The Patriot Post® · Economic Recovery Still Lags

The Foundation

“How prone all human institutions have been to decay.” –James Monroe

Government

“US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment. While the American economy added 293,000 jobs last month, according to the separate household survey, the number of persons employed part time for economic reasons – ‘involuntary part-time workers’ as the Labor Department calls them – increased by almost as much, by 278,000 to 7.9 million. These folks were working part time because a) their hours had been cut back or b) they were unable to find a full-time job. At the same time, the U-6 unemployment rate – a broader measure of joblessness that includes discouraged workers and part-timers who want a full-time gig – rose from 13.8% to 13.9%. … The labor force participation rate was dead in the water. If it were back to January 2009 levels, the U-3 unemployment rate would be 10.9%. … Only 53.9% of private industries added jobs last month, the second lowest of the labor market recovery, according to JPM. … If the economy continues to add jobs at the 2013 pace of 196,000 a month, the labor market would return to pre-recession employment levels in seven years and ten months, according to the Hamilton Project’s ‘jobs gap’ calculator.” –American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis

For the Record

“9.5 million Americans have left the workforce during the presidency of Barack Obama, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In April, the total number of Americans counted as ‘not in the labor force’ declined for the first time since December, but that number was still near a record high at 89,936,000. Those not in the labor force declined by 31,000, from a record high of 89,967,000 in March. That broke the recent record of 89,304,000 not in the labor force in February of this year. Since February 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9,549,000 people have left the labor force. There were 80,387,000 Americans not working that month, compared with 89,936,000 not working or looking today, according to the latest economic release from BLS. … In the 50 months since Obama has been in office, the number of people counted as not in the labor force has declined 16 times.” –CNSNews’ Elizabeth Harrington

Re: The Left

“Liberals deny that raising labor cost through minimum wages reduces incentives to hire. But if you asked a liberal for advice on how to stop rich people from shirking their tax obligations, they’d say raise the penalty. Ask low-information Harvard University doctors what should be done to stem gun violence and they answer that government should institute ‘a new, substantial national tax on all firearms and ammunition.’ Ask Illinois’ Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle how to reduce purchases of bullets and guns. She’d say levy a nickel tax on each bullet and a $25 tax on each gun. Liberals demonstrate they understand the law of demand – that raising the cost of something lessens the amount taken – but they deny that it applies to labor. That’s as ludicrous as suggesting that the law of gravity applies to everything in the universe except cute creatures, such as pandas and puppies.” –economist Walter E. Williams

Essential Liberty

“It used to be that Americans mostly agreed that in order to attain citizenship, immigrants had to not only come to this country legally but also demonstrate, after training and study in the American system, that they believed in the unique United States Constitution and embraced what it means to be an American. Though that still occurs in the naturalization process, we seem to have abandoned it altogether in connection with the immigration debate. What sense does it make that we seek to instill a love of America in those earnestly seeking to acquire legal citizenship through the proper procedures but ignore it altogether in our rush to legalize 11 million illegals? … Indeed, hard-leftists don’t just disagree with many of America’s founding ideals; they believe that it’s somehow backward even to have such ideals, because to them, it reflects a prejudice against other systems, cultures and values. So, you see, this is not really a debate over whether the American system and the ideas and values undergirding it produced the greatest nation in world history and thus should be preserved. It is a core disagreement about whether it’s even proper and desirable to endorse a unique set of founding ideals as being superior to any other.” –columnist David Limbaugh

Insight

“Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’” –British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

The Gipper

“The gun has been called the great equalizer, meaning that a small person with a gun is equal to a large person, but it is a great equalizer in another way, too. It insures that the people are the equal of their government whenever that government forgets that it is servant and not master of the governed.” –Ronald Reagan

Political Futures

“[T]he institutions – the organs of the body politic – that are the most obsessed with eradicating bigotry (as liberals define it) tend to be the places that have to worry about it the least. The Democratic Party is consumed with institutionalized angst about prejudice, intolerance and bigotry in America. But the odds are that relatively few of these people (particularly those under the age of 50) have been exposed to much real racism or intolerance. The same goes for the mainstream media. In fact, many major media outlets have explicit policies dedicated to hiring and promoting minorities, women, gays, etc. Like the Democratic Party, some have very strict hiring quotas in this regard. The well-paid executives and managers of these institutions come from social backgrounds where the tolerance for anything smacking of overt bigotry is not just zero, but in the negative range; they bend over backwards to celebrate members of the officially recognized coalition of the oppressed.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

