COTW: Bread & Circuses

David Stockman has seen the light and is talking the talk. Regan's former bad boy of the budget tells us what many of us already instinctively know: the job numbers are bogus, period. He says the Second Great Depression resulted in the lost of 5.7 million middle-class jobs; those are permanent, 40 hours-per- week jobs on which a person can raise a family. Stockman labels these "breadwinning jobs". New jobs are temporary or part-time because no employer wants to be stuck paying for benefits. These 'McJobs' only pay about 40% of a real job. Consequently the average weekly number of hours worked is still going down, a trend that has continued since Nixon:

Fifteen years of money printing for the rich and connected, causing the Fed balance sheet to explode in size 9 times, has done almost nothing for Mainstreet while further enriching the financial elite of Wall Street:

The part-time economy maybe bustling as we serve each other drinks and tacos while your hotel bed is made and you shop for shoe repairs, but actual goods-producing jobs have yet to recover fully from the Second Great Depression. Only 21% of those jobs have been recovered. Stockman says manufacturing jobs are 22% lower than they were at the turn of this century:

Bottom line: Hope that the radical Keynesians are not smoking legal pot when they claim the US economy can continue indefinitely to borrow from the rest of the world.