By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 19, 2012
It was arguably Ronald Reagan's favorite joke. In one
version, two kids -- one an optimist, the other a pessimist -- rush downstairs
on Christmas morning. The pessimistic kid gets a new bike and weeps that he'll
probably break it soon. The optimistic kid is presented with an enormous pile
of manure and squeals with delight: "There's got to be a pony in here
somewhere!"
In fact, the joke took on a life of its own in the Reagan
White House. Whenever bad news came in, someone would remark, "There's got
to be a pony in there somewhere."
Barack Obama, who always wanted to be a liberal version
of Ronald Reagan, has his own version of the joke. It's not particularly funny,
alas. In Obama's telling, the kid runs downstairs, sees a huge pile of manure
and yells, "Yay! Manure! Who needs a pony!"
On the stump and in the recent debates, the president has
been taking credit for things that are symptoms of a bad economy and touting
them as major accomplishments.
Obama boasts that illegal immigration is the lowest it's
been in decades, but he leaves out that, in the words of the Associated Press,
"Much of the drop in illegal immigrants is due to the persistently weak
U.S. economy, which has shrunk construction and service-sector jobs attractive
to Mexican workers following the housing bust." Indeed, Census data shows
that many Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, are heading home because they
think the opportunities will be better south of the border.
Obama boasted at the Hofstra debate Wednesday night that
his policies "lowered our oil imports to the lowest levels in 16
years." And it's true they're the lowest in 16 years.
One reason for that is an explosion in domestic oil
production on private lands thanks to the technological breakthrough of
hydraulic "fracking," an industry the Obama administration has been
slowing down with increased regulations. This is the biggest driver of the
decline in net oil imports, and President Obama has no business taking credit
for it. Fossil fuel production on federal lands, notes economist Mark Perry,
hit a nine-year low in 2011, and crude oil production dropped 14 percent on
federal lands -- the biggest decrease in a decade.
And, to be fair, another reason for the decline is the
longstanding trend of increasing energy-efficiency standards, which Obama
supports. Energy expert Jeff Miller writes at the Energy Collective website,
that a whopping 1 percent of the total reduction in petroleum consumption can
be chalked up to such measures. (Increased efficiency standards for cars, a
frequent talking point for Obama, accounts for precisely 0 percent of the
decline, according to Miller).
And then, of course, there's the unemployment rate. When
the statistically odd drop in the unemployment rate for September was announced
earlier this month, the president raced around the country celebrating the fact
that we'd finally dropped below 8 percent unemployment. And you can hardly
blame him.
But the reality is that the unemployment rate is only as
"low" as it is because millions of Americans have given up looking
for work. If you give up looking for work, you're no longer counted as part of
the labor market. In other words, if everyone just gave up hope of finding a
job, the unemployment rate would be zero!
The actual state of the labor market is miserable. More
than 12 million Americans are out of work, and that number becomes 23 million
if you include people who've stopped looking or can't find full-time work. The
labor participation rate is the lowest it's been since the recession of 1981.
A few months ago, I wrote a column on how there were some
silver linings to the dark cloud of a lousy economy, on the grounds that bad
times often encourage good habits. Americans have been paying down their debts,
building up their savings and having their tattoos removed -- all thanks in
part to the bad economy and the financial crisis of 2008.
But there's something distinctly creepy about looking at
the symptoms of a lousy economy and preening how you meant to do that. It makes
you wonder if someone gave Obama a pony he'd shout with glee: "Yay! There
must be some manure in here somewhere!"
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