Disaster films were all the rage in the late 90s and early 2000s. You had Armageddon, Deep Impact, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, The Day After Tomorrow, Twister, and 2012, and that’s before we get into the awesome sub-genre of Sci-Fi channel gems like Swamp Volcano.

Most of it was pure unintentional comedy. A comic mix of an utterly ridiculous plot, B-movie actors hamming it up, and best of all, an utter unawareness on the part of everyone involved that this is not exactly Oscar-bait.

But since Obama has taken control, Washington has become a disaster that is harder and harder to laugh off. It has all the elements of the 90s-era disaster flick – bad actors (we’re looking at you Joe Biden), an improbable plot (paying off our $16 trillion debt seems about as unlikely as a Bruce Willis dynamiting an asteroid at this point), and a cast and crew that takes itself very seriously despite the inanity that surrounds them.

Yet there is no comedy here. Unlike every movie disaster, the audience is not guaranteed a neatly resolved plot where everyone ends up happy. Sure, you may feel like you overpaid for your $5 box of popcorn, but that sure beats wondering where your next job is going to come from or how high your taxes are going to soar.

And it’s that uncertainty that makes the next looming disaster – aptly named Taxmageddon – all the more terrifying.

Taxmageddon, which will occur on December 31^st of next year, represents the simultaneous expiration of a number of laws that have kept tax rates lower for literally every American. On that day the entirety of the Bush-era tax rates will vanish, meaning that rates on investment income, estates, and every wage level will shoot upward. The marriage penalty will roar back to life. The child tax credit will be cut in half. Twelve billion dollars worth of tax breaks for education expenditures and dependant care costs will disappear. The Social Security payroll tax will jump two percentage points overnight. And finally, the Medicare tax hikes tucked deep into Obamacare will spring into life.

It’s the fiscal equivalent of a Roland Emerich film in which a giant earthquake, set off by an alien blast, created a colossal tsunami that altered the weather and spun off dozens of enormous typhoons. It will be epic. And like many Roland Emerich films, it will be terrible.

The Washington Post reports:

“How do you plan for chaos?” Marion Blakey, president of the Aerospace Industries Association, sighed during a break between meetings with lawmakers, who could provide little assurance that the spending cuts would be averted. “It’s almost a unique moment in government because there’s so much at stake. And there’s nothing that inspires confidence that this will get done.”

The uncertainty is already prompting some firms to take action. Many more say they will be forced to contemplate layoffs and other cost-cutting measures long before the end of the year unless the Republican House and the Democratic Senate come up with an alternative path to tame deficits. But with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in play on Nov. 6, aides say it is impossible to begin mapping a strategy for compromise until they know who wins the election, by how much and on which issues.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has already warned that should all of the taxes go into effect he will have “absolutely no…ability whatsoever” to soften the blow to the economy. And that blow is enormous. The expected fiscal drag of the legislated tax increases and spending cuts is approximately $537 billion in 2013. That’s roughly 3.5 percent of GDP – an enormous sum that would immediately drive us into another recession.

But the uncertainty is already having a “deep impact.” Businesses have put hiring on hold and slowing down their purchases because they have no idea what their tax rates will be.

And things will only get worse unless Democrats work with Republicans to avert these historic tax increases. Disaster films are fun, escapist entertainment, but Taxmageddon is a scary reality that we must escape from.

When Eagles singer Don Henley was asked what his most famous song, Hotel California, was about he said it was “basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about.”

As he sang it, the Hotel California is an amazing place with “mirrors on the ceiling” and “pink champagne on ice.” But ultimately it was a hotel that allowed you to “check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

Although the excess Henley sang about was personal: the biggest houses, the fastest cars, and the most expensive food, the lyrics also (somewhat ironically) mirror the present day state of California.

The Golden State boomed as the idyllic climate and picturesque views coupled with the glamour of Hollywood made it the destination of the rich and famous. Sadly, the luster is fading as years of government excess resulted in an enormous debt burden state leader’s just can’t seem to will themselves to solve.

California was long headed for trouble. Decades of lavish spending on public-sector pensions and other government goodies was slowly creating an untenable situation. For better or worse, the economic collapse sped up that process as real estate prices bottomed out, sucking property and income tax revenues down with them.

