ISSUES & COMMENTS: Poll Shows Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Obama Jobs Plan - WSJ.com

Poll Shows Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Obama Jobs Plan - WSJ.com

Yes, there are many issues - but, I feel as though the Laffer argument about what continued the Depression in the 1930's has now been validated by the facts.

I.e. we had the monetarists, Keynesians and Laffer. The Keynesian policies didn't work in the 30s, so we had the other two.

Now that monetarist and Keynesian policies have been shown not to work when faced with anti-business fiscal policies, it is clear to me that Laffer was onto something - i.e. when you push taxes up (with Obama implied but misallocations as you note) and support unions (Boeing, Gibson Guitar, NLRB, etc.) - the economy isn't going to rise.

There is also the 'regression to the mean' where the US has 3% of the world's population and uses 25% of its resources.

So, one would think that the government (except liberal policies find such anathema) would have pro-business policies knowing we need to create jobs.

We have to recognize there are clearing prices for labor as a component of production (we are talking here gross expense not net pay). This is ignored by gross policies and a short term 2% cut of employee sharing costs doesn't work.

There are tons of wonderful articles on what the Obama Admin, is doing that is anti-business.

What isn't talked about is the philosophy of liberals to try and equalize outcomes vs. opportunity. The results are seen all over the economy and in society. Education that isn't geared to excellence but equal outcomes is the mantra in California and other states.

To not allow competitive vouchers to support educational excellence is but one example.

We can't have an unequal and globally non-competitive tax rate. Japan has the same thing so companies locate production offshore.

You may recall the buzz-word of a few years back - the 'platform economy'.

Here big companies want to offload the equity cost and business risk of variable production.

This risk isn't being taken up domestically. I'd say Bush's tax cuts helped rather than hurt here as small business could more quickly build equity.

Ah well. The LA Times reported a hardening of positions on both the left and right - even though many on the left think the economy is going down the wrong road.

So, it makes sense for gold to go up; and, last I recall at the beginning of the year the forecasts were for 3%+ growth by the 4th quarter of 2011 and just now on Tom Keene on Bloomberg an actual decline was discussed.