But that's where I get off the reservation.

Presidents like to claim they "create jobs." Well they do - a few thousand of them, mostly around Washington, D.C. But they don't create millions of jobs in the private sector, at least not with any precision or in a way that can be replicated by flipping some job-creation switch. Even the New Deal was largely ineffective until the onset of WWII. What creates economic growth are billions of decisions all over the world, made according to a timeline that only vaguely coincides with the political calendar.

It now looks like the economy's about to take off again. President Bush will surely claim more credit than he deserves. President Bush's tax cuts were in, my book, a good idea. But they surely didn't restructure the U.S. economy.

All of this is the real "voodoo" economics. And by all of this, I mean the nonsense spewed by Democrats and Republicans alike about the economy. Not only does this voodoo economics ascribe powers to presidents they don't have, but it allows the personality of the president to color the morality of material progress. When President Reagan was in office, wealth creation was evil. When Clinton was in office, it was good.

In other words, the voodoo trumps reason. It's all hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo. Howard Dean even believes that a massive tax hike would create jobs simply because that would be the Clintonesque thing to do. "I would go back to the Clinton era of taxes," Dean told NBC's Tim Russert, "because I think most Americans would gladly pay the same taxes they paid when Bill Clinton was president if they could only have the same economy that they had when Bill Clinton was president."

Why not just say he's got a recession doll and he's going to stick pins in it?