving changes in the economy? We don’t know for sure.

None of the Times' three theories use this armchair psychoanalysis to consider one obvious reason American workers aren't more productive these days:

It isn't friggin' worth it.

Since the end of the Great Recession, Americans have become more and more aware — aided by growing discussion of income inequality and movements like Occupy Wall Street — of two very salient points:

• For decades, American productivity has soared.

• During those same decades, worker wages have stagnated.

Here's The Atlantic, reporting in February 2015:

Though productivity (defined as the output of goods and services per hours worked) grew by about 74 percent between 1973 and 2013, compensation for workers grew at a much slower rate of only 9 percent during the same time period, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.

That increased productivity has been good for the bottom line of a lot of businesses, but it hasn't meant boo to most workers. (Top earners, though, have seen their income and wealth soar.) Why have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump been so successful this  election cycle? Because a fundamental American promise — worker harder, you'll probably do better — seems to be broken.

I come from the news industry, where we've spent most of the last couple of decades under constant pressure to do more with less, more with less, more with less. At some point, there's no more to be wrung from less. And if giving more won't gain you more, why not just put in your time, clock out at the end of the day, and stress out a little bit less?

This isn't the kind of thing that economists measure, I don't suppose. But maybe productivity is declining because workers are tired of the cycle. Maybe they need incentives.

Robert Samuelson to Middle Class: I find your lack of faith disturbing

Robert Samuelson says the middle class is thinning out because it doesn't believe hard enough:

What the middle class faces today is a crisis of faith. Being middle class is more than attaining some threshold income. It also involves embracing a set of beliefs that, unfortunately, have been severely shaken. 

Middle-class Americans believe in opportunity, stability, reward for effort, a brighter future and the ability to control their lives, as sociologist Herbert Gans showed in his 1988 book “Middle American Individualism.”

Anybody who endured any bout of unemployment during the Great Recession would be bound to have their faith in such precepts shaken. There's nothing like wondering if you're going to be poor forever to make you question the American dream. And that's true even if you got back on track, somehow. I've got a good job these days, one of the best I've had, but I'm also deeply aware of how fragile it all is — how lucky I am to have found my way back.  The underlying faith I used to have that things would generally be on an upward trajectory? Gone. I miss it.

Samuelson adds:

The economy is more random, unstable and insecure than we imagined. It is less susceptible to policy engineering. The fact that the upper classes can better shield themselves against its upsets naturally breeds resentment.

That's not quite right. The resentment is bred more from the fact that the upper classes are shielded by government from the vagaries of the economy more than the lower classes are. Banks were too big to fail, our tax dollars bailed them out, and executives kept on collecting bonuses. Middle class home buyers found themselves stuck with underwater mortgages,meanwhile, and got lectures about responsibility. The people most directly responsible for screwing the economy suffered little, if any, long-term consequences. The rest of us are still living with consequences in many cases. Hard to have faith when lived experience contradicts it.

Is America's economy fair?

That's the question in this week's Scripps Howard column, following up on yesterday's Gallup poll and President Obama's State of the Union comment that "We can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules." My take:

"Fairness" can be a slippery concept, so let's use Obama's formulation as our guide. In the American economy, does everybody get a fair shot? Does everyone do a fair share? Does everyone play by the same set of rules? No. Yes. No.

No, not everybody gets a fair shot. Sixty-five percent of American men born poor stay poor, according to research from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Sixty-two percent of those born rich stay rich. Other studies show that it's much easier to rise from humble circumstances if you're a native of Canada, Norway, Finland or Denmark than in the United States. The poor often lack the education and resources to advance in today's high-tech economy.

Yes, the people who are able to obtain jobs do their fair share. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says that American workers doubled their productivity between 2008 and 2009, and then did it again in 2010. Some of that is due to workplace mechanization, but some is surely due to American workers continually finding ways to "do more with less."

