Steve Hayes and Charles Krauthammer, on Friday’s Special Report with Bret Baier, scoffed at the Washington Post’s front page characterization that President Barack Obama’s expected budget proposal “will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency.”

Hayes marveled: “This is one of the funny things about reading mainstream newspapers and watching mainstream media report on this President, is they somehow are operating under the illusion we’re living in this age of austerity.” Krauthammer proposed, “we have talked about Obama’s assaulting the Constitution. This is an assault on the dictionary. This is a guy who ran $4 trillion of deficit in three years...”

The top of the February 21 front page headline: “Obama budget to rebuff austerity.” Online, the headline over the story by business reporter Zachary Goldfarb: “With 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to era of austerity.”

FNC anchor Bret Bair read from the article to lead off the panel segment, “‘With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans,’” before cuing up Hayes of The Weekly Standard: “Steve, I think a lot of people might say, ‘really, age of austerity?’”

from some discussions regardig the CBO employment numbers last week.

Mr. Mulligan thinks the CBO deserves particular credit for learning and then revising the old 800,000 number, not least because so many liberals cited it to dispute the claims of ObamaCare’s critics. The new finding might have prompted a debate about the marginal tax rates confronting the poor, but—well, it didn’t.

Instead, liberals have turned to claiming that ObamaCare’s missing workers will be a gift to society. Since employers aren’t cutting jobs per se through layoffs or hourly take-backs, people are merely choosing rationally to supply less labor. Thanks to ObamaCare, we’re told, Americans can finally quit the salt mines and blacking factories and retire early, or spend more time with the children, or become artists.

Mr. Mulligan reserves particular scorn for the economists making this…argument…

A job, Mr. Mulligan explains, “is a transaction between buyers and sellers. When a transaction doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. We know that it doesn’t matter on which side of the market you put the disincentives, the results are the same. . . . In this case you’re putting an implicit tax on work for households, and employers aren’t willing to compensate the households enough so they’ll still work.” Jobs can be destroyed by sellers (workers) as much as buyers (businesses).

He adds: “I can understand something like cigarettes and people believe that there’s too much smoking, so we put a tax on cigarettes, so people smoke less, and we say that’s a good thing. OK. But are we saying we were working too much before? Is that the new argument? I mean make up your mind. We’ve been complaining for six years now that there’s not enough work being done. . . . Even before the recession there was too little work in the economy. Now all of a sudden we wake up and say we’re glad that people are working less? We’re pursuing our dreams?”

The larger betrayal, Mr. Mulligan argues, is that the same economists now praising the great shrinking workforce used to claim that ObamaCare would expand the labor market.

He points to a 2011 letter…signed by dozens of left-leaning economists including Nobel laureates, stating “our strong conclusion” that ObamaCare will strengthen the economy and create 250,000 to 400,000 jobs annually….

“Why didn’t they say, no, we didn’t mean the labor market’s going to get bigger. We mean it’s going to get smaller in a good way,” Mr. Mulligan wonders. “I’m unhappy with that, to be honest, as an American, as an economist. Those kind of conclusions are tarnishing the field of economics, which is a great, maybe the greatest, field. They’re sure not making it look good by doing stuff like that.” [Bold added.]

And now here’s Cochrane, following up on the above commentary:

The rhetoric of our national conversation is strangely asymmetric…Imagine if, say, a Republican congressman said how great it was that lower and middle income people were quitting their jobs, so they could become artists. He would be pilloried as completely out of touch with the realities of life in middle America. What, has he been hanging out with former President Bush too much?
…
There are a hundred disincentives to work in America right now. Job lock was a big problem with our employer-based health insurance system, and I’ve written against it too arguing for a system based on portable individual insurance. But as economists, we are supposed to look at overall distortions, understand that employer and employee distortions contribute equally, and that jobs represent two-sided matches. The idea that the full effect of government policy was to induce too many people to work is just silly. [Bold added.]

Beautiful; exactly.

my first touch regarding this was here:  The New Yorker's Embarrassing Attack on Clarence Thomas

There's another good take here: Toobin’s Disgrace

but the BEST take on it: “The white man demands that the black man entertain him?”

These incompetents can't even get their failures on the same page.

Biden Admits Defeat on 7 Million Obamacare Enrollment Goal

Sebelius Denies WH Ever Aimed For 7 Million Obamacare Sign-Ups

RICHARD VEDDER ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S WEALTH INEQUALITY:

The eight Ivy League schools have less than 1 percent of U.S. college students but almost 17 percent of all endowment money. The top 3 percent of schools ranked by endowment size have more than half the funds. Five schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford University and one public institution, the University of Texas) had endowment increases last year of more than $1 billion, exceeding the total endowment of more than 90 percent of the schools (including virtually all the larger ones) publicly disclosing information.

Do rich schools use their wealth to promote upward economic mobility by disproportionately accepting low-income students? No — just the opposite. I took the 10 highest-endowed schools and looked at the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, then compared that with the 10 lowest-endowed schools in a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Most Pell Grant students come from below-average-income households. In the highly endowed schools, a median of 16 percent of students received Pells, compared with 59 percent at the lowest-endowed institutions.

