The continuing weakness in the job market, which I wrote about this morning, means that the debate over unemployment benefits will get more heated.
I’ve already noted that even left-wing academics like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that you get more unemployment when you subsidize joblessness.
And I’ve cited some good research on the topic from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, as well as other studies by academic economists.
But none of this evidence seems to matter, as I discovered in this debate with a former Obama Labor Department official.
To better understand the points I was making, here are two good anecdotes from Ohio and Michigan.
Last but not least, this cartoon does a very good who of teaching about the economics of unemployment insurance. And if you want to understand the absurdity of the left, this post shows Nancy Pelosi is a train wreck of economic illiteracy.
More Sub-Par Employment Numbers
The Labor Department just released its monthly employment report and the White House is probably not happy.
There are several key bits of data in the report, such as the unemployment rate, net job creation, and employment-population ratio.
At best, the results are mediocre. The unemployment rate generally gets the most attention, and that was bad news since the joblessness rate jumped to 8.2 percent.
What makes that number particularly painful is that the Obama Administration claimed that the unemployment rate today would be less than 6 percent if the so-called stimulus was adopted. But as you can see from the chart, squandering $800 billion on a Keynesian package hasn’t worked.
While that chart is probably embarrassing to the White House, I think the most revealing numbers come from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s interactive website, which allows users to compare employment data and GDP data for different business cycles.
I looked at those numbers a couple of months ago, so I could compare Reaganomics and Obamanomics, and the difference is startling. The Reagan policies of lower tax rates, spending restraint, deregulation, and tight money generated much better results than the statist policies of Obama.
The most recent numbers, shown below, aren’t any better for the Obama Administration.
But I suppose the good news is that the United States is not Europe. Government is even bigger on the other side of the Atlantic and many of those nations are in the middle of a fiscal crisis and the unemployment rate averages 11 percent.
Sort of makes you wonder whether there’s a lesson to be learned. Maybe, just maybe, bigger government means weaker economic performance.