No, not everyone plays by the same set of rules. Banks get bailed out by taxpayers and their executives still collect bonuses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but homeowners stuck with bad mortgages are sneered at as "losers" by television pundits. If you're rich, it's tough to stop being rich, no matter how badly you screw up.

If you're less well off, one mistake can doom your whole life.

It didn't used to be this way in America. There were once opportunities to rise from humble circumstances. That's not really the case anymore. Horatio Alger may have become famous writing rags-to-riches tales about opportunity in America. But Horatio Alger is dead and mostly forgotten. And it's not fair.

I guess I could've applied the test posed by John Rawls and asked if this economic system would've been agreed to by most Americans if they were blind to whether they'd be advantaged or disadvantaged by it. My guess: No. But I don't think the tweaks would actually be all that massive under such a scenario.

Ben thinks the economy is unfair ... to free enterprise. Bwahahahaha!

When did Matt Taibbi start writing for National Review?

He hasn't. But Kevin Williamson's piece on the nexus of Wall Street and Washington is devastatingly reminiscent of Taibbi's Rolling Stone reportage, albeit from a right-of-center point of view. Here's a sample slice:

When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration.

#ad#Barack Obama (Nasdaq: bho) has been a pretty good buy for Goldman Sachs et al. Sure, the Frank-Dodd financial-reform bill is going to be a sharp pain in Wall Street’s pinstriped posterior, and it’s going to cost some moneymen some money, but not enough that anybody’s going to be out a champagne saber. Mostly, Big Business has got just what it wanted from the Big Government guys in the Obama administration: Frank-Dodd did not do much of anything to lift the cloud of opacity over the world of structured finance, which is what the investment bankers feared most. President Obama has made some noises about ending the carried-interest treatment that allows the fine fellows who run private-equity funds to pay 15 percent in taxes on their gazillion-dollar take-homes instead of 35 percent, but the private-equity guys know that isn’t going to happen, mostly because they’ve heard this story before, from Senator Schumer, and they recognize it for what it is: an inelegant appeal for campaign donations. Beyond Wall Street proper, your Fortune 500 types are looking at the many-splendored tax credits and subsidies and grants and stimulus dollars lavished upon firms such as the now-defunct Solyndra and the really-should-have-been-defunct General Electric and wondering: How do I get me some of that?

Williamson points out—to his credit—that the same dynamic would exist under a Mitt Romney administration. He doesn't name a GOP candidate who might change things.

Ralph Nader rose to spoiler status in 2000 because many liberals believed Bill Clinton had dragged the party into an alliance with Wall Street at the expense of workers and the poor. Twelve years later, not much has changed in that regard: President Obama's Kansas speech was remarkable both for its populist rhetoric and its absence of any specific measures to make good on the rhetoric. If you don't trust the parties not to sell you out, and if you think the Occupy Wall Streeters are too stinky or radical, where do you go? What do you do? Who represents your interests?

Why aren't men going back to school?

The New York Times has an interesting story this morning about how women are using the recession* to leave work, go back to school, and bulk up their credentials for the job market. Men, on the other hand, are working lousy jobs. (Probably, the story suggests, because men still feel a need to be familial breadwinners in ways that women don't.) Once the recession lifts, though, the newly educated women are going to have an advantage over their grind-it-out male counterparts for new jobs.

When I lost my job, nearly two years ago, I thought ever-so-briefly about going back to school. Time off from career seemed attractive, as did the opportunity to formally upgrade my skills. It was a short consideration, though. I was stopped by two thoughts:

• Debt. Going to school would've cost a lot of money I didn't have. I couldn't see adding graduate-level debt to my financial burdens unless there was a likelihood of employment—improved employment, financially—on the other side of that degree.

• And I couldn't necessarily see that. A master's degree in journalism (for example) would've been useless—those degrees are mostly for people who spent their undergrad years majoring in philosophy, and who wanted to pick up some useful skills for the job market after all. Besides, job opportunities in the field aren't exactly expanding: I felt—and feel—my resumé is strong enough that I don't need to add an academic degree to bulk it up.

