James Pethokoukis

Drilling a bit deeper and moving beyond the 8.9 percent unemployment rate and 192,000 jobs created, here is what I found:

1. The U.S. labor force remains as small as it has been in a generation
2. More than 5 million Americans have disappeared from the job rolls
3. If the labor force was currently at 2007 levels, the unemployment rate would be a whopping 12 percent – the worst since the Great Depression.

As it is, the broader unemployment rate, which includes those who are underemployed and discouraged workers, is still an agonizing 15.9 percent. What’s more, the Federal Reserve believes that the high number of people out of work for 27 weeks or longer is creating structural unemployment. (The longer you are out of work, the harder it is to get that next job.) No wonder the Fed now believes the economy’s natural rate of unemployment has increased from a bit under 5 percent to a bit more than 7 percent.

In short, you may have a much larger pool of the long-term unemployed than is historically typical in America, something more akin of what is seen in Old Europe.

This is why it is critical to deal comprehensively with the Axis of Economic Evil: Big deficits, high taxes and onerous regulation. America must get more competitive and productive. I find the below chart from McKinsey particularly scary since it shows how much job growth is happening in unproductive areas of the US economy.

A handy chart from JPMorgan:

Nick Schulz says Republicans need a broader policy portfolio than lower taxes and less spending:

Too often discussions of growth are overly abstract or narrow.  They tend to focus on a few policy prescriptions such as tax cuts or trade or education. These are important. But the discussion about growth is strangely detached from the particular and unique characteristics of the United States. Any serious growth strategy should acknowledge and leverage America’s attributes and advantages.

Nick then goes on to praise Joel Kotkin and his “continental strategy” for growth, which — best I can tell — centers around more infrastructure spending. But what is the free market way of approaching this so it does not turn into a supersized version of Boston’s Big Dig — build and privatize?

As explained by Joel Kotkin:

Gentry liberalism combines four basic elements: faith in postindustrial “creative” financial capitalism, cultural liberalism, Gore-ite environmentalism and the backing of the nation’s arguably best-organized political force, public employee unions. Obama rose to power on the back of all these forces and, until now, has governed as their tribune.

Obama’s problems stem primarily from gentry liberalism’s class contradictions. Focused on ultra-affluent greens, the media, Wall Street and the public sector, gentry liberalism generally gives short shrift to upward mobility, the basic aspiration of the middle class.

Now that the ball is in his court, the president and his party must abandon their gentry-liberal game plan. The emphasis on bailing out Wall Street and public employees, supporting social welfare and manufacturing “green” jobs appealed to the core gentry coalition but left many voters, including lifelong Democrats, wondering what was in it for them and their families.

From pollster Rasmussen:

Running under the Tea Party brand may be better in congressional races than being a Republican.

In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Tea Party comes out on top. Thirty-three percent (33%) prefer the Tea Party candidate, and 30% are undecided. Twenty-five percent (25%) would vote for a Democrat, and just 12% prefer the GOP.

Among Republican voters, 39% say they’d vote for the GOP candidate, but 33% favor the Tea Party option.

Jon Henke applies his own analysis to the NY-23 race:

The story of NY-23 is not “conservatives beat moderates” or “conservative loses to Democrat”.

The story of NY-23 is “the Right starts dismantling the Republican establishment.” This is about how the Republican Party is defined and who defines it.

Right now, the movement wants the Republican Party to be defined by opposition to big government. Gradually, as new leaders arise, we will demand that the Republican Party be defined by its own solutions, as well, but rebuilding is an incremental process. We can hammer out the policy agenda and the boundaries of the coalition later.

For now, our job is to disrupt the establishment GOP.  If we beat Democrats while we’re at it, great. But the first priority is to fix the Drunk Party – the Living Dead establishment Republicans. They’re history. They just don’t know it yet.

NY-23 was the first shot in that war.  It was a direct hit.  Next year, we start storming the castle.

Me: Next up, Rubio vs. Crist and DeVore vs. Fiorina.