As a result of the debt deal, the Federal Government is going to spend more this year than last year. They are going to spend more next year than this year. This is true for both military and non-military spending. So why is John McCain is crying over military cuts? When you spend more than the prior year, I don’t think you really get to complain about cuts. If your favorite program has less money than last year, don’t fund one of your new programs. Or wind down one of the programs that have been dragging along since the cold war.

Ok, I’ll be back to hating on Democrats when they say something equally stupid. Note: “Satan Sandwich” doesn’t count. That’s gold. The Dems do get a partial reprimand for complaining about cuts while we continue to spend more year-over-year (stop funding stupid stuff at the expense of things you care about). But nobody said anything as dumb as McCain.

robot-heart-politics:

brooklynmutt:

Yeah, who needs government spending?

It always blows my mind that people seem to have forgotten this so quickly…

I think this is a good illustration of why we don’t need more government spending. How many trillions of dollars are spent on useless crap while genuinely useful infrastructure projects are passed over? We’ve designed destroyers only to scrap them, only to redesign them, only to scrap them again… and again. We’ve invaded countries posing no threat to US interests. We spend money to prop up murderous dictators. We spend money to spy on our own people. We spend money on ridiculous security theater, spend money on studies to prove that such spending was ridiculous, and continue to spend money after we’ve been shown how ineffective the spending is. We spend money to kill ourselves with simple tobacco and HFCS subsidies. We subsidize the construction of communities in flood zones. But we passed on that bridge. We passed on the Sacramento levees. We passed on about 3,000 dams at risk of failing.

We will continue to spend money on such things because such spending has a better return on investment for what really matters to those making the decisions: votes. It creates far more jobs to fund a bullet train that will never get built than to maintain the infrastructure we have… well, until it fails, at which point we’ll brag about how many jobs the rebuilding effort produces just to bring us back to where we were.

Infrastructure is not failing due to lack of funds, it is failing due to funds misspent. Why on earth would you allow a group that is so clearly irresponsible with funding priorities take on more decision-making power? Every single critical infrastructure project could have been reduced to a simple isolated vote. But if congress prioritized their spending like that, kept it simple, there wouldn’t be any political deals to get made. If they funded the important stuff first, people might not be willing to fund the crap that benefits the few at the expense of the many. Instead, something important falls apart, and everyone cries about how much more money we need to spend.

I thought we were done with the massive job cut headlines.

A toast to small victories, easily celebrated. Today’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report greeted us with a headline number of 398k. Last week’s number was revised up 4k. Compare this to the Bloomberg consensus range of 405k to 436k and you can find multiple reasons to celebrate. No special factors were cited in today’s report. Speaking of which:

In the week ending July 23, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 398,000, a decrease of 24,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 422,000. The 4-week moving average was 413,750, a decrease of 8,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 422,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9 percent for the week ending July 16, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from the prior week’s revised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending July 16 was 3,703,000, a decrease of 17,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,720,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,721,000, a decrease of 5,250 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,726,250.

There is some uncertainty in the adjustment due to the slight differences in the auto industry retooling periods from one year to the next (meaning there’s a potential for a slightly worse headline number next week if the offset came too soon). If the trend numbers look good to you, then you’ll have a bit of appreciation for the numbers that correspond to actual people. Quite a swing here:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 366,578 in the week ending July 23, a decrease of 103,503 from the previous week. There were 413,679 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0 percent during the week ending July 16, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,735,896, a decrease of 47,420 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.6 percent and the volume was 4,554,316.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending July 9 was 7,645,601, an increase of 320,152 from the previous week.

This was a good report. Lower volatility in the labor market is an indicator of strength, even if it proves to be temporary. Other growth indicators aren’t looking too good, so temporary may be the best we can hope for. The GDP revision tomorrow was either leaked or I’ve received some draft emails that shouldn’t have been sent out. If the former, we’re expecting a 10 basis point boost to the prior estimate (1.8% to 1.9%, hitting expectations). If the latter, we’re quite confused. Without a tremendous upside surprise, things are too sluggish to hope for much in the immediate future for the labor market.