My home town has been an historic and major inland shipbuildng port for two centuries. Oliver Hazard Perry’s fleet, which won a decisive victory on Lake Erie in the War of 1812 (“We Have Met The Enemy And They Are Ours”), was built in Erie, PA, and later the first iron-hulled warship, the Wolverine,, was built in Erie several decades later. Over the next hundred years, ships of all sizes were built by various boat builders at the port of Erie which also had the first lighthouse on the Great Lakes, and still has a major U.S. Coast Guard station. A few years ago, this industry was revived locally, and currently huge freighters, tugboats and smaller ships and boats are built and repaired in the city. My own interest in ships has kept me (now living far away) abreast of this industry, and in the course of my reading about it, I came across a term I did not previously know— a cofferdam.

A cofferdam (sometimes just called a coffer) is a temporary structure built over water which enables ship repair (among other purposes) to take place in a body of water on dry land. Usually using a steel enclosure, the water is removed and the space filled with dirt. It’s an expensive process, but it is done when putting a ship in drydock is unfeasible or, as is often the case, even more expensive than a cofferdam. If you live in a port city, especially on a Great Lake or near a major river, you have probably seen a cofferdam. The cofferdam. being temporary, is removed after use.

It has occurred to me that the way politicians are dealing with the current economic crises, is very much like using a cofferdam. Unfortunately, while the cofferdam is a practical and necessary device in ship repair, I think the fiscal cofferdams appearing in the US. and Europe these days function in an opposite manner. The U.S. economy, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the private pension fund system, mortgage banking system, healthcare financing system and other major economic structuress are in need of historic and very major repair. The great ship which is our economy really should be taken into drydock for serious and critical work. Putting an economic ship into drydock , however, involves delays, dislocations and other “inconvenient” problems, but if you don’t want a ship eventually to sink, it must be done.

Our politicians don’t want to face the hue and cry that would come from the citizenry (and voters) if they put the U.S. in the absolutely necessary (in my opinion) drydock to get the job  of repairing our economy done right.

So the politicians avoid this drydock and construct economic cofferdams that only provide short-term and superficial repair. An even more egregious example of this is the behavior of politicians in the European Union today. Their debt problems are perhaps even more immediate and serious than ours, but instead of facing up to imminent dangers of delay, European leaders are constructing cofferedams everywhere on the continent..

Much has been made in recent weeks and months at the centenary marking of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, a disaster which a hundred years later still grips worldwide fascination.  Our cruise ships today are much larger, and much safer, but recently one of them sailing in the Mediterranean struck a rock, and sank, turning on its side,  killing more than 30 persons.

An economy is a vastly large ship. When in need of major and critical repair, too much is at stake to simply construct a temporary cofferdam and just patch up the problem.

Commodore Perry, who commanded that key naval battle of Lake Erie in 1813, and who had personally supervised the construction of the U.S. fleet in Erie, PA two hundred years ago, had the most famous naval battle flag in American history. Its words still ring out today: “Don’t Give Up The Ship!”

——————————————————————————————–
Copyright (c) 2012 by Barry Casselman.  All rights reserved.

The Bipartisan Policy Center has produced a nifty graph comparing Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity to the plans prepared by Alice Rivlin and former Sen. Pete Domenici, Simpson-Bowles, House Democrats, President Obama, and the BPC itself (to provide a baseline). The results are striking:

And to top it off, these numbers use the CBO’s pessimistic growth assumptions.

Of course, some have attacked the Path to Prosperity from the right, arguing that it doesn’t go far enough or balance the budget quickly enough. However, we must remember that Chairman Ryan incorporated a keen understanding of political reality when he compiled the plan. When we consider this, the merits of the Path look all the more impressive.