This should have been viewed as an opportunity to fix what was broken in California; to improve one of the worst business climates in the country, to alleviate a tax burden that is driving out many businesses, and course-correct its debt laden balance sheet.

But this is California we’re talking about there. Instead, they elected a Jerry Brown, a Democrat, to replace Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (who admittedly didn’t handle things too well himself). Bloomberg reports on just how well that turned out for them:

California Governor Jerry Brown bet that a nascent financial recovery would lift the world’s ninth-largest economy enough to whittle down a $9.2 billion deficit. Instead, the gap has widened to $16 billion.

Today the 74-year-old Democrat will unveil his revised budget and explain what additional spending must be cut. Tax collections have run $3.5 billion below what he calculated four months ago. Spending has grown $2 billion above projections. The federal government and court ruling blocked some savings he expected, while his fellow Democrats in the Legislature balked at others.

California, with an economy bigger than Russia’s, lost more than a million jobs in the recession that struck in 2007, costing the most populous U.S. state 24 percent of its revenue. The new deficit estimate increases the urgency of the governor’s plans to increase income taxes on some earners to the highest in the nation, and boost sales levies that are now more than any other state.

The plan would temporarily raise the statewide sales tax, already the highest in the U.S., to 7.5 percent from 7.25 percent. It would also boost rates on income starting at $250,000. Those making $1 million or more, now taxed at 10.3 percent, would pay 13.3 percent, the most of any state.

In other words a state that has increased tax rates only to see tax revenues decline continues to think that raising taxes is the answer. Sadly, the outcome of this shell game is predictable. Entrepreneurs will look elsewhere, businesses will target their expansion in other states, and high-earning individuals (that aren’t of the Hollywood variety) will flee to lower tax jurisdictions. As a result, the state will go even deeper into debt, forcing it to cut even more deeply into the things that helped make it attractive to businesses in the first place, namely, a world-class university system.

This is the dark underbelly of success that permeated the lyrics of Hotel California. It’s also a perfect definition of the sordid politics of constant overpromising that has doomed the state to wallow in debt and deficits. It’s a hard learned lesson. Let’s hope the federal government, which faces many of the same choices in its own deficit, will learn from it.

The definition of the “American Dream” has changed over time.

During the nation’s founding the term was wrapped up in the New World mystique in which everyone had the opportunity to own their own piece of land. In the 19^th century, as the young nation was flooded by immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other European nations, the notion was tied to the lack of a strict hierarchical society with an entrenched aristocracy.

It was historian James Adams who popularized the phrase “American Dream” in the the 20^th century. “But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement,” Adams wrote in his book Epic of America.

The American Dream has since been defined as something even simpler: the ability of children to achieve a greater level of prosperity than the patients.

Sadly, regardless of definition America’s youth feel that dream slipping through their fingers under President Obama’s watch. In a new study from Rutgers University, surveying hundreds of recent graduates, an increasing number feel that the American Dream is dead or dying.

“The cream of the crop of America’s youth, graduates of four-year colleges and universities, believe the American dream of upward economic mobility may have stopped with them,” write study authors Charley Stone, Carl Van Horn, and Cliff Zukin. “Just one-fifth said their generation will have more success than the generation before them. . . One in three believes that ‘hard work and determination are no guarantee of success,’ and a quarter believed that ‘success in life is pretty much determined by outside forces.”

It’s a bleak and pessimistic view brought on by years of economic stagnation and government policies that only serve to exacerbate the underlying problems.

Sadly, youth’s pessimistic attitude is confirmed with cold hard data. The Rutgers’ study finds that three-quarters of the graduated surveyed reported having at least one full-time job since graduation. The problem is that the median salary was just $28,000 – nearly $3,000 less on average than those who graduated before the recession began.

Perhaps that would be acceptable if graduates enjoyed the work they were doing or at least viewed their job as a valuable career stepping stone. But the study showed that only 2 in 10 saw their first job as one that would help them along their career path. Moreover, 40 percent reported that they took the job just to get by.