Anything else I would've felt suited for or interested in—English, American Studies, political science—all seemed to be on a path to academia. A doctorate would've been required. Assuming I even had the patience and time for that kind of work, the sad truth is that finding a job in academia after earning a doctorate is still terrifically difficult: It's like being drafted by the NBA after playing college ball—you can be very, very good at something and still not be good enough to make the pros.

The Times gets at this glancingly, in the last couple of paragraphs of the piece:

Those attending more expensive private schools, like Ms. Baker, will have an even tougher time guaranteeing that their educational investment pays off. Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.

“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”

I didn't have that faith. That made graduate school a losing proposition.

* I know: Technically the recession is over. It doesn't feel like it.

Why we shouldn't cut unemployment benefits right now

From EPI:

Things appear to be improving, but honestly: We're not anywhere close to having enough jobs for job-seekers. Cutting unemployment benefits right now could be a real disaster.

Ditch the payroll tax cut. Keep the unemployment benefits.

I'm already on record thinking the continued payroll tax holiday is a really bad idea. I think it undermines the long-term viability of Social Security, and more than a few critics agree with me. But I'm really, really against continuing the tax holiday if the price is cutting unemployment benefits to 3 million people.

As a macroeconomic matter, which is going to have a bigger impact on the economy? Lots of workers having a few extra bucks to spend? Or 3 million workers losing all the bucks they have to spend? I very much doubt the stimulative effect of the first outweighs the recessionary effects of the latter.

The payroll tax cut is a bad idea. Achieving it by cutting a bad deal is even worse.

Doesn't economic growth cause income inequality?

A commenter asks: "Can liberals and conservatives politely agree that the only time an economy can grow is when 'income inequality' is widening?"

Sure. Absolutely. In a hypothetical case where everybody's income was growing 10 percent a year, that 10 percent would add up to a lot more dollars for the rich guy than the poor guy. But a chart depicting their incomes would show more or less the same rate of growth rising in concert with each other, even as the gaps between the lines grew wider. That might eventually produce a problem—but then again, it might not.

That's not really the situation in the United States, though. Here's a chart from the CBO's October report about income inequality.

The 21st through 80th percentiles—essentially, the middle class—barely see their income edge up between 1979 and 2007. The Top 1 Percent? With a brief break for the post-9/11 recession, their income curves sharply, sharply up, diverging from the other lines pretty dramatically. It's true the economy was generally growing during these periods. But it's also true the gains from that growth went almost entirely to the top of the distribution curve. To me, that suggests something is out of whack.

A recession is a crappy way to reduce income inequality

Since I harp on income inequality a bit around here, it's important to take note of this New York Times story today:

The share of income received by the top 1 percent — that potent symbol of inequality — dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data. Within the group, average income fell to $957,000 in 2009 from $1.4 million in 2007.

If the Top 1 Percent saw its share of income reduced, that means other groups saw their share of income rise. Good news, right? Well, not really. The same recession that kicked the Top 1 Percent in the teeth did the same thing to everybody else. The median household income has actually dropped in recent years, thanks also in large part to the recession.

The problem with growing income inequality isn't merely that the rich are getting richer. That happens. The problem has been that the rich have gotten richer while everybody else has seen stagnating incomes to go along with increased productivity, and often needed to add a second person in the household working just to keep up.

There are some people who will probably be plenty happy to see the rich become less rich, but not me. I want to see working- and middle-class folks be able to get ahead. A recession-fueled flattening of the economic bell curve isn't really cause for celebration. And as the Times notes, it's probably short-lived anyway—history shows the Top 1 Percent will likely start to pull away again. It probably won't be because a rising tide is lifting all boats. The problem still exists.

What will the new poverty measures mean?

According to the New York Times, the poverty rate in America is about to fall—not because anybody's material circumstances have changed, but because the Census Bureau is adopting a "fuller" accounting of citizen well-being that looks beyond their cash income to also measure the government assistance they receive, as well as account for differences in costs-of-living for local areas. Here's the Times' chart giving an overview of the likely numerical changes:

I'm not sure how detailed the Census numbers will actually end up being: It would be nice if we could determine what percentage of the people who remain in poverty are employed, so that we have a sense of how many of these folks are "working poor"—that is, trying to provide for themselves, but unable to completely do so in the jobs they're able to obtain.

