A Better Tomorrow, Eventually

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When the going gets silly, the silly get going.  Stephen Colbert, the ultimate exercise in personal branding gone horribly amok, is possibly running for President.  The reigns of Colbert  SuperPAC have been turned over to Jon Stewart, who immediately asked the most important question – “Does anybody know where the key to the Super PAC bathroom is?”

It had to be turned over to Jon because what matters in SuperPacLand is that there is no “coordination” between the candidate and the PAC.  If that seems awkward, consider that “awkward” is a synonym for “uncoordinated”, so there you go.  And now Colbert is free to pursue an exploratory campaign to possibly run for President, maybe.

That’s what our political system is today – a kind of performance art.

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Obama’s Job and Yours

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Will the economy produce a lot more jobs in 2012, or are we stalled looking at permanent unemployment and a new underclass?  It’s an important question because the answer to it predicts the course of the election season far more than anything else.  It’s the economy, stupid – really it’s the jobs.  Nothing else is likely to matter as President Obama makes the case for his own re-election – and likely runs against Congressional paralysis in the process.

If we want to predict tomorrow’s news today, there is nothing more important than what might happen with employment.  While we can never be sure exactly what will happen, we can put boundaries on the possibilities.

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Growing Jobs, Revisited

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Back in October 2010, job creation was at a complete standstill.  The bottom of total employment was hit in February of that year and little had changed since.  A simple analysis came through Barataria from Gary Shilling designed to predict when the turnaround might possibly occur – sometime after the economy (as Gross Domestic Product, GDP) started to grow at a rate of 3.3%.

Since that time, 2M jobs have been created in the economy and the headline unemployment rate has fallen to 8.5%.  It feels like some improvement, if not much.  Yet many people feel it can’t be a real decline in unemployment in part because the economy itself is not growing much (running an estimated 1.8% GDP growth in 2011).

Is there real job growth, or is the regression line from all the postwar data presented by Shilling telling us it can’t be real?  My own analysis, which at the time pessimistically showed that higher growth might be necessary to grow jobs, may actually be telling us that job growth is indeed real – because it was so anemic over the previous decade of the Managed Depression, starting in 2000.

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Good News or Bad?

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After a somewhat slow December, there is a lot of good news and bad. The problem is that both seem to come at the same time, leaving anyone following the flood of information bewildered.  Two main categories of news, economy and national security, are running at odds with each other.  Are things getting better or are they getting worse?  It depends on how you look at it.

This is what a time of revolution and restructuring looks like.  Anything can happen.  Times like these are what separates romantics from pragmatists, optimists from pessimists, and if we aren’t careful politics from any semblance of reality.

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The Pills

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A small wrinkle in the way he held his head was the only open betrayal of his condition.  The many colored papers he was studying were laid out in piles as he moved from one to the other, scouring each for some kind of clue.  His serious but friendly face, rounded in a kind of smile, rarely looked up.  It wasn’t until we had been at the bar for some time that we started chatting, innocently at first.

He gave his name as John, and slowly started talking about his mission.  He had just been to a pain management clinic at the hospital, and there in front of him were all the secrets that help him shove his life, if not his back, into order once again.  The car accident had done its damage, but pill after pill the magic that was supposed to help him cope had its own price.  Liz and I listened intently because a slipped disk in her back had given her the same bottles that rattled in her purse and through her nerves.

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