And while many graduates are eking by with near minimum-wage salaries, their student loan debt burdens are larger than ever. Because the economy is so poor, jobs are so scarce, and salaries are so low, students are falling further and further behind on their loan payments.

The Rutgers’ survey found that five years after graduation most of students had made very little progress in paying down their debt. In fact, of those who graduated during the worst of the recession (2009-2011) an incredible four in ten had reported not paying off a single dime of their debt.

Such enormous debt burdens has a ripple effect that impacts nearly every decision in a graduate’s life. The study reports that 27 percent of graduates lived with parents or family members because they needed to save money. Forty percent delayed a major purchase such as buying a home. Significant numbers have also been forced to take jobs that they are unenthusiastic about in hopes of putting a dent in their loans or have chosen to delay needed education because they can’t afford the debt.

These are sad statistics that represent real lives being torn apart by the Obama economy. Young Americans need jobs. What’s more, they need hope. Hope that the American Dream, in all of its iterations, is alive and well for them. While the American Dream fades, Obama is clearly asleep at the wheel.

The federal government is not very good at saving money. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Washington doesn’t have the willpower to stop spending money. On occasion they try, but like an alcoholic who decides to take up a career as a bartender, the federal government always puts itself in situations that doom it to failure.

The most prominent example is the annual doc-fix dance that drives Americans nuts each year. It all started back in the late 1990s when both parties agreed that Medicare spending was growing out of control (yes, this problem has been known for decades and we still haven’t fixed it). In an attempt to slow it down Congress created a formula called the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR), which tied Medicare spending to the overall rate of economic growth.

But as we all know, health care spending has grown much faster than the economy. That left Congress with two equally bad options. First, they could stick to the Sustainable Growth Rate and cut doctors pay under the Medicare program. The problem is that doctors who aren’t paid tend not to want to work, leaving Medicare patients in the lurch.

Predictably, Congress doesn’t want that to happen. So instead, they choose to appropriate additional funds to cover the gap between the SGR and the regular growth of health care prices. This ends up costing tens of billions of dollars each year, and the figure keeps on growing. The non-partisan CBO finds that a 10-year patch of the doc-fix would cost $298 billion; by comparison, in 2005, that figure stood at $49 billion.

Given this utter fiasco you’d think that Washington would be keen not to repeat the mistake. But in the weird mixed up world of spend-happy Washington you’d be wrong. In fact, Democrats have already done it! Tucked deep in the Obamacare bill is a provision that creates yet another doc-fix debacle, this time in Medicaid.

Currently, doctors who provide services to Medicaid patients are underpaid compared to their counterparts who serve Medicare patients and vastly underpaid compared to those paid by private insurance. As a result half of primary-care physicians and 35 percent of specialists either limit the number of Medicaid patients they see or refuse to accept new ones.  This leads to longer wait times and worse health outcomes

So what does Obama do with this wonderful program? Does he use his signature health care bill to reform it? No. In fact, he makes Medicaid, warts and all, the cornerstone of the Obamacare bill by using it to cover 16 million more Americans.

In an embarrassing attempt to try and put a bandaid over a gaping wound, Obama did make a few changes to Medicaid. The Washington Post reports:

Right now, Medicaid pays doctors 34 percent less than Medicare, which, in turn, pays less than private insurance. Health policy experts worry that such low payment rates scare doctors away from the entitlement program, creating access issues for Medicaid patients.

The health reform law changes that: It raises Medicaid rates for primary care to match those of Medicare for 2013 and 2014. That, the Obama administration hopes, will lure doctors to accept Medicaid patients — and also prevent some costly emergency room visits down the line.

But there’s a problem: The payment boost runs out at the end of 2014. While the federal government estimates that it will spend $11 billion raising provider rates for 2013 and 2014, no additional federal funds are appropriated beyond that.

As Democrats should have learned from Medicare, once you start paying a higher price, doctors are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it. And with history as our guide, when faced with popular doctors and a large constituency, Congress will fold like a cheap suit, leaving states and taxpayers on the hook for tens of billions of dollars each year.

Obamacare was passed with the intent of bending the cost-curve downwards in order to save Americans from rising health care bills. But a spend-happy Washington somehow managed to turned savings for patients into higher taxes for all Americans.

