I try to keep politics out of the weekly posts but screw that!
That disgusting, vile son-of-a-bitch (just my opinion, we report - you decide!) Newt Gingrich is on a 12-city pre-election tour where he is advising Republican candidates to frame the choice for voters between Democrats as "the party of food stamps" while selling the GOP as "the party of paychecks."
With a truly shocking 42M Americans in such dire straits that they need food stamps to make ends meet (and our study of the shopping habits of the poor last week clearly illustrated that this aid is the only way they can eat as they shop the same day the checks come every month), Gingrich this week distributed a memo to Republican hopefuls saying they should use the final month to stress tax and spending cuts as a way to spur job growth while attacking Democratic policies as detrimental that effort.
"It’s perfectly fair to say they are earning the title of the party of food stamps," he said. "By contrast, we have historically since Ronald Reagan of 1980 been the party of job creation."
The party of job creation??? Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha - ha! Ha, ha, ha. Ha! OK, I think I’m done now. Ha! Okay, now I can go on (but I’m still giggling). I will sum up the very cogent point I made to Members early this morning by simply saying: Is this out of touch elitist wealth-sucking windbag totally insane or just a big, fat liar? Let’s look at a chart:
What? Don’t like this one? Do you think it’s unfair to keep picking on poor W? I hear this all the time, Obama’s been in office 21 months, he needs to OWN this recession now and we need to stop looking at the idiot who caused it and pretend it was all Obama’s fault since he took office in the month that job losses maxed out at 850,000.
As logical as that line of reasoning may be, I do like to try to keep a historical perspective on things. We republished a full set of charts that illustrate my points from Member Chat in my Instablog, so you can view them here, but let me share just two that I find relevant. For the first chart, let’s take a look at ALL the post-Depression Presidents, including the great and powerful Ronald Reagan, and see how they stacked up in providing jobs for the American people:
Ouch! Not looking good for the red team, is it? In fact, this was only through August of ‘09 and did not include 2.8M job losses in Bush’s last 4 months in office: a feat of failure that put his Administration squarely in the red for the first time since Hoover sucked up the economy in the '20s.
Well, sure, the Republicans may suck at creating jobs but they shine on controlling spending, right. Ha, ha and ha ha again! There is not even a close contest there as Reagan, Bush and Bush ran up OVER $6Tn in debt in 20 combined years ($300Bn per year) while the dreaded Carter and Clinton caused a GRAND TOTAL of $548Bn (0.55Tn) to be added to the deficit in 12 combined years ($45Bn/year).
How about government spending? (All these figures are on the linked charts, by the way.) Also no contest; since 1940, Republicans have added far more then Democrats and, in fact, the only modern President to ever significantly reduce government spending was Harry Truman, despite all those liberal programs that paid for our parents' homes and sent them to college, etc.
"Ooh, ooh" - you may say, as you raise your hand for attention "What about the pork projects - those filthy Democrats love pork projects." No, so sorry but this is one of the funniest charts. Mr. Gingrich’s party took over the House and the Senate in the 1994 elections and controlled both houses every session other than 2001-2 (when Jeffords got disgusted and switched parties) through Dec. 2005 and LOOK WHAT THEY DID!:
THESE are the people who want you to vote them back in, THESE are the people who are making all the same promises they broke last time about spending and fraud and waste and family. Who was in control of Congress from 1995 through 2005, when Total Federal Spending DOUBLED? You may think politics is not about the markets but it’s ALL about the markets right now. We are teetering on the edge of a precipice and going back to the disastrous policies that drove us to the edge of a cliff in the first place is NOT going to make things better. Our future investing decisions will very much hinge on who is in charge, and so will our economic future as a nation.
Just look at the tremendous burden we face if we extend the Bush tax cuts. It’s bad enough if we don’t, though perhaps we can cut back spending and grow a little faster to offset the doubling of our debt to GDP load between now and 2050, but CLEARLY, extending them is nothing short of National Suicide!
You can’t give Trillions of dollars of tax breaks to the top 5% while 20% of the bottom 95% are unemployed or under-employed! A healthy economy needs a healthy labor force, which leads to healthy consumer spending which leads to more wealth for everyone - the proverbial "bigger pie." Cutting back on the social safety net and running an austerity budget when 42M of your citizens (13.5%) can’t live without food stamps is simply immoral. They do still teach morals somewhere, don’t they?
In fact, here is yet another chart of the income growth rate of post-war America broken down by party and, once again, the Democrats CLEARLY deliver better economic results for all. Well, not all, the top 1% do not do as well by a small margin under the Democrats but the entire top 5% STILL DO BETTER when the Dems are in charge by a full 10%!
We just got the Non-Farm Payroll numbers and they show that we LOST another 95,000 jobs in September. A loss of 5,000 jobs was expected. Government payrolls shrank by 159,000 jobs (damn those Democrats and their cutbacks!) while private enterprise added 64,000. While Unemployment held steady at 9.6%, U-6, the broader and also official measure of Unemployment, jumped from 16.7% in August to 17.1% in September. Even worse (and you won’t hear this in the MSM), March has now been revised down — wait for it — by 366,000 jobs! That’s right, we dropped 366,000 jobs in March vs. an originally reported up 50,000(ish) so an 800% miss in the data. Wow - good thing we didn’t know that then or the market might not have run up 7.5% between March 1st and April 26th! I wonder what other "lucky" statistical mistakes are being made during the current rally?
So don’t get me wrong, Democrats suck too, but just not as much as Republicans and, since we really only have two choices - I have to go with the guys who at least have some kind of track record fixing an economy, because this one is TOTALLY BROKEN! Of course, poor unemployment numbers boosted the futures because futures traders are generally idiots who are in the highest tax brackets and only think in terms of how things affect them and no jobs means (in theory) more Quantitative Easing and low interest rates and cheap labor - it’s everything a Capitalist dreams of all coming true at once!
From a trading perspective - frankly my dears, we don’t give a damn. We are cashy and flexible and we hit shorts on the Dow yesterday for a quick 50% in yesterday’s Member Alert and we’ll be looking to do it again this morning if they are going to keep pretending that TERRIBLE news is good news. A test of 10,800 is my goal for today and, if not, we’ll certainly take some flyers for Monday, which is a semi-holiday in America which celebrates Columbus "sort of" discovering the country 500 years after Leif Ericson - all of which came as quite a surprise to the people who had been living there for thousands of years, who had this crazy idea that they had discovered the place…
We’ll have to digest this nonsense over the weekend and play it by ear into Member Chat this morning because anything can happen and probably will on what is likely to be a low-volume day. Sorry for the rant but I work feeding the hungry and that really touches a nerve for me, so, sorry, Newt, maybe you aren’t a totally disgusting, vile, son-of-a-bitch.
(Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha - ha! Ha, ha, ha. Ha!)
Have a good weekend,
- Phil