Piggybacking on the work of my esteemed colleague, Matthew Miller, I give you the latest spot the House Budget Committee has released to promote the new Path to Prosperity:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-MswXzp2p4&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

Wouldn’t it be nice to have an election that pits two competing broad visions of America’s future – of a private sector-driven market economy vs. state-managed corporatism – against each other for the voters to evaluate? With the economy improving to a slightly less demoralizing stagnation, I would argue that the issues of the debt and deficit have only grown in their applicability to a general election platform that can attack head-on the GOP’s poor fortunes among leading demographics.

Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

In case I haven’t made it blatantly obvious, I like to turn to AEI’s James Pethokoukis when it comes to economic commentary and analysis. He does another number today on the Keynesians’ obsessive focus on the demand side of the economy. He begins with two charts, courtesy of the BLS and adds the following:

These charts are based on the U.S. Job Openings and Labor Turnover report. The first chart shows that with 13.1 million people unemployed, there were an estimated 3.9 unemployed people for every opening. That’s the lowest level since December 2008. Good news.

Yet, as can be seen in the second chart, job openings have been rising faster than hiring. As Barclays concludes: “This suggests that factors such as mismatched skills continue to be frictions in the labor market.”

Or, in other words, people who lost their jobs in the Great Recession will not be able to return to their old jobs or even new jobs in the same industry.

He then points to a recent article in the WSJ, written by Arnold Kling:

Many jobs in home construction, durable-goods manufacturing and distribution, and mortgage finance were dependent on housing markets with ever-rising prices. In the U.S. and the U.K. in particular, the finance industry expanded well beyond its true economic value. Once the property bubbles burst, these jobs were exposed as not viable. Meanwhile, ongoing creative destruction brought about by the Internet and globalization have continued to allow substitution of capital and emerging-market labor for industrialized countries’ labor in many sectors. Together, these phenomena have caused widespread dislocation. … The necessary adjustments can only be made by the decentralized efforts of entrepreneurs. …

The Keynesian story would lead one to expect a recovery to consist of workers returning to the jobs that they held prior to the recession. That is not what happened after the Great Depression. It is not what has happened in recent recessions in the U.S., particularly the one that ended in 2009. Regaining full employment requires significant restructuring of the economy, rather than simply returning to the pre-slump status quo.

We’ve heard the standard arguments from the Keynesnians over and over again: Effective tax rates on individuals and businesses stand at or near historical lows, the Fed has interest rates at rock-bottom levels, and yet the rich and their companies still sit on trillions in cash, so what else can we do except stimulate demand via government spending until the private sector can once again shoulder the burden of driving growth?

Setting aside the Keynesians’ convenient avoidance of the simple truth that without the profit and price mechanisms depended on by the private sector, the government can never know exactly how much to pump into the economy and when to do it, the data and arguments voiced by Pethokoukis and Kling highlight only a fraction of the evidence against central planner orthodoxy and Obamanomics. Now, if only we could get the mainstream media to report this…

Today, Politico reported that Sen. Rand Paul took the initiative to demonstrate his personal commitment to cutting government spending:

Freshman Sen. Rand Paul is making good on his promise to cut federal spending. The Kentucky Republican and tea-party favorite said Thursday he’s returning $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury — money from his operating budget that his office never spent.

The half million dollars represents about 16 percent of Paul’s annual budget, and he contends no senator has returned as much to taxpayers.

Obviously, $500,000 amounts to a drop in the bucket. Still, with all the broken promises and reneged commitments we see from our elected officials, it feels refreshing to see one quite literally put his money where his mouth is.

The first bubble I ever darkened on an American electoral ballot was that of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney for President and Vice President in 2004.  Being an 18-year-old young conservative, the choice was clear: smaller, more honest government with Bush, versus what would inevitably be scandalous, big government with John Kerry.

Over the next four years, I would watch as the man for whom I had cast my first vote expanded the federal government to its largest size in history, ramped up government spending to its greatest volume in history, engaged in some of the most radical and opaque redistributions of wealth ever undertaken by an American president, and began effectively nationalizing vast swaths of the private economy.

