George Rebane

Today the professional journalist is in a sorry state of his own making.  Polls show that the public holds the journalist in very low esteem indeed, somewhere down there with lawyers and politicians.  Perhaps it’s time to start a new department that highlights one or two of the abundance of follies they foist on us daily in the name of being society’s self-appointed ferrets and trumpets of truth and light.

Tonight on NBC’s evening news a typical stupid joke was pulled on the viewers when the anchor Lester Holt stated with a straight face that Obama had come up with a new plan to salve the economy.  This was announced at the beginning of the broadcast as a bullet point to get you to stay and watch, and again as the intro to the segment about “Obama’s plan”, how he was going to “put millions back to work”.  The apparent intention of this MSM outlet was to continue the hype about our new president-elect and that he’s got things well in hand even before he puts that hand on the Good Book.  Well, it turned out to be a non-item.  Obama has no plan whatsoever about how to put millions back to work.  But we were told instead that he wants to put millions back to work, and that he’s instructed his economic team to try and figure out a way to put millions back to work. 

And that is how it was left when the segment ended.  Either these clowns are just butt stupid and don’t know the difference between a plan and the fervent desire to have one, or they were continuing to practice puffery and intending to fool the folks.  In this case I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that the journalists (news editor, anchor, and segment lead) were all just comically ignorant.  But I bet 99% of the viewers now believe that Obama is a clever guy who has already figured out how to put millions back to work.  In the end, this is unfair to the president-elect who already has a lot of balls in the air, and the premature raising of expectations will help no one outside the beltway.

(The astute reader knows that there are about 150 million in the American workforce which today is about 6.5% unemployed.  A developed country counts ‘full employment’ effectively occurring when the “natural unemployment rate” drops below about 4.5%.  That means that Obama is seeking to return around three million workers to jobs by taking money from the Peters to pay the Pauls.  As economists have told us for decades, this means that the Peters cannot spend that money to create the really needed jobs, and we must all trust that this time around the government knows how better to deploy the workforce than does private industry.  In any case, as FDR demonstrated seventy years ago, there will be no net jobs created through any such policy.)

  ABC News announced tonight that President-elect Obama will seek to “restore” 2.5 million jobs.  While that’s close enough to my predicted 3 million jobs, I will stick with the higher number because things will get worse before they get better and Obama will up his target.  What we should keep in mind during all this is that these “restored” jobs will be advertized falsely as net new jobs.  Instead, whatever number actually created will be jobs displaced from the private sector by the government using both fiat money and fiat tributes to make people do work they deem to be most important.  The previous program that did this under FDR was called the National Recovery Administration which extended the Great Depression so that a world war was required to set things right – a high price to pay for meddling in the markets.  Stand by for another spate of Fireside Chats.

[24nov08 update] More recent research (here) has been announced on how FDR’s policies extended the Great Depression and how Obamanomics may be preparing to take around that barn again.