America’s Creeping New Normalcy

[WestVirginiaRebel]

National Review:

The Japanese have said “Enough.” After a generation of stagnation, they’ve chosen an all-of-the-above policy to boost economic growth. The nation’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is promising a “three arrows” strategy: bold monetary easing, increased public-works spending, and structural changes, such as regulatory reform. He’s throwing the ramen against the shoji and hoping something will stick. Some of those ideas are good ones, some probably aren’t. But it’s clear that Tokyo’s priority is growth, growth, growth. Time to get Nippon moving again.

Nations probably never choose decline, at least not consciously. More likely they become victims of a creeping normalcy. Things once objectionable can become passively acceptable if they happen slowly, incrementally: the boiling-frog syndrome. Decline just sort of happens, year by year, decade by decade, one “meh” economic report at a time.

Last Thursday the U.S. Commerce Department reported that fourth-quarter GDP fell at a 0.1 percent annual rate. For the year, the U.S. economy grew a meager 2.2 percent. That’s a bit better than 2011, but about a percentage point less than what most economists think is the economy’s current potential. Even worse, the first few recovery years after deep downturn typically exhibit abnormally strong catch-up growth. But that’s not happening post–Great Recession. White House spokesman Jay Carney conceded the obvious, that the negative quarterly report was “not good news,” and then blamed congressional Republicans for creating a “headwind” of political uncertainty.

The next day the Labor Department reported the unemployment rate ticking up to 7.9 percent in January as the economy added 157,000 net new jobs. At that rate of job creation, with all else equal, the economy wouldn’t return to 4.4 percent unemployment — the George W. Bush administration’s low point — for another eight years. Oh, and that’s assuming no recessions between now and 2021. White House economist Alan Krueger said the report provided “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

It must be terribly inconvenient for the Obama White House to be reminded every quarter and every month that the $800 billion stimulus — and subsequent mini-stimuli — failed to ignite the boom Obama economists repeatedly predicted through the first term. The president has so many higher priorities, after all: immigration reform, gun control, climate change, income inequality. Stuff with which to build a legacy.

Faster growth and faster job creation apparently don’t make the cut. A president deeply concerned about growth would perhaps have followed a few more of the recommendations of his own Jobs and Competitiveness Council before letting it expire, as Obama did last week. Sure, Obama acted on agenda items that comfortably synced with his ideology, like retrofitting government buildings for energy efficiency. But he ignored commonsense ideas that didn’t mesh, such as expanding domestic oil and gas drilling and revamping the corporate tax code. More high-skill immigration? Sorry, it will have to wait for comprehensive immigration reform.

________

 

The era of perpetual malaise.

[Valin]

 

Life After Blue: The Middle Class Will Beat The Seven Trolls

Walter Russell Mead

 

 

(Snip)

These problems are real and they are serious; people are not wrong to worry. But attempts to perpetuate the blue model don’t help. Many of the seven trolls are the results of the high cost blue model approach to governance, the health system and higher education, and in any case the forces ripping the blue model apart are too strong and too deeply rooted in the way our economy works to be stopped.

 

Yet if the worries are real, the pessimism is excessive. The information revolution destroys jobs, but it also creates them, and we are already in the early stages of a jobs explosion. And as it proceeds, the information revolution is likely to propel the rise of a middle class that is more productive, better educated, more autonomous and more interested in and capable of civic leadership than the Fordist middle class of the late industrial age.

 

The new jobs will be different from the old jobs, and this is one of the reasons many fear the economic transition we’re in. There are a lot of people on both the right and the left who think that in a country that doesn’t “make stuff” there won’t be any jobs. If it isn’t a widget that you can grab in your hand and do something with, it isn’t real. This is nonsense. Two hundred years ago people thought that the only real jobs involved growing food, and that people who made non-necessary consumer goods were engaged in a socially parasitic activity. Nobody in 1800 could have imagined the plethora of manufactured goods that gave people jobs once the industrial revolution took hold: mass produced Elvis on velvet portraits? Fuzzy dice to hang from car mirrors?

(Snip)

 

 

Unfortunately the Left apparently refuses to adapt to the changes going on. They keep using the old ways (Progressism) of addressing the new world.

Unfortunately, in that so many people still buy into their answers.