This week gave us two big pieces of economic news.
First, after wrapping up on their two-day meeting on Thursday, Federal Reserve officials announced that they would not hike interest rates and signaled they would pause further increases going forward, in light of recent turbulence in the financial markets, signs of trouble with global growth, and relatively muted inflation. The shift relieved investors and sent stocks rocketing higher.
Then, on Friday, the Department of Labor delivered an unexpectedly strong jobs report. Employers added 304,000 workers to their payrolls in January, compared tothe 170,000 forecasted by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. Companies mostly seem to have shrugged off this winter’s government shutdown. In fact, the numbers showed that hiring has sped back up after a lull in the summer and early fall. The economy tacked on an average of 241,000 jobs over each of the last three months, compared to an overall monthly average of 205,000 since the beginning of 2017.
One way to look at these two pieces of news is that the Fed has been worrying about nothing, and that it can safely get back to hiking rates like before. As Politico’s Ben White put it:
If anything, though, I’d say opposite is true. The fact that employers can still find hundreds of thousands of people to hire each month suggests that, even in an economy that seems pretty hot, there are still plenty of Americans who want or need work. The Fed is right to take a breather before trying to cool down the economy in order to prevent inflation.
Over the years since the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve has consistently underestimated the amount of “slack” left in the labor market—essentially, how far joblessness can fall before employers have to start paying significantly higher wages in order to hire, which could cause inflation to pick up. One major reason why is that Fed economists have traditionally looked at the official unemployment rate as a guide to the economy’s condition. Headline unemployment has dropped to historic lows, which at one time might have meant that almost everybody who really wanted a job had one. But today, the statistic no longer seems to accurately reflect how many Americans who would like to work if they could find the right opportunity, or who simply wanted more hours. As a result, there have consistently been more adults ready to take a job than our central bankers realized. Fed officials keep thinking they’re about to run out of slack—and that inflation will surely pick up—only to discover they’ve got plenty more rope left in the economy.
Notably, nobody has been a loudercritic of the Fed’s excessive hawkishness than our president, Donald Trump. He might not understand the nuances, and is likely concerned mostly with keeping the economy hot so his poll ratings stay out of the thirties, but he’s been uncharacteristically lucid about the Fed’s unnecessary tightening. (His inability to pick Fed officials who’s views he actually agrees with notwithstanding).
Today’s giant jobs report doesn’t tell us for sure that the labor market will have more slack going forward. But it does confirm, yet again, that Fed officials have been too pessimistic in the past about how much room the job market has had to grow. Meanwhile, plenty of data points, such as the share of Americans in their prime working years who are employed and the speed at which employers are raising salaries, are signaling that the country still has a long while to go before employers have to worry about anything resembling a labor shortage. Taken together, it all suggests our monetary policy makers are right to sit back, stop trying so hard to snuff out inflation before it flares up, and let companies keep their hiring signs up. Good jobs numbers, like today’s, are a hint that the economy could be even better.
Deranged liberals are sorry to see him go after his poetry and writings about killing children certainly qualified him to be on the road to the WH.
"I need a butt-shine,
Right now
You are holy,
Oh, sacred Cow
I thirst for you,
Provide Milk.
Buff my balls,
Love the Cow,
Good fortune for those that do.
Love me, breathe my feet,
The Cow has risen.
Wax my ass,
Scrub my balls.
The Cow has risen,
Provide Milk."
More of his literary genius.
“One day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street. They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles…. This happiness was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams,” O’Rourke wrote in one of the t-files, according to Reuters.
“As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two. I was so fascinated for a moment, that when after I had stopped my vehicle, I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head,” O’Rourke continued.
Yeah, he was a teen when he wrote this and at one time so was Ted Bundy.
And this asshole ran for president...
The frosting on the cake.
He began to focus on gun control, and vowed to remove assault-style weapons from private ownership, saying in one televised debate: "Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15s."
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., defended former California Congresswoman Katie Hill and blasted her fellow Democrats for not rallying around her following a scandal that led to her resignation.
"This is an issue where a lot of millennials, I think sympathize with Katie Hill because a lot of young people who grew up with a smartphone in their hands took pictures, sent them, shared messages and materials that are now recoverable later in life," Gaetz said Thursday on "The Story with Martha MacCallum."
