Economy = Not Good

One need not be a racist or even conservative to be highly disappointed in Obama's economic policies. They certainly aren't working well. The best advocates of his policies argue, "it isn't as bad as it could have been." In The Loop has a moment when an assistant is late to a meeting because he was drunk and boning a girl the night before and after being scolded by his boss, tries to defend himself by saying, "being late wasn't the worst thing I could have done, at least I didn't puke in the meeting." The boss' best moment in the movie is his response when he goes on for about 3 minutes about whether he is supposed to congratulate the assistant for not whipping his dick out and peeing all over everyone and similarly absurd things that he didn't do. It was freaking awesome. And that sort of sums up the defense of Obama's economic plans, thus far. Well, at least he didn't inflate the currency like pre-war Germany. Or at least we didn't abandon the FDIC and cause a run on the banks. Are expectations so low that we are supposed to be thankful for "only" 10% unemployment now? Which, by the way, is an inflated number because of ps government jobs like census taking.

This graph alone is frightening. The average length of unemployment is double that of anytime in the past 50 years. Ugly.

Does anyone think Obama's extension of unemployment benefits has anything to do with the average length of unemployment? To suggest this to a liberal is offensive - how dare you say giving unemployment benefits makes someone look for work less!!! Uhhh...well...I don't know...human nature? Oh, and evidence.

So the Obama White House itself studied whether extended unemployment benefits have discouraged people from going back to work? What did they conclude? It's hard to believe that long-term unemployment benefits, however justified on humanitarian grounds, don't discourage people to settle for the jobs that are available. And if stimulus is what we care about--well, you'd think stimulus spending would be most effective if it didn't come in the form of benefits that required non-work. ...

P.S.: Here's a suggestive paragraph deep within a recent story on temporary jobs that the L.A. Times' editors somehow didn't highlight:

Single mother Marie Li works 22 hours a week as a teacher of English as a second language. She said she barely has enough money to buy food after paying for rent and her course credits at Cal State L.A. Friends tell her she should stay home and collect unemployment benefits rather than work part-time. But she says she likes teaching ... [E.A.]

Is "duh" an insensitive comment?