The media is doing their best to set up a stark contrast between the two presidential candidates. One, is being shown as the down-to-earth, even cool, candidate who understands the struggles of the everyman and does his best, despite numerous challenges, to help alleviate them. The other, is being portrayed as an elitist, who made his living destroying jobs and can’t get through a day without saying something that makes your Average Joe’s mouth drop in “I-can’t-believe-you-could-be-that-out-of-touch” amazement.

The former of course is the liberal media’s beloved Obama (did you know he slow jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon!?!) the latter is Mitt Romney (did you know he’s super, super rich?).

But the story is largely fabricated; a well crafted attempt by Obama’s campaign team (with an admitted helping hand from some Romney gaffes) to create a contrast between two rich, successful, Harvard-educated men.

And it’s not as if Obama hasn’t shown some moments of being out of touch. Indeed, his entire presidency has been one shining, yet somehow overlooked, example of being out of touch with the suffering of normal Americans. But, Obama’s comment on Friday may take the cake.

“It was a house of cards and it collapsed in the most destructive, worst crisis that we’ve experienced since the Great Depression. And sometimes people forget the magnitude of it,” Obama said at a fundraiser in Washington State today. “You know, you saw some of that in the video that was show. Sometimes I forget.”

I’m sorry, but you’ll have to point out to me these lucky Americans who “sometimes forget” the recession. In one way or another, whether you lost your job, a family member lost theirs, your neighbor had to sweat through a downsizing, or you couldn’t sell your house, you’ve felt the impact of the recession and the non-existent Obama recovery. And it’s unlikely that you’ve forgot.

That said, it’s clear that Obama has often failed to remember. He’s consistently promised either a “pivot” to jobs or sworn that he’s going to get “laser focused” on “jobs, jobs, jobs.” But he’s never gotten around to it. Instead, he’s blithely carried on, working towards priorities that have little or nothing to do with job creation or economic revival.

In fact, many of his policies have had just the opposite effect. Obamacare and Dodd-Frank didn’t create jobs, they killed them. With enough red tape to strangle any entrepreneur and a regulatory burden that would weigh down even the best small companies, the economy continues to stall. Obama has also continued to pile up an enormous debt – soaking up capital that should be used for the private sector and worrying businesses with the need for higher taxes. Oh and those tax hikes, don’t even get us started on the real threats Obama has made about raising capital gains rates (which would discincentivize investment) and hiking marginal rates (which many small business owners pay).

In other words, when Obama isn’t forgetting about the recovery he’s actively attacking it in the name of pursuing his agenda. And when he’s not doing that, he’s out on some ridiculous vacation to hob-now with the nation’s elite in Martha’s Vineyard or cozying up in a private villa on the white sands of Hawaii.

This is not an everyman. This is not someone who has been cut by the economic collapse and continues to stare down at a scar that just won’t heal. So yes, “sometimes he forgets.”

He forgets about the recession. But he also forgets about creating jobs, about changing the culture of Washington, about his promise to reduce the deficit, and about young adults who continue to struggle.

But in November America would be wise not to forget Obama and his thee-and-a-half years of forgetfulness.

“Compassionate conservatism” is making a comeback. Those words may not excite Republicans who have come to view them as an artful cipher for the contradiction in terms known as “big government conservatism.” But it is absolutely necessary in a political culture that has allowed Democrats to use the terms “compassion” and “spending” synonymously.

Sadly, compassionate conservatism gets a bad rap in today’s Republican circles because it became identified solely with the Medicare prescription drug benefit – a new, expensive entitlement created under George H.W. Bush.

Although Medicare Part D may be the tangible result, it wasn’t the theoretical origin. In fact, compassionate conservatism began with no thought that it would expand the government. “Compassionate conservatism is the theory that the government should encourage the effective provision of social services without providing the service itself,” wrote Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson.

Putting it more artfully, George H.W. Bush said “It is compassionate to actively help our citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on accountability and results.”

Now, Paul Ryan is ready to pick up the torch, using his Path to Prosperity Budget to make the case that smart entitlement reforms, not rampant spending, is the compassionate choice. Here’s Ryan in a House Budget Committee meeting yesterday:

“I think around here we spend too much of our time and our intellectual effort measuring compassion for those in need by measuring inputs: “How much money are we spending, how much money are we increasing spending, how many programs are we creating?”