"Katie Hill's problem is not with Donald Trump. I wish she had not lashed out at him. Her ire should be directed at her fellow Democrats," he said.
Hill ripped into her political opponents on Thursday, denouncing what she called a "double standard" in politics that allegedly punished her while letting others off the hook.
Hill announced her resignation on Sunday after a media firestorm was ignited by intimate details about her personal life. Pornographic photos of her surfaced online after a conservative news site – RedState – reported on an extramarital affair that Hill allegedly had with staffers.
Gaetz was sympathetic to Hill and criticized Democrats for not supporting her.
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I think Gaetz is 100% correct. This kind of shit is normal behavior in the Democratic party and why they didn't support her is beyond disgusting!
Stupidity defined:
I’ll allow these photos to be taken…what could possibly go wrong?
Gotta love it...
'Hill ripped into her political opponents on Thursday, denouncing what she called a "double standard" in politics.'
Gaetz calls out Democrats for not defending Katie Hill
As you're reading remember this was another one of her profound predictions.
Video 528
If you did the check bounced.
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Nancy Pelosi wants you to know that the House Democratic leadership has not committed to impeaching President Donald Trump—notwithstanding the muscle she’s thrown behind the inquiry, or tomorrow’s vote on how its next stage will proceed.
“We have not made any decision to impeach,” the House speaker insisted during a meeting with a small group of columnists earlier this week.
But Pelosi nevertheless left little doubt that’s where the process is headed. She said flatly that she believes the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation has already accumulated enough evidence about Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to justify such a decision. “I do think we have enough,” she said. “We’ve had enough for a very long time … but as long as there is corroboration, we might as well get some more. And then we’ll see.” She was equally unequivocal that the core charges against Trump—that he withheld congressionally appropriated military aid to try to force Ukraine to investigate a political opponent—reach the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment.
“If this president were to get away with this, forget about it all,” she said, sitting in a conference room in her suite of offices in the Capitol. “We might as well not even run for office. You don’t need this branch of government if he’s going to overturn the power of the purse, if he is going to overturn all of the other checks and balances, the power of inquiry.”
Pelosi has never been quick to cry “impeach!” She pointed out that she dismissed demands from some House Democrats to pursue impeachment against George W. Bush over the Iraq War in the final two years of his presidency. More recently, she rebuffed demands from her party’s liberal wing to impanel a full-scale impeachment effort following Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report about Trump and Russian interference in 2016. But now that she’s begun an impeachment inquiry, she betrays no doubt about seeing it through. Impeachment promises to be an ordeal, especially against a president so volatile, combative, and willing to twist the truth. Approaching that heaving sea, Pelosi projected resolve. “When we decide, if we are going to go forward, we will be ready and we will be ironclad,” she said, referring to potential votes on articles of impeachment. It sounded less like a boast than a statement of fact.
Without detailing specific plans, Pelosi left the clear impression that the impeachment process will conclude sooner rather than later, and its focus will be more narrow than broad. She refused to answer when asked directly if any eventual articles of impeachment will cover issues beyond Trump’s interactions with Ukraine and the administration’s defiance of subpoenas from the committees investigating them. Some House Democrats have advocated for articles that address everything from family separations to emoluments. “No one should infer from what we’re doing that there is an imprimatur to do emoluments if it’s not” listed among Democrats’ justifications for impeaching Trump, Pelosi said. (She was careful to say, too, that if Trump’s team has “exculpatory testimony they want to present” on Ukraine, House Democrats are open to it: “We pray that that will be the case—something we don’t understand about how he interprets the Constitution.”)
Though Pelosi is vague on just how much longer the inquiry will go on, she expressed concern about Americans’ appetite for a lengthy process. “How much drama can the American people handle?” she asked. “Where does the law of diminishing returns set in? Where is the value added not worth the time?”
As those comments demonstrate, Pelosi seems focused on trying to win over public opinion on the impeachment process—and the Democrats’ broader governing agenda. Even as she dismissed the complaints from House Republicans about the investigation, she repeatedly returned to the theme of finding ways to reach voters now skeptical of Democrats. In the internal Democratic debate over whether the party’s future depends more on mobilizing its own core supporters or recapturing swing voters who took a flier on Trump in 2016, she clearly leans more toward the latter. This preference not only seems to inform how she’s approaching the House inquiry, but how she’s assessing the party’s policies.
