By Charles C. W.
Cooke
Friday, May 07,
2021
The lesson of today’s jobs
report is that President Biden should be spending less time fantasizing
about becoming Franklin Roosevelt, and more time trying to avoid becoming
Herbert Hoover.
It all happened so fast. At 8 a.m., CNN
was echoing the likes of Warren Buffett, Larry Summers, and Janet Yellen
in sounding the
alarm about inflation. By 8.30 a.m.,
it had broken away to report the news that the April jobs report was an
unmitigated disaster. The consensus had been that the data would show a million
new jobs; the real number was less than a quarter of that.
That, Axios noted, represented “the biggest miss, relative to
expectations, in the history of the payrolls report.”
A lot of people said they were “shocked.”
But why, exactly? Did they believe that Joe Biden had rendered gravity
optional? This is what you get when you pay people not to work. It’s what you
get when you send check after check after check to people who, were they
permitted to, would be perfectly capable of regaining employment. It’s what you
get when you allow the teachers’ unions to shut down the schools ad
nauseam, and put working parents in a long-term bind. There is nothing
magical about 2021, or about Joe Biden, or about this set of legislators and
appointees and special interests. The same rules apply to them that applied to
their predecessors. You can’t spend what you don’t have. You can’t tax and
spend your way to prosperity. And human beings cannot be programmed out of
responding to clear
incentives. Call your plans whatever you want —
Build Back Better, Modern Monetary Theory, Fairness, the Left-Handed Teacup
Initiative — it doesn’t matter. Reality doesn’t care about branding.
The pigheadedness is stunning. The
Treasury is spending twice what it’s taking in, we have a national debt that has eclipsed
annual GDP for the first time since World War II, and, despite the abundance of
recovered jobs, we are having a real problem getting people into them. So, of course, the Democratic-led
government in Washington has decided to send out a new round of stimulus checks
and to extend the subsidies that have encouraged workers to sit at home — a
witches’ brew of stupidity that, taken together, amounts to the American people
piling on yet more debt for the privilege of stopping an
economic recovery.
Some of the governors who live closer to
reality — among them Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Greg Gianforte of
Montana, and Ron DeSantis of Florida — have begun limiting the damage by
reducing the incentives for workers to stay at home. In Montana and South
Carolina, unemployment benefits are being cut; in Florida, they are being
restricted to those who are actually looking for work. Before long, more will
presumably follow. But the states can’t fix this on their own. They are going
to need Washington to just stop. It is hard for politicians to
grasp, but sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing at all. And,
after the flurry of action and profligacy that has marked the last year, it is
high time for a salutary pause.
Will we get one? It doesn’t look like it,
no. The Democrats have been warned that overextending support could damage the
labor market, and they have been warned that pumping trillions of dollars into
an expanding economy without reference to need, prudence, or the output gap would risk an inflation spiral, and yet, as the Washington
Post reports, the White House seems to
believe that today’s jobs report
“illustrates the importance of providing robust unemployment support with
millions of Americans still out of work” while Nancy Pelosi thinks that “the
evidence is clear that the economy demands urgent action.” Unless that
“urgent action” involves immediately turning off the taps, canceling both of
President Biden’s ridiculous spending packages, and encouraging teachers and
everyone else to get the hell back to work, it will represent precisely the
wrong course. It may not be as true as it once was that politics is “the
economy, stupid,” but voters will still exact their revenge for
government-engineered malaise — and, unless they elect to dramatically shift
course, that is exactly what the Democratic Party is inviting.
No comments:
Post a Comment