And as the Times notes: "Monday’s release are likely to offer fodder both to defenders of safety-net programs and fiscal conservatives who say the government already does much to temper hardship and needs to do no more." True. But more information will help—the debate should be based on detailed honest data, and not our worst ideological fears. (And that goes for both liberals and conservatives: If things are more hunky dory than we thought, we should focus our priorities and solutions accordingly.) On the surface, though, it looks like the liberals have something to crow about: The safety net really does save lots of people from poverty—which means our Great Recession hasn't been as devastatingly painful as it might otherwise have been.

That said, I'm not sure the Times frames the debate quite accurately: Conservatives aren't just arguing the government "needs to do no more"—many are arguing that government should do less, which seems to me like a recipe for disaster in this economy. Loosening the safety net probably won't grow the economy in any appreciable way, but it might devastate many lives. Republicans would help all of us if they focused less on contempt for the poor and a bit more on measures to give folks the way to earn their way up out of poverty—reducing the need for and strain on the safety net.

The poor are making poor choices. Right?

I want to read more deeply into this new paper about how debt is swamping the middle class—which makes the suggestion that the leverage problem is holding back America's economy. But in a quick overview, I couldn't help but notice this:

• The debt is highest among the middle class. Middle-income families before the crisis had a debt-to-income ratio of 155.4 percent in 2007, the last year for which data are available, for families with incomes between $62,000 and $100,000, which constituted the fourth quintile of income in our nation in 2007. This ratio is higher than for any other income group. Families in the top 20 percent of income (with incomes above $100,000) had a ratio of debt to income of 123.6 percent, and families in the third quintile (with incomes between $39,100 and $62,000) owed 130.7 percent of their income. Households in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution (with incomes below $39,100 in 2007) owed well below 100 percent of their income.

In the Facebook thread on my payday loans post yesterday, there was some discussion—typical in these circumstances—that the poor are poor, and dragged down by the burdens of debt, because of the poor choices they make. And in some cases, I'm sure that's true. But honestly: It appears that the low-income folks of America might be the only ones not taking on far more debt than they can possibly afford.

Solving the jobs crisis through despair

Some goodish news from the Fed...

The unemployment rate, it predicted, would still be at least 8.5 percent at the end of 2012, at least 7.8 percent at the end of 2013 and at least 6.8 percent at the end of 2014.

But at least that's a drop in unemployment, right?

Such reductions probably would come in part from people abandoning the search for work, rather than those finding new jobs.

 (Sigh.) Expect government officials to tout the falling unemployment rate even as other indicators—median wages, number of households in poverty—continue to stagnate or get worse.

We know how to help the economy: Aid distressed homeowners

I found this recent magazine article very interesting. Here are a couple of key paragraphs from it:

Underwater homeowners can’t refinance at today’s rock-bottom interest rates, because they’re considered bad credit risks. They can’t move to where jobs are more plentiful or the pay is better, because if they sell their home, they end up owing the banks a bundle. But if they lose their job, their wages drop. If they have a medical emergency, they may fall behind on their mortgage payments and be foreclosed upon. If that happens, they and their family can lose both their home and their credit rating.

We don’t need another stimulus to fix what ails the economy. We need to fix the housing market. And the way to do that is to allow a mortgage cramdown in the context of a personal bankruptcy. Put simply, someone who owes $450,000 on a house worth $300,000 isn’t going to be helped that much by a lower interest rate. He would be helped​—​as would the housing market and the larger economy​—​if the lender could be compelled in a bankruptcy proceeding to write down the loan amount to $300,000, which is all the lender would recover in any case were it to foreclose on and then auction off the property.

