Mountain Views News          Saturday, June 16, 2012

15

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday June 16, 2012

HOWARD Hays As I See It

BI-PARTISANSHIP AIN’T WHAT 
IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE

 
Listening to President Obama’s speech 
today, it seems his new campaign strategy is 
to mimic Truman and run against the “do-
nothing congress”. This of course assumes 
that the Congress isn’t doing anything (hence 
they’re doing nothing), but more importantly 
that when they do something it’s actually a 
good thing. History pretty clearly tells us 
that this isn’t necessarily true.

 The opposite of a “do-nothing” Congress 
is bi-partisan cooperation in which lots gets 
done. But the record pretty clearly shows 
that what Congress does matters more than 
anything else. This should seem like a pretty 
obvious statement. If Congress and the 
President pass a bad law, then bad things 
come from bi-partisanship. On the other 
hand, if Congress and the President pass 
a good law, then good things happen. It’s 
what’s done that matters.

 When it comes to the state of our 
economy the principal above couldn’t be 
more true. President Reagan operated 
with a Democratic Congress to pass one 
the greatest tax reductions in our country’s 
history, and the resulting boom repaired the 
years of misery under Carter. Many readers 
may not remember the “misery index”, but it 
was the combination of the inflation index 
and the unemployment index. Yes, both 
were occurring at the same time – contrary 
to what Keynesian economists said was 
possible – and many media and political 
elites had written America off; our best days 
were supposedly behind us. Reagan offered 
a great solution, got cooperation from 
across the aisle, and America recovered and 
achieved new heights. 

 Bill Clinton ran into a bit of trouble with 
Americans when he had a Congress of his 
choosing – heavily Democratic. They didn’t 
do such a good job, and the Americans took 
the opportunity of the mid-term elections 
to give Republicans control of the Congress 
for the first time in about 40 years. Clinton 
correctly read the voters’ message and began 
to work with the Congress to implement 
real spending restraint, tax reductions, and 
welfare reform. The result was another 
economic boom and several years of Federal 
surpluses. Seems almost impossible to 
conceive of that now. They are possible, but 
only when economic policy moves in the 
right direction.

 President 
George 
W. Bush 
decided 
he would 
be more 
cooperative 
with his 
Congress 
in the last 
two years 
of his second term. That proved to be a big 
mistake. Rather than move Congress to his 
side of the political debate, he simply joined 
the Democrats on their side. This is bi-
partisanship, but it wasn’t a pretty thing. We 
got a trillion dollar prescription drug benefit, 
abuse at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 
resulting in the mortgage meltdown of the 
economy, and a $700 billion TARP bailout, 
among other spending orgies. The economy 
tanked.

 President Obama came into office with 
a heavily sympathetic Congress and doubled 
down on the TARP program, government 
spending, and pressed Obamacare on the 
nation. Congress cooperated right up to the 
point of creating the largest deficits we’ve 
ever seen and the largest federal debt we’ve 
ever carried. The economy almost imploded.

 In concept, cooperation seems like a 
good thing. If we can all just get along, 
there’s a lot less confrontation in the air, and 
humans tend to feel good about that. But 
cooperation is only a means to an end. The 
result still has to be good, or the cooperation 
is not beneficial at all. In fact, it can cause 
some pretty significant problems. Let’s all 
hope that when Congress and the President 
(Obama or Romney) finally do something in 
2013, they do the right thing, and we don’t 
all just hold hands in bi-partisan fashion and 
jump off the fiscal cliff together. 

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a 
freelance writer and has spoken to several 
civic and religious organizations on cultural 
and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles 
area with his wife and 3 children and is active 
in the community. He can be reached at 
gregwelborn@earthlink.net.

 “There isn’t a journalist in 
the country who doesn’t know 
what Obama meant.”

 - Howard Kurtz on CNN’s 
“Reliable Sources”

 Yeah, we know – President 
Obama was speaking of private 
sector job growth relative to 
the public sector when he said, 
“The private sector is doing fine.” Within minutes 
of the president’s press conference, though, the 
twitter-sphere was buzzing (tweeting?) with a 
new “gotcha!” for Republican operatives.

 That very afternoon, Mitt Romney was asking, 
“Is he really that out of touch?” (The same Mitt 
Romney who a few weeks earlier told teachers 
at an inner-city Philadelphia school of a study 
showing class size doesn’t matter, and of the 
benefits of two-parent households.)

 Chances are there will be a new “gotcha!” 
dominating coverage by the time this column 
appears, but Romney promises the president’s 
remark will “go down in history”.

