Well, if you look at political office as anything other than providing a service to your constituents than you are doing it wrong. When concern for career trumps concern for economic reality, there is a huge disconnect imho. Ron Paul never had this problem it would seem. And now, marketing...Keynesian style:
No doubt that's the theory behind giving them the perks, so that they are free to serve others instead of themselves. But, enter lobbyists.
There is something fundamentally wrong in the federal government sending taxpayer dollars to states and localities to hire local government workers. Why even have states and cities? Just let congress run it all. What happens is the same thing that so infuriated people in the mortgage crisis. States that live within their means and do not run up unsustainable public sector expenses are expected to subsidize those like California which have sold out to govenment unions. Hiring teachers, police, firemen et al is a local responsibility. If local governments can no longer afford union contracts they agreed to in the past, there are legal remedies for that. Just don't expect me to pay for it, any more than I expect to chip in for my neighbor's mortgage.
I'll agree that "just fine" is an overstatement (unless he meant only in comparison to public sector employment, the two are in fact headed in opposite directions), but the news from many places does indicate modest improvement in the private sector. Yes, of course we'd like it to be stronger.
I'm of the strong opinion that we just finished the "corrective wave" (2009-2011) of this ongoing depression. I noticed a string of smaller retail like businesses opening within the past six months. Commercial storefronts that basically went vacant from late 2007-08 until recently. I view it as a contrary signal, i.e. people finally felt enough confidence to invest in a start-up based on a slew of temporary liquidity that drove this market off its lows and created a brief uptick in consumer confidence. The problem is that the structural weakness is still present, nothing materially has improved. The states are still facing a tsunami of financial problems, the consumer is still getting killed by a combination of higher costs and lowered real estate values, ZIRP, etc...We've sacrificed everything to re-capitalize the banks and yet it still probably won't be enough. In the interim, we've torpedo'ed this economy for probably decades. Just wait to see what type of "earnings" whether accounting gimmicks or not, we will see once the halcyon effect of QE and the other backstop programs wears off.
I stopped believing earnings when Bush granted the intelligence czar the power to allow companies to suspend standard accounting practices, in the name of national security: ---- President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations. Notice of the development came in a brief entry in the Federal Register, dated May 5, 2006, that was opaque to the untrained eye. Unbeknownst to almost all of Washington and the financial world, Bush and every other President since Jimmy Carter have had the authority to exempt companies working on certain top-secret defense projects from portions of the 1934 Securities Exchange Act. Administration officials told BusinessWeek that they believe this is the first time a President has ever delegated the authority to someone outside the Oval Office. It couldn't be immediately determined whether any company has received a waiver under this provision. William McLucas, the Securities & Exchange Commission's former enforcement chief, suggested that the ability to conceal financial information in the name of national security could lead some companies "to play fast and loose with their numbers." McLucas, a partner at the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr in Washington, added: "It could be that you have a bunch of books and records out there that no one knows about." http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may2006/nf20060523_2210.htm
Harry Reid carries a heavy burden these days, blocking and tackling for an unpopular President's unpopular agenda while trying to hold onto a Senate majority in 2012. So perhaps we should be forgiving when the Majority Leader says what he did yesterday on the Senate floor: "It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about." Then again, he really said that. Mr. Reid was trying to defend a new Democratic proposal to spend another $35 billion that the government doesn't have to help states hire teachers and other public workers. He seems to be under the impression that private job creation is doing well, and that happy days would be here again if we could only gin up more government jobs. So let's go to the videotape. According to the White House budget office, the federal executive branch had 1.875 million civilian full-time equivalent employees when the financial crisis hit in 2008. Two years later, that number had risen by 253,000 jobs to 2.128 million, a 13.5% increase. The budget office predicted earlier this year that the number would fall slightly to 2.101 million in fiscal 2011, which ended on September 30, but then rise again in 2012 to 2.116 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September that overall federal government employment had fallen by 30,000 jobs from September 2010, but that's after the rapid rise under President Obama. There's been no jobs recession in the Beltway. So perhaps Mr. Reid is referring to state and local government jobs? Well, the Labor Department report for September shows that state governments have cut payrolls by all of 49,000 since September 2010, to 5.089 million. Local governments have reduced employment at a somewhat faster paceâby 210,000 workers in the last year, to 14.076 million. The pace of these state and local cuts have picked up this year, as the federal stimulus spending has declined. But Democrats promised in 2009 that the stimulus would be temporaryâto help states get through the recession. State and local governments now have no choice but to cut workers, as they adjust to a new and reduced level of tax revenue thanks to the slow economic recovery. As for the private jobs market, it's hard to see what Mr. Reid could possibly mean when he says it is "doing just fine." Private nonfarm employers added only 137,000 new jobs in September and 352,000 in the last three months. That's why the overall jobless rate remains an unprecedented 9.1% two years into an ostensible economic recovery. Going back to 2008, the Labor Department reported 111.822 million employed private workers at the end of 2008. The number plunged during the recession, and as of September of this year overall private employment had climbed back to 109.349 million. But that's still some 2.5 million fewer jobs than in 2008. If this is doing fine, we'd hate to see Mr. Reid's definition of lousy. What these numbers show is that, contrary to Mr. Reid, the real U.S. jobs problem continues to be in the private economy. If private employers were hiring at the pace they normally do in an economic recovery, we might be doing fine. In any case, Mr. Reid's latest stimulus proposal isn't intended to help private employers. Its goal is to help state and local government workers, especially teachers, most of whom are unionized and pay dues that can finance Democratic Senate campaigns. The $35 billion would operate as a campaign-finance pass-through account, from Senate Democrats to unions and back to Senate Democrats. Mr. Reid knows his proposal can't pass the House, and perhaps not even the Senate, so his real agenda is to stage a vote that Republicans will oppose so President Obama can claim on the stump that Democrats are doing something to help create jobs and that Republicans stopped them. Instead, Mr. Reid's comments yesterday reveal that he and his fellow Democrats inhabit an economic universe in which government is the main engine of job creation. That's how you get a jobs crisis. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204485304576641324142710998.html?mod=googlenews_wsj