Oops! That's actually two different magazine articles—the first paragraph comes from Robert Reich's piece in November's American Prospect, a liberal magazine. The second—and this is kind of shocking—is from Ike Brannon, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard.

Reich and Brannon have slightly different approaches to the issue, but their bottom line is roughly the same: Distressed homeowners should have their mortgages written down to reflect the post-bubble value of their homes—so that those owners don't owe more than what the house is worth. Banks make no less money than they would if they were forced to foreclose, but owners gain back some of their money and freedom to move to a new job.

Free those underwater homeowners, and they might start buying stuff again. When people start buying stuff again, demand will rise and the people who make and sell stuff will likely start hiring more people to make and sell that stuff. The economy would get new life.

Smart people on the left and right can see this. Yet a serious effort to help these homeowners doesn't seem to be in the offing, either from the president, his GOP rivals for the office, or Congress. Why not?

Andrew Stiles is wrong: The problem with the economy is lack of demand.

At NRO, Andrew Stiles tries to prove the "regulatory uncertainty" canard is actually true:

A new Gallup survey asked small-business owners an open-ended question about what they viewed to be “the most important problem” facing the small-business community. It’s not “lack of demand,” as Democrats like to argue. In fact, 22 percent of respondents listed “complying with government regulations” as their top concern.

Here's the graphic that Stiles uses as supporting evidence:

Notice anything about items 2 and 3 on that list? "Consumer confidence" and "lack of consumer" demand" are parsed out as two different items, but the effect is the same: Consumers who aren't confident are consumers who aren't buying stuff—thus, they're not demanding the products that businesses provide. Add those two up, and 27 percent of small-business owners see some variation of the demand side as being the biggest problem with the economy.

Which is, ahem, more than say the same for "regulatory uncertainty."

Stiles is guilty of doing some cherry-picking, too, because later on in the same poll, business owners are asked what they need to see in 2012 in order for their business to thrive. Here's that graphic:

Check it out: The number of business owners who see regulations as the big problem suddenly drops by 10 percent when they have to name the thing that would make their business better.  Sales increases is No. 1. "Job creation" is No. 2—and I don't think it's a stretch to suspect that what business owners here want is for more of their customers to have jobs so they'll start buying stuff again.  Add in "improved economy" in at fourth place, and suddenly you have 37 percent of business owners suggesting that demand is what stands between them and success ... and just 12 percent citing government regulations.

Which makes intuitive sense. Businesses don't like dealing with paperwork and regulations, of course; no one does. But more business owners know that it's not the government that's holding them back right now. It's lack of demand. And we know why there's a lack of demand. Solve that, and we begin to move forward again.

The 'regulatory uncertainty' canard

Ben and I discuss whether regulatory uncertainty is holding back the U.S. economy in this week's column. My take:

Let's be honest: "Regulatory uncertainty" is a euphemism for "regulations." Businesses -- and their mostly Republican allies -- don't want them.

We have regulations for a reason. The Dodd-Frank law passed because the financial industry proved it couldn't police itself and nearly destroyed the American economy. Richard Nixon created OSHA at a time when 14,000 employees were dying in the workplace every year; that number dropped 60 percent over the next 30 years. Left to their own devices, businesses often cut corners, resulting in financial and even physical harm to the rest of us.

Overregulation can stifle the economy. The Obama administration recognizes this -- and in August announced a reform effort to reduce regulatory burdens on business by $10 billion a year, mostly by streamlining required health, labor and tax paperwork. Obama even alienated environmentalist supporters this fall by delaying new EPA ozone standards to save jobs.

The problem isn't regulatory uncertainty. The Economic Policy Institute in September reported that weekly hours for still-employed workers are still down from their last high in August 2007.

If businesses wanted to produce more widgets --but wanted to avoid the federal paperwork that goes with hiring more widget-making workers -- they'd increase the number of hours their existing employees are working. They aren't. That suggests that the problem is demand: Americans aren't buying stuff.