The effects of these actions were a housing bust that never corrected, a recession that turned into a lumbering depression, a dimming and slowing American economy, a new culture of corporatism and dependency, and a social order that has begun unraveling into civil unrest.

Needless to say, I and many others who had initially supported George W. Bush have been seriously disillusioned.  No longer do I (and the majority of grassroots conservatives) merely take it for granted that the individual with the (R) adjacent to their name will necessarily be preferable to the individual with the (D) adjacent to their name.  And it wasn’t just George W. Bush being one bad apple—the entire executive branch, Senate, and Congress, were awash with Republicans and self-proclaimed conservatives.  We got government that was larger and more unsavory than anything Democrats had ever delivered us—unprecedented federal regulations on the education system, a huge expansion of Medicare entitlements, and a Great Society program for the entire Middle East under the guise of “protecting us from terrorism”.

I needn’t relate the terrifying numbers to you, which constitute the national debt, the tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities, and the unfolding population shift that spells crisis for all the entitlement systems.  We have heard these numbers endlessly, and we are all well aware of them.

We are in a serious crisis, and the root of this crisis is a federal government that has stifled the ability of our once robust and well-oiled free market economy to provide for its participants.  The federal government has disoriented and impoverished the individuals comprising the free market slowly, bit by bit, over the course of many decades.  Each additional, little program has contributed a little bit more to the economic and fiscal disaster now upon us.  What the economy needs is not someone who will tinker with, and try to “fix,” all these thousands of poorly-functioning trinkets that, combined, are crushing us beneath their weight.  What the economy needs is someone who will simply throw all of this junk off of our backs entirely.

The charge typically thrown at those who advocate such a massive paring down of federal responsibilities is that we would be “throwing out” these things entirely.  Without federal student loans, we just won’t have college education anymore.  Without subsidies to the arts, we just won’t have any museums.  Without massive entitlement systems, we just won’t have health care in this country.  If the federal government doesn’t do it itself, it just won’t happen.

As conservatives, our immediate response should be, “Bull hockey.”  We know better than that.  We had all these things before the feds got involved in them, and their rate of improvement has either slowed or reversed since the feds got involved.

The biggest portion of federal weight on the private economy is of course not student loans and subsidies to the arts, but rather military spending and entitlement spending.  Once again, the charge of big government-supporters is that if the Pentagon isn’t expropriating and using the wealth we create, then we will be unsafe.  If Medicare and Social Security are not humming with a steady intake of taxpayers’ money, then retirees will waste away in the streets.  On so many other issues, we conservatives readily see and admit that government spending more money on a good or service does not equal a better good or service.  Shoveling more money into the Department of Education does not equal a better educational system, just as shoveling more money into the Department of Defense does not equal a better national defense.  We can and should see huge portions of the defense and entitlement budgets returned to private control.  For every dollar that we take away from a bureaucrat’s pocketbook and return to the individual who earned it, we see an increase in the prudence and ingenuity with which it is put to use.

We need a very, very big change—not only in the size of government, but in the entire attitude and culture that defines the citizenry’s relationship to government.  A President can only accomplish so much, which is why every President accomplishes far less than they promise.  This is why I feel it is so important to risk erring more on the side of small government and individual liberty.  A President who promises to eliminate three federal Cabinet departments will probably only eliminate one—and it will probably be eliminated by joining its staff and budget to other departments in such a way that no net decrease in spending occurs.  A President who promises to cut federal spending by 10% will probably only slow the increase in federal spending by about 10%.  If we really want to see even minor changes in the way the government operates, we need to elect someone who promises to cut federal spending by a full 40%, or someone who will submit a balanced budget to Congress in his or her first or second year in office.  There will be push-back from the legislative branch and other elements of the government, but we will be much farther on the road to a balanced federal budget and an economic recovery with a President who pushes the envelope a great deal and only makes half the progress they intend to, rather than a President who promises to push only a little bit past the status quo and ends up only maintaining the status quo (or worse).

