If the December jobs numbers that are released just a few days into 2015 look like the numbers for the last 11 months have looked, 2014 will be the best jobs growth year this country has seen since 1999. Which of course is just all the evidence you need that the Socialist-Kenyan-Communist-Sharia-AlinksyBot 5000 in the White House is extremely anti-business and extremely anti-capitalism. Because nothing says “I hate this country’s capitalist economy” like overseeing its stabilization and subsequent rise — albeit a slow one — to former levels of jobs growth and unemployment, right? With the November jobs number smashing the 300,000 mark — 321,000 to use the exact number the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave us — is there an end in sight to Obama’s reign of financial terror that has seen the DOW explode to new heights, and the lowest unemployment number since 2008 while having the longest period of sustained private sector jobs growth in the modern age?
Yes, that is just about how they’re going to handle the November 2014 jobs numbers in Fox News Land. Well, they’ll also of course wag their finger and insist if we adjust for people who have just stopped looking for work — a number that is also going down and can be attributed in part at least to the growing number of Boomers leaving the work force and retiring. First of course, they’ll ignore and downplay the news. This is while they craft their talking points about the undeniably positive economic news that they’d welcome gleefully if Mittens Q. Romney were in the White House right now. But then, they’ll hem and haw and insist that this economic growth isn’t good enough, fast enough or targeting the right people. While they may have a point about the jobs not all being the right kinds of jobs, there is one thing that is becoming abundantly clear as we sail on the cosmic seas toward 2015 — we’re going back to 1998 and 1999 all over again.
We have a sitting Democratic president, who was duly elected twice. This time, the man in the Oval Office got more than 50% of the popular vote twice, just to reiterate that despite the right-wing narrative to the contrary, there are still millions of people who voted for Obama less than two years ago that still want his agenda to get through. These people still support Obama, just as Clinton most definitely still had his supporters despite Newt Gingrich and company truly believing that their righteous (and as it turns out in Gingrich’s case, hypocritical) indignation over a fib regarding a blowjob or two was shared among all Americans. This is what gave Gingrich the false notion that people would want a Constitutional crisis to spring up over something so clearly trivial, and ultimately why the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton were so unpopular at the end of it all.
The funny thing is that at least the Republicans back in the Clinton days could claim that Bill probably broke some kind of law, and ultimately that’s what they effectively “censured” him for. But despite millions of dollars spent on scandal investigation after scandal investigation, they have nothing that sticks to Obama and opens the door for an impeachment. But don’t think that won’t stop them. If you ask me, there was desperation back in the late 90’s that played into Gingrich and his Senatorial cohorts deciding to impeach Clinton, and I think the same desperation is going to hit them now. That desperation is over jobs numbers exactly like the ones the BLS just released for November.
There will come a point where the unemployment numbers start getting dangerously close to what they were in Clinton’s best years — right around the 4% mark, though on average he was closer to the 4.5% mark — and the Republicans will panic. They’ll also of course take credit for controlling Congress during this time, even though simple plain fact is that much of the economic recovery and growth thus far has been directly in spite of, and not thanks to any Republican efforts in Congress. Liberals and progressives should probably be armed with that knowledge for the next foreseeable forever, because just like they try to take credit for Clinton’s economy (while of course not sharing any credit with Reagan’s Democratic congressional foes), they’ll try to rob Obama of some his economic legacy too, despite the fact that we have mountains of historical data that prove their economic cream dream — Supply Side economics — is a crock of utter dog shit, that only leaves the middle class in worse repair than you found it.
As the unemployment numbers creep lower and lower, and the right’s talking points about the coming economic disaster that Obama is either willfully or incompetently (they can never make up their minds if he’s a moron or an evil genius) start looking dumber and dumber, their desperation to discredit his legacy and his presidency will ramp up as well. When it reaches a fever pitch, that’s when impeachment will start to go from a thing they quietly hope for while telling the media it’s only Democrats that want Obama impeached for cynical political reasons to a full-blown witch hunt with Obama at the center. It’s at that point that we’ll get to see just how fed-up with the craziness the American public is. The good news is that historically, when a party gives over to the fundies in their base and lets a shit show like this get away from them, voters hammer that party in the next election they get a chance to; but I don’t make predictions so that’s just not much more than wishful thinking based on what’s happened before.
Left-leaning folks should also be realistic about the jobs numbers, if they want to maintain some sense of intellectual honesty. There are going to most definitely be a significant number of seasonal employees in the numbers, given the time of year. And the simple truth is that until enough good, well-paying full-time jobs are created for people to move into, there is still a great risk for a ton of people to not have an income. Of course to people who think like we do, this seems like a great time to reinvest in our crumbling infrastructure and put people back to work simultaneously. Too bad we have people controlling congress for the next two years who think that’s a terrible idea and would rather regulate your wife’s pussy, right?
So take it all with a grain of salt — the good and the bad. It would seem to me that no matter what Barack Obama has done a good enough job putting this country back on the right track economically that most moderates will see results and believe them. This bodes well not only for his legacy, but for his agenda. Republicans will start to feel the futility of running a full branch of government but without the votes they need to override the vetoes that Obama will most assuredly sign over the next couple years, and that futility will have to be released at some point. And it’s then, in a cloud of derp and histrionics, that we may finally, after all this time, see the Republican’s Tea Fever break.
The next two years are going to be fun, and economic news like this will only keep the fun coming in droves.
And now…a lighter look at the subject.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqsl-gvyuCc