Why? They're digging themselves out of debt -- often in the form of mortgages that are now worth more than the houses those mortgages bought. Until that issue is adequately addressed, or until those mortgages are finally paid off over the next 30 years, America will continue to have a problem with demand.

"Regulatory uncertainty" offers a handy political club to use against Obama, though. The GOP, it seems, would rather win the presidential campaign with stale untruths rather than address our real problems.

Mark Boyle's World Without Money

There's something initally Waldenesque and seductive about Mark Boyle's vision of a world without money, but I'm not sure that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Boyle decided to test himself by living for a year without cash, and decided to keep on keepin' on after the year came and went.

What makes the whole endeavour seem a bit of a swindle, frankly, is that while he didn't himself use cash, his existence is made very possible by piggybacking off a world that does, in fact, use money as a way to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

Boyle lives in rural England in a trailer he spotted on Freecycle.org. He feeds himself by growing everything from barley to potatoes, foraging wild edibles like berries and nettles, and occasionally dumpster-diving for luxuries like margarine and bread. He cooks with a wood stove fashioned from large restaurant olive cans; brushes his teeth with his own mixture of cuttlefish bones and fennel seed; and makes paper and ink from mushrooms. He barters labor for rent, Internet service, and whatever else he can't find, grow, or make.

I don't begrudge anybody who wants to escape the rat race, and more power to Boyle for making it happen for himself. But let him try his experiment in some part of the world where the people and the land are poor -- something actually closer to the moneyless society he favors. Guess I'm dubious that such an experiment would be successful; it's cash-based commerce that made Boyle's survival possible.

And it seems plain that, even allowing for the piggybacking on the existing cash economy, Boyle is still very much engaged in acts of commerce. I don't think he'd deny that; he apparently was an economics student at one point. But money is just a way of making the whole business of commerce more efficient. What's wrong with that?

Maybe this:

We couldn't move from what we are today to—even in 10 years' time—living completely moneyless. It's about moving away from complete dependency on money, which is a very insecure position to be in, anyway. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. As more and more people move away from one economic model to another economic model, then the market reacts to that in certain ways and people produce less. It's more about slow evolutionary process than a revolutionary process. And that's quite key to the whole thing. Our whole agricultural system is based on fossil fuels. Each gallon of fossil fuel is the same as 40 man-hours per week. That's a lot of extra man hours. And so if we're going to get back to a way of agriculture that doesn't involve oil, then people are going to have to transition away from some of the jobs that aren't necessary.

The problem, if I'm reading correctly, is that money is efficient. It makes it possible (in a roundabout way) accomplish a whole workweek's worth of tasks in the span of minutes. Sounds good, but as Boyle points out, that has some ripple effects that maybe aren't good for the environment.

Understood. And I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Boyle, however, is unlikely to convince many people that they should return to the Age of Bartering, where existence becomes more difficult and work more arduous. Who wants to live that way? Ascetics like Mark Boyle, I suppose. But environmentalists are never going to win the big fights if the rest of us think that Mark Boyle's vision is the one the rest of us should live by. There's a lot about the modern world to like. We just need to make it work better.

Tom Corbett still really thinks that unemployed people are lazy

Looks like Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett has decided to double-down on the "unemployed people are lazy" theme in fairly cowardly fashion:

Speaking to reporters after a campaign stop in Delaware County, the Republican nominee for governor noted that newspapers across the state are carrying line after line of help-wanted ads.

"Are there jobs out there? . . . How would you interpret that?" he asked.

Corbett reported seeing one newspaper page that he said promised thousands of jobs listings in print and online.

"You guys asked me if there are jobs out there," he said to a pair of reporters. "If I am a common citizen, the average citizen, and I look at a newspaper . . . and I see jobs - what's the answer to that question."

Asked if he was implying that the unemployed were not taking advantage of these listings, he said no-adamantly no-he wasn't saying that.

But he clearly is saying that. And he's being a punk by not owning up to the clear implications of his statement.