Now is not the time for status quo moderation.  We cannot afford a “safe” (which is not truly safe anyway) presidential candidate that will merely get an “(R)” into the Oval Office without actually making a serious difference in federal spending and monetary policy.  It’s time to move past the red flag / blue flag game we so enjoy playing and actually get serious about changing this government from a huge, limitless one, to a limited, constitutionally constrained one.  Only a libertarian Republican can accomplish this.

If you want an America defined by personal responsibility, free market capitalism, and strong communities, then vote for Ron Paul or Gary Johnson in your state’s primary or caucus.  If you want an America that continues its slow, gravely slide into economic stagnation, uncontrolled government power, and civil strife, then vote for any of the other seven candidates with a great haircut, a perfectly-fitting suit, smooth oratory skills, and a milquetoast commitment to individual freedom and free markets.

Politico reports that House Republicans have made it a priority to advance a balanced budget amendment, with a couple variations possible:

There are two options, which the House Republican Conference is mulling Friday morning in a closed meeting. One balanced budget amendment would cap federal spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product, while requiring a two-thirds supermajority for raising taxes. The other is a so-called “clean” balance budget measure, without any super majority limitations for tax increases.

“We’ve been involved in good faith negotiations and discussions with Democrat colleagues and I’m just convinced this is the right policy moving forward,” [Mike] Pence told POLITICO.

Of course, the subtext is that House Democrats have signaled that they wouldn’t help Republicans get to 290 — the number of votes needed to meet the threshold to amend the Constitution.

Pushing this legislation would certainly lend credence to the tough rhetoric Republicans have taken on the deficit since President Obama took office. After all, Democrats frequently allege that while Republicans like to talk tough on the deficit, when they get in power they don’t really do much. A BBA would help counter these claims.

Of course, they’ll face a steeply uphill battle with attracting support. Democrats will not want to place any more pressure to cut spending on themselves, and on the other side of the coin, many Republicans will recognize that a BBA may compel them to vote for tax increases. Still, if the party genuinely believes in balanced budgets, this is a battle worth having.

A new report from the non-partisan Civic Foundation illustrates yet another example of how not to govern courtesy of my home state of Illinois:

Despite a major income tax increase, the state of Illinois is expected to end the budget year more than $8 billion in the red, according to a report set to be released Monday by a nonpartisan tax watchdog group.

The Civic Federation analysis found that while lawmakers cut spending for state agencies this year, the reductions were offset by higher pension costs and the growing cost of paying back years of increased borrowing to keep Illinois afloat.

…”What we’re seeing is that even after a considerable tax increase and a commitment by the Illinois General Assembly to set expenditures based on revenues, because of the manipulations to under fund Medicaid and the growing debt service and pension contribution costs, the state remains in an unstable and unsustainable fiscal situation,” said Laurence Msall, Civic Federation president.

…Despite the bleak picture, Msall said there was a silver lining this year — lawmakers made the annual pension payment without borrowing money. But Msall said that payment, roughly $4 billion, ate up most of the extra money the January tax increase brought into the state, and the pension systems remain severely underfunded.

So, let’s recap: Illinois elected officials, led by Gov. Pat Quinn, argue in favor of a tax increase as a means to address the state’s mountains of unfunded pension liabilities. The hikes pass, and, lo and behold, while they do generate some additional revenue (aside from making the state even less competitive for businesses), the structural deficit has hardly changed!

If this should sound familiar, that’s because it is. The Illinois government and budget offer plenty of lessons we can apply on a national scale. Indeed, you can substitute “entitlement” for “pension”, “country” for “state”, and “trillion[s] for billion[s]” and have almost the same overall scenario. This provides us with a key insight: that we should look to spending restraint (read: entitlement reform), not tax increases, as the primary means to address our fiscal woes.