But we’re not measuring outcomes: “Are these programs working? Are people getting out of poverty?” And we need to focus on that, because if we simply measure inputs Medicaid is phenomenally successful.

…[B]ut surveys tell us doctors aren’t even taking Medicaid patients. One recent survey said that approximately half of all of our doctors aren’t going to take any additional Medicaid payments because they lose money every time a Medicaid patient walks into their office.”

As usual, Rep. Ryan couldn’t be more right. There is absolutely nothing compassionate about tossing more money into broken programs that do little to help Americans, but do a lot to create a cycle of dependence and poverty.

More to the point for young adults, there is nothing compassionate about running trillion-dollar-a-year deficits for as far as the eye can see. Consider this: 5.7 trillion. It’s an unimaginably huge number. Indeed, it’s more than five times the amount that federal, state, and local governments combined spend on educating our children every year. And yet, that is what America is projected to spend on interest on the national debt over the next decade. Not principle mind you, interest.

Such spending and debt has huge implications for the future. One new study by economists Carmen Reinhart, Vincent Reinhart, and Kenneth Rogoff found that in the 26 cases were public debt exceeded 90 percent of GDP since 1800, economic growth was about 1.2 percent lower than other years.

That may not sound like much, but the cumulative impact over the course of years is enormous. According to James Pethokoukis who ran the numbers, that’s the difference between having a $21 trillion economy in 2035 and a $28 trillion one. That’s a $7 trillion difference! And that’s money that could go into raising the standard of living in America, money that would go a long way towards reducing dependence on federal poverty programs.

Compassion is about conviction – a sincerity behind the promise to create solutions to the problems our nation faces in a way that is sustainable for future generations. It’s not about kicking the can down the road. And it’s surely not trying to convince Americans that the programs they have paid their whole lives into are safe (and in all to many cases have become reliant on) are fiscally sustainable, when the exact opposite is true.

The debate over reform is not a dichotomy between the heartless right and the compassionate left. Nothing could be more compassionate than putting America back on a responsible, sustainable path towards a secure bright future. That’s the new compassionate conservatism.

A fantastic new study came out today in Current Biology that should totally upend climate science (OK, not really). According to British scientists dinosaur farts may have actually raised global average temperatures by as much as 18 degree Fahrenheit. Yes, global warming in the Mesozoic era was caused by flatulence. The BBC reports,

“British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus.

By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs – as a whole – produced 520 million tones of gas annually.

They suggest that the gas could have been a key factor in the warm climate 150 million years ago.”

That’s a lot of hot air. Which brings us to Obama (see what we did there!?!) whose constant stream of truth-stretching, fibs, and outright lies far outweighs the blowing bluster of the ancient dinosaurs.

On Saturday President Obama formally kicked off his reelection campaign in Ohio with another populist speech about how much America must spend to get back to its roots. You didn’t read that wrong. Despite months of flying to every swing state on the map to bash Republicans and highlight his own election-tailored proposals, those weren’t “campaign events.” Why, you may be asking? Because it allowed him to use taxpayer funds rather than dip into his own fat fundraising coffers…ah, the privileges of the presidency.

The speech was built around President Obama newly unveiled campaign slogan: “Forward.” Yep, that’s it. The supposed best minds in the messaging business spent days, weeks, months in a room to come up with the perfect phrase to launch the biggest election campaign in American history and they came up with “forward,” a brazen MSNBC knock off.

“’Forward,’ the Obama campaign will be declaiming to Americans,” writes Ross Douthat in the New York Times, “which feels like a none-too-subtle admission that a look backward at the Obama economic record might be bad news for the president’s reelection prospects.”

Indeed, Obama seemed to be doing everything he could to shield himself from the past. Thus far, Obama has arguably helped to usher through three major pieces of legislation: the stimulus, health care reform, and Dodd-Frank. These were supposed to be his signature pieces of legislation, his make or break moments. And now he won’t even discuss them.

“On issue after issue, we can’t afford to spend the next four years going backward,” Obama told the Ohio crowd. “America doesn’t need to refight the battled we just had over Wall Street reform and health care reform.”

