Jobs Creation Chart

There's a "Jobs Creation" chart circulating around Facebook, amongst Obama re-election advocates, that shows that the rate of negative job creation (i.e. the rate at which jobs were being lost) started declining in May 2009 --four months after Obama's inauguration, and reached zero in early 2010, months before Republican gains in the House in that Tea Party dominated campaign.

Further, the chart shows that since then the jobs-creation rate has been positive, though rather slow.

This is presented as a triumph for Obama, who is portrayed with a cartoonist speech bubble above his head saying to Bonior, "You're welcome. Now can you just help a brother out once in a while?"

There are problems with that, as an argument in favor of preserving the Obama presidency. First, it ignores the impact of Fed policy. Everything that has happened by way of jobs creation (and it hasn't been much) is rather readily understood as the natural stimulative consequence of all the money creation, the "quantitative easing," we've seen from Bernanke.

Second, that's not a good thing! Loose monetary policy is the problem not the solution. Greenspan rescued us from the (relatively mild) recession of 2000-2002 precisely by cheapening the US dollar. That created a few good years, and a bigger bust when the dancing inevitably stopped.

We are in the position of a severe alcoholic who starts every day with a drink, because he's got a splitting headache and he needs a hair of the dog that bit him.  The problem of course is that this just leads into another day, another dog, another headache, and the need for another such hair. Further, to cycle isn't going sideways. The cycle is heading downward, to a fatal car crash or cirhosis.

Third, the administration's "stimulus" packages have stimulated nothing.  How can I be sure of this?  Because in their candid moments, high officials thereof say as much. Including the highest of them. In an interview with The New York Times in October 2010, the President said, "there's no such thing as a shovel-ready project."

THAT we can believe. The record of government spending on "infrastructure" in the hope of getting money circulating and good times rolling is pretty clear. When projects are made ready, they amount to "bridges to nowhere." There are good reasons why the private sector doesn't build such bridges.

Which "brother" will I most want to "help out"? Whichever one realizes that truth and significance of a quote often attributed to one of the Rothschild's: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws."  The enemies of a country could do no better job of undermining ourselves than we have done wirth decades of increasingly funny money.