As the Land of Lincoln has showed us, you cannot erase red ink without focusing on the true driver of budget gaps. Public pensions act as that for Illinois; for the federal government, entitlements do.

Here’s an interesting item in the blogosphere this afternoon concerning the Congressional Debt Panel and its deliberations:

A bipartisan group of 36 senators urged the joint committee on deficit reduction Thursday to exceed its legal mandate and cut the deficit by as much as $4 trillion by embracing tax reform and entitlement cuts.

The group was led by Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.) and Mark Warner (Va.), members of the Gang of Six, a group of senators who worked for months on deficit reduction ideas and unveiled a similar proposal in the days just before Congress accepted the debt deal with much more modest goals early in August.

The group’s message to the panel, dubbed the “supercommittee,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D): “Be brave, be bold, go big.”

Let’s hope this leads to something.  Read the full story here.

Yesterday, Conserative Home published an op-ed by former Race42012 contributor Dustin Siggins and me.  I initially posted this yesterday but then figured it made much more sense to wait until today, so we had time to discuss and process last night’s debate.  Without further ado:

With President Obama making a major speech about jobs this week, and the House GOP, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman putting forth their own plans in response, it appears employment will finally be on the forefront of the public debate. This year’s often vitriol-filled discussions of the United States’ bleak fiscal future, despite their intensive media coverage, have overlooked a stark reality: millions of Americans still sit out of work. Paul Krugman gets a rare cheer for a recent column in which he hammered Washington for replacing leadership with gamesmanship.

Let’s be clear: the national debt is the greatest issue facing America. However, to achieve long-lasting success, any plan to balance the budget must encourage job growth. A growing economy will do a great deal to shrink the deficit as it increases tax revenues, and it will enable more Americans to provide for themselves, control their own financial destinies and avoid government dependency. This especially matters to the 115 million Americans aged 5-30, who will become the Debt-Paying Generation (DPG) if our national debt continues to skyrocket.

With some ideas already on the table, and others still being hammered into actual plans, here are some proposals our leadership and potential leaders should embrace:

• Eliminate all tax loopholes and simplify the tax structure. Americans spent 6.1 billion hours and over $160 billion (equivalent to about 40 hours and over $1,000 per working American) complying with just the personal and corporate income tax code in 2010. Certainly, under a flat tax or the FairTax, taxpayers could redeploy these resources in productive activities that would expand the economic pie and thus increase tax revenues. Furthermore, such reforms would eliminate or at least shrink the IRS, taking up to a $13 billion dollar bite out of the deficit.

• Eliminate all subsidies from the government to private companies. The energy industries, for example, received direct subsidies of $37.2 billion in 2010, all at the expense of the American taxpayer— and some at the expense of the poor in this and other countries. Total corporate welfare totaled $92 billion in 2009. These and other subsidies only distort markets, essentially taking productive dollars out of the private sector and redistributing them at the whims of politicians and government bureaucrats.

• Utilize all of America’s energy resources without prejudice. Essentially, get the government out of the way and let each form of energy- from nuclear to oil to hydro to ethanol- stand on its own merits. This will create hundreds of thousands of new high-skill, well-paying, long-lasting jobs in the nuclear and oil industries alone. Additionally, allowing equal competition would create a smaller regulatory bureaucracy in Washington, and eliminate many of the above-mentioned subsidies. This would save the taxpayers money and increase tax revenues, creating a two-fold deficit reduction effect.