Opinion in Brief

“If our educational institutions – from the schools to the universities – were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences. Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness. Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil – whether the particular issue at hand is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever. … The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society.” –economist Thomas Sowell

Culture

“Not long ago – OK, 50 years ago – Sports Illustrated put athletes on its covers because they did things only Mickey Mantle, Jimmy Brown, Bobby Orr or Wilt Chamberlain could do on the playing field, not in the sack. Now [NBA player] Jason Collins’s sexual affiliation is the biggest news in sports? Does anyone know, or care, how many points per game he scores or how many shots he blocks? No. Being gay and his being willing to announce it to the entire sports world is what’s important now. … I’m sure most of Collins’ family and teammates have known he was gay for years, but because they’re decent and good people who cared about his privacy, they kept the big sports ‘news’ to themselves. This isn’t about sports at all. It’s partly a case of identity politics. That’s why Obama was in such a rush to congratulate Collins on his courage to come out and say he was a proud member of the Democrat Party’s most loyal sex-based constituency. … Gays have been playing pro sports forever. Big deal. No one asked and no one told. Sports should be about winning and teamwork and accomplishment. Owners, coaches and fans don’t care what color their star players’ skin is, what their ethnicities are or who they sleep with – and neither should the rest of us. Wake me up when this embarrassing gay-pride parade is over, please.” –columnist Michael Reagan

Faith and Family

“If we believe America was founded on timeless principles that God wove into the fabric of human existence, then we must put our faith in them and believe they still ring true in good hearts. Secondly, we must employ the mechanism designed to be the most effective for passing them along, namely, small groups. The smallest living organism is the cell; as it divides it multiplies so that within a very short time a single cell has become a tissue, a tissue an organ, multiple organs with specific functions form a body, that is life. So then let us commit to forming these associations, first within our own families, our neighborhoods, our communities. Get a good study guide on the essentials of liberty to guide the discussion. Emphasize action. To ensure success keep Faith In God at the center; more specifically let Jesus Christ be the nucleus of the group to use each individual as His hands, eyes and mouthpiece to bring healing and hope. As you grow in wisdom, action and numbers divide the groups and continue to grow your influence. We didn’t get here overnight and we won’t get it back any faster. Difficult times are ahead; we will need each other and Him now more than ever.” –Patriot Post Grassroots contributor Charlie Lyon

Reader Comments

“The reason Obama wants to purge Christians serious about their faith from the U.S. military is to remove any who would oppose his statist and dictatorial designs. He wants in the military only those who will follow orders from above blindly and without regard to either the Constitution or unalienable rights. Christians in the military are an impediment to his totalitarian plans, which he has been implementing throughout the federal government since he took office.” –Bob in Hattiesburg, Mississippi

“Well Court Martial me then because I won’t stop believing in Christ and telling others the reason for my hope and faith.” –Jim in New Haven

“Courts Martial for the Faithful is outrageous! The president of the United States is under Oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ and with this proclamation he becomes an enemy of our Constitution! I am retired USAF and I would’ve taken a court-martial before denying GOD!” –Harry in Belpre, Ohio

The Last Word

“So Medicaid, which is going to cost trillions, has shown in a new study to not improve the physical health of those who have it. It’s trillions of dollars and does nothing. So it’s an easy choice to just cut this and save tons of money, right? Nope, the left are promoting how Medicaid improves ‘mental health.’ Trillions of dollars, and people feel better – which is probably just because people feel better thinking they’re covered even though the coverage actually does nothing. So we could just pretend to cover people – placebo coverage – and get the same effect for much cheaper. But the left will never go along with that. If a giant government program is a complete and utter failure, that just means it need to be made even gianter. If there was a government program that just put trillions of dollars in a hole and burned it, the left would go on and on about how much warmth for the poor that program created and how we need to burn even more money. We can’t ever get rid of government programs no matter how useless they are. And that’s why I think the only step is to start to train our kids to build a new, better government after this one collapses.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team