The Bowyer Briefing

Forget the excuses about today still weak jobs report. It’s not a snow problem. You have to be unemployed for the entire pay period to count as unemployed. If you can’t get to work for a week or so, it just shows up in fewer hours worked, not as fewere employed persons. Bad policy is making the most jobless recovery of the post war era.

Unemployment stayed at 9.7%. Payrolls contracted by another 36,000. The broadest measure “U-6″ unemployment rose to almost 17%. Long-term (4+ months) unemployed now up to almost 60% of total. High School dropout unemployment rate, almost 16%. Black youth unemployment rate 42%! Jobless recovery hurting people workforce from the bottom up.

Greece is in some way the founding nation of Europe, the names itself, Europa, is a Greek one. Hellenic society has come full circle, for Plato’s humanistic rationalism to economic and demographic collapse, as rationalism always does.

Buffett’s other fascinating comment to CNBC revealed the roots of demand-side economics in deception. He said that they way to get people spending is to ‘give everyone a million dollars’ but since ‘the money won’t be worth anything’ it would only work if ‘everybody thought he was the only one getting the money’. In other words make people feel richer than they really are, so that they’ll spend.

Buffett told CNBC this week that the way to get the economy going again is to get people spending more. Isn’t this the guy who under Bush said that if we didn’t start becoming a nation of savers we would become a “sharecroppers society” dependent upon the thrifty masses of the world? The incoherence of Keynesiansim always shocks me. Do they want us to save, or to spend? Even they don’t know.

Avatar is the most lavish presentation of Lenin’s theory of the exploitation phase of capitalism every produced. Marx said that the free economies would collapse into poverty and revolution. When they didn’t Lenin invented ‘imperalist exploitation’, the idea that we survive by stealing from the third world. Problem is the one’s that have dealt with us the longest prosper the most.

Just saw the first Percy Jackson movie with Susan and some of the kids. We’re fans of the books. Problem is the film took the best stuff out, the affirmation of monotheism, the defense of western civlization with the US at its center, and most of the primer on Greek mythology…. But don’t worry, they replaced it cleavage and sex humor.

The Hellenic debt crisis is a con of a type that we’ve seen in municipal politics here state-side. Big city gives unions everything they want, default looms, city’s warned, city keeps spending, city gets bailed out. Insert ‘auto company’ for ‘city’ and you get last year’s crisis. Insert ‘nation state’ for ‘city’ and you’re looking at this years crises.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3cfeab9e-1813-11df-91d2-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

I’ve been warning you since last Summer that as Obama’s agenda gets stuck in the legislative branch, he would shift to an executive branch strategy, by passing the congress. That, unfortunately, seems to be happening now, according to the New York Times, which doesn’t seem to be too worried about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/us/politics/13obama.html

Hat Tip Crane Durham. Enjoy.

http://www.pjtv.com/v/3070