• Cut regulations with an axe. The size of the Federal Register, the official record of federal regulations, swelled to nearly 80,000 pages during the Bush administration. To name but a few egregious current examples:

1. The infamous light bulb law, which effectively bans standard incandescent bulbs, has already begun to drive jobs and capital overseas. It also restricts the choices free, law-abiding Americans can make regarding their energy options.
2. According to a 30-year veteran of business ownership interviewed for this piece, the minimum wage is a significant job-killer. Instead of helping low-skill workers, it actually crowds them out of the job market by making their cost to an employer more expensive than the benefit to an employer.
3. “Richard Gale,” a general contractor and member of the Debt-Paying Generation, told us a series of 2010 EPA lead regulations impose significant costs on his business. Formal estimates of the impact on businesses vary, but according to “Richard,” the “cost of training, licensing, lead testing and extensive precautionary measures make the cost of contracting services prohibitive to the customer,” and thus deprive “Richard” of approximately $20,000 in lost annual revenue.
4. Myriad rules and restrictions on energy projects caused a natural gas pipeline, which stretches from Opal, Wyoming to Malin, Oregon, to finish four months late and 23% over budget.

Ours is the longest-lasting recession in several generations, and it is likely to continue for some time— despite the influx of government debt over the last 4 years. At the current pace of job creation vs. debt creation, the Debt-Paying Generation is in serious trouble: according to August 2010 Bureau of Labor Studies statistics, 16-24 year olds have an unemployment rate of over 20%. An entire subsection of young people is losing the opportunities necessary to garner job skills, grow their retirement savings and purchase their first home. And while the spending cuts we recommend won’t balance the budget, they represent a serious down payment that will grant politicians a little more time to tackle the “big four” expenses of our federal government: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and national defense.

It heartens us to see influential public figures finally returning their collective focus to unemployment. Now, we challenge them to take matters one step further and offer credible proposals on how to get America back on the path to recovery.

Thoughts? Questions? Concerns? Let us know what you think!

When Obama took office, the national debt stood at $10.6 trillion.

Since then, it has risen to $14.6 trillion.

That is irresponsible and unpatriotic of the President. But don’t just take my word for it…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuTG19Cu_Q[/youtube]

And to top it off, Obama complained about Bush adding $4 trillion in debt over eight years. Our current commander-in-chief has achieved that feat in less than half the time!

We all know how much Obama loves calling the actions of his administration “unprecedented”. Well, he can add this to the list.

In case you haven’t heard, Standard & Poor’s just announced that they will downgrade the U.S.’s credit rating:

S&P dropped the ranking one level to AA+, after warning on July 14 that it would reduce the rating in the absence of a “credible” plan to lower deficits even if the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit was lifted. The U.S. was awarded the top credit ranking by New York-based S&P in 1941. It kept the outlook at “negative” amid the failure to end Bush-era tax cuts.

“The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics,” S&P said in a statement today.

…S&P said it may lower the long-term rating to AA within the next two years if spending reductions are lower than agreed to, interest rates rise or “new fiscal pressures” during the period result in higher general government debt.

Well, we can’t act surprised. Ratings agencies have warned us for years that our elected officials needed to enact structural entitlement reform to maintain top-quality credit. One can’t help but assume that the Obama administration convinced S&P to wait on making the decision official until the markets closed today.

In a shameless abdication of reality, the media has already begun attempts to lay the blame on the Republican Party or the ratings agencies themselves. Just look at some of these headlines: “Is the U.S. Credit Rating a Victim of GOP Sabotage?” (written by none other than Yahoo! Finance’s economics editor) and “S&P Downgrades the U.S. – But Why?”

How will President Obama try to wriggle out from under this one? Sure, he can lean on his tried-and-true tactic of blaming the opposition party, but the fact remains that he has bowed to political considerations and avoided entitlement reform (other than adding an additional entitlement, of course…) as much as possible, in an attempt to force the GOP to “make the first move” and thus create more fodder for the negative attacks he vowed to cast aside but has instead embraced.

Simply put, the President had his chance; with the stratospheric amount of goodwill he carried when he entered office, he could have harnessed the opportunity to advocate true entitlement and tax reform. However, he passed. Instead, he opted to pour his political capital into an ill-begotten “stimulus” plan that did more to safeguard public union jobs than it did to fund the infrastructure projects Democrats so love, in addition to a frighteningly complex and opaque health care bill.