In other words, I thought these would be popular, they aren’t popular, so let’s all do me a favor and pretend they just never happened, mmkay?

So what does Obama want to talk about?

Well, nothing really. He’s willing to toss out some platitudes about what America should be – one in which “if you’re willing to work hard, you should be able to find a good job” and one in which if “you’re willing to meet your responsibilities, you should be able to own a home, maybe start a business, give your children the chance to do better.”

All good stuff, and you’d be hard pressed to find a Republican who disagreed with any of that. The problem is that he provides no prescription on how to get there besides throwing out the same “hope and change” line again (yes, it’s really back). But as we’ve learned the hard way over the past four years “hope” doesn’t hand out many paychecks and “change” isn’t hiring.

So forgive us if we don’t buy into the same talk that led to record high youth unemployment. We apologize if we won’t be suckered by words that have led to the longest, slowest recovery since the Great Depression. Sorry if we don’t buy your talk when the American Dream is fading for an entire generation of graduates who have been forced to move back home, take lesser jobs, put off getting married and starting families, and attempt to survive with more debt and less income.

I guess what we’re trying to say is…spare us the hot air.

Internal consistency isn’t exactly a hallmark of liberal logic.

The most brazen example has come from the new fetish amongst left-wing talking heads and even-leftier wing bloggers that the perceived failure of European austerity just goes to show that America is due for another stimulus package.

Let’s go ahead and get some caveats out of the way before we dig into this gem of an “argument.”

First, there is a reason that many European countries are trying to cut their debt and it’s not that their inherent masochists who enjoy a good populist riot. As Gideon Rachman explains in the Financial Times, “Their austerity drives were a reaction to the fact that markets were demanding unsustainably high interest rates to lend to them. There is no reason to believe that the markets are now suddenly prepared to fund wider deficits in Europe.”

Second, nobody expected austerity to be an instant success. It took decades for the social welfare state to crumble beneath the weight of impossible promises to its citizens. It will take time, measured in years, not months, for nation’s balance sheets to repair themselves to a point where natural growth prevails. But this is a necessary pain. If economies and living standards can only be supported by year-after-year deficit spending, then we are living in an unsustainable lie.

Third, one of the major problems is demographics – a factor that is immune to stimulus or austerity. Europe is getting gray. As Megan McCardle explains in this month’s Atlantic Magazine, “Not one country on the Continent (Europe) has a fertility rate high enough to replace its current population. Heavy debt and a shrinking population are a very bad combination.” Why? Because there are fewer workers, which makes it hard to grow the economy, and more retirees, which rely on expensive government programs. Bad combo.

But all of that aside, the main logical inconsistency in liberal’s argument is that at the same time they’re lamenting austerity they are arguing for tax increases. Have they completely ignored that European austerity is synonymous with tax hikes?

Take Britain as an example. They appear poised to slide into a double dip recession after passing an austerity package. But it has nothing to do with spending. In fact, total public sector spending, in real terms, was almost 4 percent higher last year than it was in 2009, according to the Atlantic Sentinel. What they have done is raise taxes. The austerity plan raised the top marginal tax rate by 10 percentage points  in 2010 – something that liberals in the United States can only dream of – and another point last year.

It is much the same with other European nations. Kyle Wingfield writes for the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

“If five of the nine recessionary countries, governments cut spending in 2011. In four, they didn’t There were another three European countries in which public spending fell without triggering a recession.

. . . In fact, the EU’s recessionary countries were just as likely to have raised taxes in 2011 as to have cut spending.

The hardest-hit countries – Greece, Portugal, and Spain – did both. These countries are the only ones in Europe that can truthfully say they’ve embraced austerity. Unless, that is, you count Iceland, which returned to robust growth last year despite cutting spending by more than 5 percent.

Yet, in both Portugal and Spain, the tax hikes were larger, percentage-wise, than the spending cuts. So, who’s to say the changes in spending, rather than taxes, are to blame?”

Of course, liberals don’t seem to realize any of that. In their simplistic worldview austerity is simply the equivalent of spending cuts. If Europe is suffering, a lack of spending must the cause.