Now: Corbett has spent his career bouncing in and out of employment by the state of Pennsylvania; he's an attorney by profession, so I'm going to hazard a guess that he's rarely, if ever, had to seek a job by going through the classifieds of his local paper. It's not like turning on a water faucet -- hey, there's water! It's a more difficult and tedious process than that: You look for jobs that seem to match your skills and experience -- and, if you're lucky, your interests -- and then you further weigh if the jobs in question can provide enough income to sustain you and your family.

By the time you've gone through that process, there are -- for many people -- rather fewer than "thousands" of jobs available.

Corbett, like many other people, ignore the math: Nationwide right now, there are five job seekers for every job opening. Even if there are thousands of classified ads, there are tens of thousands of people who need jobs. Corbett's a smart guy with lots of information resources at his disposal; he could know this if he wanted to. Maybe he does. But he's choosing to judge the state of the Pennsylvania economy based on anecdotal evidence.

There is a long tradition, of course, of Republicans stirring popular anger among the "haves" against the "have nots." Does the phrase "welfare queens" ring any bells? Right now, there are more have-nots than there've been for a long time -- and their ranks include a lot more of the "haves" than there used to be. The GOP is doubling down on its rhetoric, though. And it makes you wonder: Who will they turn to for votes when there are more have-nots than haves?

Victor Davis Hanson: Conservatives are destroying capitalism

National Review's Victor Davis Hanson reports his frustration with a business-owning friend who won't buy equipment or expand his business. It deserves quoting at length:

I asked a businessman two weeks ago why he said that he was neither hiring nor buying new equipment. He started in on “rising taxes.”

“But wait,” I interrupted. I pointed out that income-tax hikes haven’t taken effect. The old FICA income caps are also still applicable. Health-care surcharges haven’t hit us yet.

He countered with “regulations” and “bailouts.” I said, “Come on, get specific.” He offered up “cap and trade” and “the Chrysler creditors.” I parried with more demands that he tell me exactly how the federal government has suddenly curbed his profit margins, or how his electric bill had gone up since January 2009, or whether he had lost money on any investment because the government had violated a contract.

Exasperated, he talked now instead of more cosmic issues — the astronomical borrowing, the staggering national debt, and the new protectionism. I pressed again, “But aren’t interest rates historically low? Inflation is almost non-existent, isn’t it? New products are still comparatively cheap? Rents and new business property are at bargain-basement prices?”

This give-and-take went on for ten minutes; but you get the picture. Private enterprise is wary, hesitant, even frightened, but nevertheless hard pressed to demonstrate in concrete fashion how Obama has quite ruined them in just 18 months.

So why are a lot of cash-solvent financial firms, banks, and manufacturing companies not hiring, not expanding, and not buying new operating equipment as they did in past bottoming-out recessions?

In a word, fear. Remember that capitalism is in large part psychologically driven. Confidence, optimism, and a sense of calm about the future foster risk and investment, while worry, pessimism, and a sense of foreboding ensure timidity and stasis.

Barack Obama — who is mostly a creature of the university and the dependable government payroll — does not seem to grasp that fact.

Hanson goes on to say that Obama has created a climate of fear through the hiring of appointees -- like Van Jones -- with radical pasts, or through insufficient worship of free markets. But if there really is a climate of fear in the business community, who really has created it?

Conservatives, that's who.

They've devoted considerable time and resources to proclaiming the Obama Administration an era of "socialism" and "tyranny" -- even though, as Hanson admits, the actual rules and taxes on business right now should be encouraging growth and expansion. The country has been force-fed a diet of Glenn Beck and Tea Parties over the last 18 months, all of them making the case against Democratic policies in the most dire terms possible. Is it any wonder that some people actually take it seriously?

I don't think Victor Davis Hanson or other conservatives should refrain from criticizing Obama in order to revive the economy. But I do think a constant stream of hyperbole can have consequences. Hanson's column, though, shows how Republicans all-too-easily win: They get to create a climate of fear -- and blame it on the victim. It's cynical stuff, and in this case -- if Hanson is to be believed -- it has demonstrable harm.