 The president later clarified he was referring 
to the history of creating “3 million jobs over the 
last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone.” 
Romney’s own history shows Massachusetts 
ranking 47th out of 50 states in job creation 
during his governorship. 

 Bloomberg news went beyond the history of 
the two candidates and looked at private sector 
job creation over the past fifty years. That 
history shows that since the Inauguration of JFK, 
Republicans have been in office 28 years vs. 23 
years for the Democrats. According to the Labor 
Department, 42 million private sector jobs were 
added during those 23 years under Democrats, 
vs. 14 million during 28 years under Republicans. 

 On a monthly basis, Bill Clinton comes in first, 
averaging 217,000 private sector jobs created per 
month during his two terms. Jimmy Carter is 
second at 188,000, with Ronald Reagan third at 
153,000. During the eight years under George 
W. Bush, an average 6,700 private sector jobs 
were lost each month. (Public sector job growth 
has been about even – with an average 22,000 a 
month increase under Democrats, and 21,000 
under Republicans.) 

 130,000 private sector jobs were created in 
April, surpassing the number created the month 
Obama took office. Total job growth, however, 
is slightly less – as the public sector shed over 
600,000 jobs since the beginning of his term. At 
the state level, government employment was cut 
1.2% in 2011 – the largest cut since they started 
keeping track in 1955. 

 Cutting public employment while coming 
out of a recession is unprecedented in recent 
history; with Presidents Reagan, H.W. Bush and 
Clinton all seeing growth in government hiring 
in recovering from the 1981, 1990 and 2001 
recessions.

 Under George W. Bush, the number of public 
sector jobs had increased by 3.7% at this point 
in his presidency. If public sector employment 
grew at the same rate under President Obama 
as it did under his predecessor, there’d be an 
additional 1.4 million Americans working, and 
the unemployment rate would be lower by a full 
percentage point.

 Economist Paul Krugman took the comparison 
back further; “If it weren’t for this destructive 
fiscal austerity, our unemployment rate would 
almost certainly be lower now than it was at a 
comparable stage of the ‘Morning in America’ 
recovery during the Reagan era.” Under Ronald 
Reagan, over twice as many government jobs 
were added (1.4 million) as have been cut under 
President Obama. There was the “stimulus” of 
a $415 billion increase in government spending 
on goods and services during the Reagan years, 
compared to a $114 billion cut in such spending 
over the last two years, as President Obama’s 
stimulus program wound down.

 Aside from employment, there are other signs 
“the private sector is doing fine.” According 
to the U.S. Commerce Department, after-tax 
corporate profits are at an all-time high of nearly 
$1.7 trillion, surpassing the pre-recession record 
of not-quite $1.4 trillion. Corporate profits have 
also never been higher as a percentage of the 
country’s GDP. The Federal Reserve reports 
U.S. corporations are currently sitting on $1.74 
trillion in liquid assets.

 Under tax laws and (absence of) regulations 
championed by purchased Members of Congress, 
these profits and liquid assets are not going 
for hiring and business development, but for 
executive salaries that now average $12 million 
a year for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. 
According to a recent AFL-CIO study, the 
average CEO of an S&P 500 Index company pulls 
in a salary 380 times that of the average worker; 
in 1980, the salary of the CEO of a large company 
was about 42 times what the average worker 
made.

 Those S&P 500 Index CEOs had salary increases 
of 13.9% in 2011, while the Index itself remained 
flat. Workers saw an average salary increase of 
2.8%. In 2010, 93% of the country’s income gains 
went to the richest 1%.

 As President Obama made clear, the private 
sector may be doing fine, but the economy isn’t. 
It certainly isn’t helped by massive layoffs in the 
public sector, and the “multiplier effect” this has 
on private sector businesses – especially in an 
economy which is 70% consumer-driven.

 A week before the president appeared 
at his press conference, Martin Bashir on 
MSNBC commented on House Majority 
Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) own declaration 
for the microphones, that “these job numbers 
are pathetic” and what’s needed is the “right 
leadership”:

 “But Mr. Cantor is part of the leadership of 
this country ... Leader Cantor has done absolutely 
everything in his powers to be sure that not one of 
the president’s policies on job creation have ever 
seen the light of day. Even when an independent 
analytics firm like Moody’s estimates that the 
American Jobs Act would create about two 
million new jobs, and raise GDP by a full 2 
percentage points, Mr. Cantor prefers his own 
form of leadership, which is designed to crush job 
creation ... You always wanted to undermine the 
President - but what you’ve done is undermine 
the country.”

 There might be those who misunderstood the 
point President Obama was trying to make. But 
I don’t think anyone could miss the point Martin 
Bashir made.