That leaves them free to advocate for higher taxes, via the Buffett Tax or other harebrained scheme, in an attempt to eliminate the deficit, or (worse) free up more dollars for another stimulus package. Little do they know they are advocating, in their own way, for the very austerity that they simultaneously bemoan. Logical inconsistency at its finest, or worst, depending on where you stand.

The happy signs of economic growth that dominated the first few months of the year are fading back into the muck of an unlabeled recession.

This has all happened before. Remember back to March through May of 2010, when the economy was adding an average of 316,000 jobs per month. Obama immediately tried to work it to his advantage. He traveled to the swing state of North Carolina to point to the job numbers as proof of the merits of his economic policies.

“Today is an encouraging day,” Obama said. “We learned that the economy actually produced a substantial number of jobs instead of losing a substantial number of jobs. We are beginning to turn the corner.”

Were those numbers real, America would have been well on its way to full employment and real economic growth. They weren’t. The decennial Census propped up hiring with temporary jobs, but when those jobs went away the economy lost 167,000 jobs. We hadn’t “turned a corner” so much as pulled a U-turn.

2011 followed a similar script. Early-year job growth (between February and April the economy added an average of 246,000 jobs) appeared quite strong. The economy appeared to finally be getting on track.

Obama’s team was once again spouting off about their success in guiding the economy out of a disaster. “For two years, President Obama and Congressional Democrats took bold steps to get the economy back on track – and today’s jobs report is a sign our actions have moved our country in the right direction,” Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in April.

“This sign of jobs growth shows the President’s economic plan is starting to work,” added Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).

But it was all another mirage. Over the next four months job growth averaged a meager 80,000. That’s not nearly the level of growth needed to add jobs for all of the new entrants to the workforce each month (think graduates and immigrants), much less actually put a dent in the recession. As it turns out the Obama economy, to the extent it was “starting to work,” still had us pointing in the wrong direction.

Which brings us to this year. After a few promising jobs reports, the “recovery” appears to have once again stalled out and the economy is plummeting, without an engine, towards earth.

In March, three strong jobs reports had economic forecasters thinking big, predicting 205,000 jobs would be created. Then reality hit, and the actual report showed the number was actually only 120,000.

Chastened by reality, the median forecast among polled economists in April was 160,000. Even those lowered expectations for the recovery turned out to be dramatically overoptimistic. In a sick April Fool’s joke the economy added only 115,000 jobs, the worst month of 2012.

If we continue adding jobs at the pace we did in April the unemployment rate would remain above 7 percent as late as 2026 – a whopping 14 years from now. Even if the economy grew at the average of the first five months (including the inflated levels of early in the year) it would take a distressing eight years and six months to reach what economists consider “full employment” where unemployment is between 4 and 6 percent.

Despite the obvious weakness in the economy Obama will no doubt tout the fact that the unemployment rate continues to fall. That is nothing but statistical sleight of hand. The only reason the unemployment rate ticked down to a still-high 8.1% was because people continued to drop out of the workforce at an alarming rate.

According to James Pethokoukis if the U.S. labor force was the same size as when Obama took office the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. Even if you accept that the aging of the Baby Boomers make for natural workforce shrinkage by taking demographic changes into account the real unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent. Not exactly cause for celebration.

Foolhardy optimism followed by inevitable stagnation. That’s what you get in the Obama economy.

Regional Political Director

The College Republican National Committee (CRNC) seeks four qualified Regional Political Directors (RPDs). Qualified applicants will have at least 1 – 2 years of paid political experience. Prior Full-time campaign work is required. The RPD will work under the National Field Director to manage the CRNC’s 2012 field program. Duties include managing a large budget, devising and implementing a targeted field campaign, working with local College Republican leadership, managing a team of field representatives across multiple states, and assisting the National Field Director with the training of field staff. Interested individuals should send a resume, cover letter and three references to National Field Director Brad Alexander at balexander@crnc.org

Field Representative

The CRNC is currently in the process of hiring 60 qualified Field Representatives for 2012. Applicants should send a resume and cover letter to National Field Director Brad Alexander at balexander@crnc.org. Please visit the following link for more information:

http://www.operationrednovember.com/content/jobs