Try as he might, I can’t see how anybody other than hardcore Democratic partisans and the lowest of the low-information voters can let Obama slide on this. The problem didn’t start with Obama, nor with George W. Bush (although both did their part to contribute), but he sure didn’t do anything to help.

Today, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wrote an enlightening analysis of the respective decisions by Mitt Romney and John Huntsman to oppose and support Washington’s recent debt ceiling agreement:

Basically all of Romney’s opponents are getting some traction by criticizing his inaction on the issue. And one of The Fix’s favorite reporters – Politico’s Ben Smith – coined a term this week that could haunt Team Romney in the weeks and months ahead: The Mittness Protection Program. It refers to the idea that Romney has basically been hiding from the big ideas and issues of the day.

This could all help Romney’s opponents paint a picture that ends up being very similar to the image that emerged of Romney’s 2008 campaign. In that race, Romney got pegged as an expedient politician with no real convictions.

At the same time, by not supporting or opposing all of the other proposals that were brought forward before the final deal, Romney avoided pinning himself down on all manner of things that could be used against him in the future.

Any time you’re supporting or opposing a broad package of spending cuts and reforms, its pretty easy to cherry pick one or two items than make for a powerful campaign ad. If you were one of Romney’s opponents, you could easily pick one of the more controversial aspects of the plan and hang it around Romney’s neck. Or, if he didn’t support the larger proposal, you could accuse him of opposing this or that spending cut.

Romney also has an eye on the general election, where he still wants to be able to attract independent voters. Embracing some of the more conservative proposals could have hurt him if he gets to that point.

…Huntsman, meanwhile, was quick to jump on board with the last two proposals. This is part of his strategy of trying to look like the adult in the room – the moderate pragmatist who wants to get things done and isn’t a craven politician.

“Everyone else played politics,” Huntsman spokesman Tim Miller said. “Voters want a president who is going to be honest with them.”

Inasmuch as Huntsman has a path to victory right now, this is it. While all the other Republicans will be fighting over ground on the right, Huntsman is content to appeal to the leftovers in the middle.

Mr. Blake also notes that any negative proposals coming from the debt super-committee could easily get pegged to Huntsman by his opponents.

As we’ve seen, the polling data that has emerged since the agreement has suggested that candidates like Romney, Pawlenty, and Bachmann, who opposed the deal, may not see much political damage, as most of the public disapproved of the proceedings.

For those who, like me, came away perplexed from Mitt’s posture (or lack thereof) during the debt ceiling debate, Blake’s article certainly sheds some light on the strategy behind it.

CNN/ORC Debt Ceiling Survey

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president?

• Approve 45% (45%) [48%] {54%}
• Disapprove 52% (54%) [48%] {45%}
• No opinion 2% (2%) [5%] {2%}

Note: Results in parenthesis taken July 18-20. Results in brackets taken June 3-7. Results in curly brackets taken May 24-26.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?

• Approve 14%
• Disapprove 84%

As you may know, an agreement between Barack Obama and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress would raise the federal government’s debt ceiling through the year 2013 and make major cuts in
government spending over the next few years.

Based on what you have read or heard, do you approve or disapprove of that agreement?

• Approve 44%
• Disapprove 52%
• No opinion

As you may know, the agreement would raise the debt ceiling through the year 2013. Regardless of
how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of raising the debt ceiling
at this time?

• Approve 48%
• Disapprove 51%
• No opinion

As you may know, the agreement would cut about one trillion dollars in government spending over
the next ten years with provisions to make additional spending cuts in the future. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the cuts in government
spending included in the debt ceiling agreement?

• Approve 65%
• Disapprove 30%
• No opinion 4%

And as you may know, the agreement does not include any tax increases for business or higher-income Americans. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the fact that the debt ceiling agreement does not include tax increases for those
groups?