A student graduating from Yale or Princeton, with their roughly $2 million endowments per student, has a ticket to a well-paying job, while one graduating from the College of St. Joseph in Vermont, with its $29,000 endowment per student, does not. Only 12 percent of the Yale and Princeton students have Pells, compared with 71 percent at St. Joseph.

1. Total Fed assets increased by 400%.
2. The Fed increased its holdings of U.S. Treasury debt by almost $2 trillion, or over 200%.
3. The Fed now owns over $1.5 trillion of mortgage-backed securities that the private banking system wants nothing to do with.
4. The Fed is perilously close to balance sheet insolvency. When he took over in 2006 the Fed would need to suffer a loss of 3.5% on its assets to force it to throw in the towel (or force it to going crawling to Congress with its tail between its legs and beg for a bailout.) On the day Bernanke left office that loss was reduced to only a hair over 1%.
5. Unemployment is 6.6% today, compared with 4.8% on the day he took office in 2006. Not only that, labor force participation is down, meaning that not only are fewer people working who would like to work, many more have given up on the prospect of ever having job.

Janet Yellen has her work cut out to better these figures. In my recent daily at Mises Canada I explain why she´s in a pretty good position. Bernanke has left the economy so destabilized that it is hard to see how much worse it could get.  Read more here.

Patrick Barron writes in today’s Mises Daily: 

In The Law Frédéric Bastiat presents the irrefutable maxim that man’s rights exist prior to the formation of the state and that, therefore, the collective action of the state cannot conflict with man’s prior rights. According to Bastiat, man can delegate to the state only those powers that he himself already possesses, and man does not have the natural right to force another to give to a charity. Since I cannot coerce you to give to the charity of my choice, neither can government force you to give to the charity of its choice. Yet that is exactly what it does. Let us say that you object that government gives money to a charity that you personally abhor. You would not get very far arguing that you have a right to reduce your tax payment by a pro-rata amount. If you persisted in withholding payment, government will confiscate your assets. If you try to protect your assets, government will kill you.

Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb caused spit takes in Washington on Friday morning. At the top left of the paper, the headline is "Obama budget to rebuff austerity." Or, as Goldfarb described the new White House budget document, "Obama will call for an an end to the era of austerity that has dogged his presidency..."

Is there nobody at the Post who can properly understand that the largest deficits in American history have occurred in the past five years?

meanwhile, the Missus got in on the act as well

First Lady Michelle Obama insulted the young people of America during an appearance on Thursday night’s Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon asked her why young people should sign up for ObamaCare if they can’t afford it, and Mrs. Obama struck a condescending note in her response.

“[A] lot of young people think they’re invincible,” she said. “But the truth is, young people are knuckleheads. You know? They're the ones who are cooking for the first time and slice their finger open. They’re dancing on the bar stool.”

read more

I've repeatedly posted the graph showing the failure of Obama's stimulus package which came nowhere near doing what it was supposed to do as far as unemployment was concerned.  Now this, regarding LBJ's War on Poverty.

Take a look at the graph below. From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half. Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone. Economic growth is clearly the most effective antipoverty weapon ever devised by man.

The dotted line shows what would have happened had this trend continued. Economic growth would have reduced the number in poverty to a mere 1.4% of the population today — a number so low that private charity could probably have taken care of any unmet needs.

But we didn’t continue the trend. In 1965 we launched a War on Poverty. And as the graph shows, in the years that followed the portion of Americans living in poverty barely budged. In 1965, 18% of the population lived in poverty. Today we are at 15%, or 50 million Americans. That’s after spending $15 trillion on antipoverty programs and continuing to spend $1 trillion a year.

I've had versions of this regularly for the last two plus dozen decades.  I wish I never had to have it again.  It's sad, really.  the conversation starts over many issues: abortion, drug laws, 2nd Amendment ... you name it.  But at a very base level, it almost ALWAYS comes down to this.

ME:  Where do rights come from?

Them:  The govertnment.

Me:  Let's say you wanted to give me a milliuon dollars.  What would you have to have?

Them: A million dollars.

Me:  Right.  Now, where do rights come from?

Them:  <eyes rolling>  The government!

Me:  Where did THEY get them?

Them.  <Blank stare> Whadaya mean?

Me:  Before you can GIVE something you have to HAVE it.  Before the governement GIVES us our rights they have to GET them from somewhere.  Where?

Them <eyes light up, thinking they're going to win>  The Constitution!

Me:  Yes.  Sort of.  The government was given stuff by the Constitution.   By whom? (THATalways throws them.  "Whom.")

Them: <sensing it might be slipping away> Whadaya mean?

Me:  Who gave the governemnt stuff via the Constitution?  I'll give you a hint, it's in the very beginning of the Constitution.

Them <SO proud> We, the people.

Me:  RIGHT.  Very good.  (might even include a pat on the head here.)  Now, where'd WE get them?

Them: <slumping and obviously losing interest becuase, you know, thinking is HARD>  Whadaya mean?

Me:  Well, we've agreed that before you can GIVE something you have to HAVE it, and you've said we GAVE it ot the government via the Constitution.  So where'd WE get it? (also note, completely bypassing the  point that we had it in the first place)

Them <slumping into chair> I dunno.

Finish it off with a quick lecture on natural human rights, wrap it up in a bow, wipe their nose, pat them on the ass, send them  on their way, KNOWING with great certitude that you're going to have to do it all again tomorrow.