She is openly dubious of the left’s top priority in 2020: the push to establish a single-payer health-care system that will replace private health insurance. It would be better for Democrats to “begin with where we have agreement,” she said. “Let’s not start with: ‘You have private insurance—forget about it.’” She wants to begin by bolstering the Affordable Care Act, adding a public competitor to private insurance and restoring provisions in the law that Trump has weakened. ”Maybe Medicare for all is a destination,” Pelosi said. “But it’s certainly not a starting point.”
Pelosi was reared in a Baltimore political family—her father was a Democratic representative from Maryland and later the city’s mayor—in an era when Democrats proudly considered themselves the party of the working class. That history was evident when she talked about the two parties’ coalitions, recoiling at the notion that education levels have become one of the central dividing lines. It worries her, she explained, when she hears that Democrats now rely on voters with more education, while Trump voters are deemed “uneducated.” “They’re not uneducated,” she said with sudden passion. “They’re educated and alive—fighting our wars, raising our families, building our country. Just because they don’t have a college degree doesn’t mean they are not educated.”
Even as Pelosi said she wants to generate the greatest possible public support for any action the House takes, she seemed sanguine about what that means in a country so persistently divided. In recent months, Pelosi had hesitated on impeachment partly out of fear it might threaten the 31 House Democrats, many of them first-termers, in districts that voted for Trump in 2016. But in the interview, she clearly signaled that she would be comfortable moving forward toward a vote without much more, if any more, public support than the investigation has already generated. “Over 50 percent [support] is very good,” she said, referring to recent polling. “And perhaps we will get [higher].”
Yet her expressed desire to create a process that minimizes division seems to reach its limit at her concern about Trump’s connections to Russia. In the interview, she repeated what she told Trump at his last meeting with congressional Democratic leaders in the White House, causing him to erupt in fury. It’s a line of argument that similarly enrages his supporters.
“In saying that he wasn’t going to send the military assistance to Ukraine, who benefits from that? The Russians. Then … he did what he did in Syria—who benefits from that? Putin. What he said earlier about NATO—who benefits from that? Putin,” she said. “That’s what I was saying the other day [in the meeting]: ‘All roads lead to Putin.’” She added, ominously if vaguely: “There is something wrong here about this Putin thing—there’s something wrong.”
I cut in, asking Pelosi exactly what she was implying about Trump. The exchange was striking enough to recount in detail.
Brownstein: “He’s called you a traitor. He’s said that you and [Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam] Schiff are guilty of treason. Is he guilty of treason? Is he undermining American national-security interests in the interest of serving a foreign leader?”
Pelosi: “Well, we’ll see. But what I’ll say is this: I don’t know if he’s guilty of treason. But I do know that he projects. Everything that he says—‘She’s in meltdown’ means that he’s in meltdown. Everything that he says, understand that he’s projecting his own recognizable [weakness].”
Brownstein: “But when you say, ‘All roads lead to Putin,’ what does that mean? Does that mean that you believe he is acting at the behest of Putin? Do you think he is trying to advance Putin’s interest?”
Pelosi: “I don’t know. All I know is the three things I mentioned in the room [with Trump], plus [a] fourth, the obstruction of our election … He is absolving Putin of any responsibility there … It’s just curious. … I said early on: ‘What is it that the Russians have on the president—politically, personally, or financially?’”
Brownstein: “But just to be clear, do you think there is reason to question his loyalty to the United States?”
Pelosi: “I’m not going to that place.”
Pelosi’s words were careful, but it’s easy to forget how unimaginable they might have been at any previous point in American history. She did not directly accuse the president of acting at Russia’s behest, but she didn’t exactly absolve him of the accusation either.
It was one of many moments during the interview that reflected Pelosi’s sense that Trump had carried Washington to a moment that historians will view as a hinge point for not only the American presidency, but for the nation. As she’s done before, Pelosi paraphrased a stirring line Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense during the American revolution: “The time hath found us.”
“We think the times have found us now,” she said. “Not any one of us, but all of us, all of you. The times have found us to protect this Constitution of the United States with three coequal branches of government as a check and balance on each other.” With open House hearings, a floor vote to impeach, and a Senate impeachment trial now all on the horizon, the next few months will measure how many Americans see this confrontation the same way.