• Approve 40%
• Disapprove 60%

Do you think that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by Tuesday would create a crisis for the United
States, major problems, minor problems, or no problems at all?

• Crisis 14%
• Major problems 38%
• Minor problems 31%
• No problems at all 15%

Who do you think is more responsible for the debt ceiling agreement? Do you think Barack Obama
and the Democrats in Congress are more responsible for that agreement, or do you think the Republicans in Congress are more responsible for that agreement?

• Obama/Democrats in Congress 34%
• Republicans in Congress 42%
• Both equally 18%
• Neither/no opinion 6%

Next, please tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way each of the following has handled the negotiations over the debt ceiling in Washington over the past few days.

Barack Obama 46% approve/53% disapprove (-7%)
The Republican leaders in Congress 30% approve/68% disapprove (-38%)
The Democratic leaders in Congress 35% approve/63% disapprove (-28%)

Interviews with 860 adult Americans conducted by telephone on August 1, 2011. The margin of error is +/- 3.5%

A few follow-up points:

1. Ouch. These numbers certainly don’t look good for Republicans. Apparently, the majority of the public views our Republican leaders’ performance as childish, unreasonable, and selfish (maximizing political gain at the expense of “reasonable compromise”). Prepare to see the Democrats paint their Republican counterparts with this brush well into the future.

2. After seeing this, the decision of all the Republican presidential candidates except Jon Huntsman to oppose the deal make more sense (at least from a political standpoint).

3. This poll gives the Dems even more ammo to wax poetic about the need for a “balanced approach”, filled with “shared sacrifice” and “millionaire and billionaire corporate jet owners paying their fair share” in future deals. In fact, we’ll probably hear the words “balanced approach” so often from Democratic leaders, they might as well tattoo them on their foreheads.

By TwitterButtons.com

As was expected, the House of Representatives passed the debt-ceiling deal tonight by a margin of 269-161. Democrats split their vote exactly evenly 95-95 while Republicans voted 174-66 in favor of the bill. As Politico points out, all this talk of uber-radical freshmen turns out to be more than a little spin. You can see how your Representative voted here.

However, the most dramatic moment of the night was when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, still recovering from an attempted assassination, made her way to the floor and cast her first vote since January. As you might guess, the returning Congresswoman was met by an emotional, emphatic and overwhelming response. I defy anyone to not feel a small lump in your throat or a tear in your eye at this one.

Sorry to spoil the President’s victory lap and throw some cold water on his fire, but the issue of the day – the economy – still looms large:

Manufacturers had their weakest growth in two years in July, a sign that the economy could weaken this summer.

The Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing executives, said Monday that its index of manufacturing activity fell to 50.9 percent in July from 55.3 percent in June. The reading was the lowest since July 2009 — one month after the recession officially ended.

…The disappointing report on manufacturing is the first major reading on how the economy performed in July. It suggests the dismal economic growth in the first half of the year could extend into the July-September quarter.

…The economy expanded at a dismal 1.3 percent annual rate in the April-June period after an even worse 0.4 percent increase in the first three months of the year, the government said Friday.

…The index fell in May to 53.5 from April’s reading of 60.4. That was the sharpest one-month drop since 1984.

Employers have responded by pulling back on hiring. The economy added just 18,000 net jobs in June, the fewest in nine months, and the unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent. Hiring by manufacturers was nearly flat in the April-June period.

Of course, when the economy continues to sputter into 2012, Obama will most likely suggest that the spending cuts contained in the debt ceiling/deficit agreement contributed to the malaise.

Typical of Keynesians, the President wants to have his cake and eat it, too; he stumps for increased government spending to end the recession, calls for even more when these measures fail to have their desired effects, and then rails against the massive federal deficit largely caused, of course, by spending.

When it comes down to it and people challenge Kenynesians on why their policy prescriptions rarely, if ever, achieve their expected growth effects, they often take the easy way out and argue that they simply didn’t go far enough.

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