[paraclete]

And when we all become Detroit, what then?

You mean to say you haven't already been there?

[speechlesstx]

Things are booming in my neck of the woods and not a single Obama recovery sign in town.

[tomder55]

Go ahead shut the government down and defund Obama Care. I dare you

.
I'm in... and no chicken little... the sky won't fall when the gvt shuts down.

[speechlesstx]

The new EPA chief has spoken...

The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency told an audience at Harvard Law School on Tuesday that cutting carbon pollution will “feed the economic agenda of this country” and vowed to work with industry leaders on shaping policies aimed at curbing global warming.

“Climate change will not be resolved overnight,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told the 310-member audience. “But it will be engaged over the next three years. That I can promise you.”

McCarthy made a full-throated defense of her agency’s right to address greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollutants, saying that air-quality regulations and environmental cleanup efforts have already produced economic benefits in the United States.

“Can we stop talking about environmental regulations killing jobs, please?” she asked, prompting loud applause. “We need to embrace cutting-edge technology as a way to spark business innovation.”

“EPA cannot dictate solutions,” McCarthy said. “We have to engage.”

Might I suggest that "the economic agenda of this country" is in actuality much different than the Obama/progressive economic agenda, which is what she really means. The country is waiting for the government to get out of the way and let the private sector do its thing. We've already had years of a phony recovery, doubling down on the same is not going to magically make the economy explode.

And no, we will not stop talking about how environmental regulations kill jobs. We already know hundreds of workers will be losing their jobs shortly thanks to war on coal Obama isn't waging in his effort to make energy prices "necessarily skyrocket."

And finally, dictating is exactly what the EPA is doing.

For once I just wish this administration would quit lying to us.

[tomder55]

And now you know why the Senate Repubics stalled the nomination. Although everyone suspected that she'd be a carbon tax nut job ;there was no way to find out for sure because she and others in the EPA communicated through unauthorized text and Email addresses.

[excon]

Hello again, tom:

Although everyone suspected that she'd be a carbon tax nut job ;

I don't know.. To me, people who believe that throwing your garbage into the air is just fine and dandy, are the true nut jobs.. But, that's just me.

Excon

[speechlesstx]

Hello again, tom:
I dunno.. To me, people who believe that throwing your garbage into the air is just fine and dandy, are the true nut jobs.. But, that's just me.

excon

As are those who keep repeating that lie.

[talaniman]

As are those who keep repeating that lie.

Its no lie if you live next to a power plant, cement factory, or a recycling plant. What's around you?

[speechlesstx]

Its no lie if you live next to a power plant, cement factory, or a recycling plant.

As usual you're confusing the points. Does pollution exist? Yes. Are we pro-pollution? Uh, no.

What's around you?

A belt.

[tomder55]

Hello again, tom:
I dunno.. To me, people who believe that throwing your garbage into the air is just fine and dandy, are the true nut jobs.. But, that's just me.

excon

So tell me how driving up the price of energy for the consumer will fix that ? Answer it won't because carbon tax schemes are a scam of the highest order.

[speechlesstx]

So let's do like Zero and pivot to the economy. July's jobs numbers came in, an anemic 162,000 jobs were added and unemployment fell to 7.4%, still a far cry from the 5% team Obama projected by July 2013 thanks to Porkulus.

I'm guessing you lefties are thrilled by those numbers but let's look deeper.

First of all I'm guessing that a large number of Americans are still leaving the labor force so they can't be called unemployed any more. Secondly, 97 percent of the jobs created this year are part time jobs.

The July government employment report released Friday showed the job market treading water.

And a closer look at one of the two measures the Labor Department uses to gauge employment suggests that part-time work accounted for almost all the job growth that’s been reported over the past six months.

Employers added a weaker-than-expected 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in July, according to the Establishment Data Survey, which relies on reporting by a large sample of businesses.

The unemployment rate is measured by the separate Household Survey, and it fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 7.4 percent, its lowest level since December 2008. That’s due in part to slow growth in the labor force. The jobless rate is based on a sample of self-reporting from ordinary people across the nation, and it’s the Labor Department measure that shows a very troubling trend in hiring.

“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “That is really remarkable.”

Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. Over the past six months, he said, the Household Survey shows 963,000 more people reporting that they were employed, and 936,000 of them reported they’re in part-time jobs.

“That is a really high number for a six-month period,” Hall said. “I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.

I think that's an understatement. Thanks to Obamacare we are becoming a nation of part-timers, but I know you'll blame it on heartless, greedy corporations, blah, blah, blah instead of acknowledging it is a consequence of your policies, followed by a demand for more regulations.

[talaniman]

I went through this during Reagan, where he touted the volumes of want ads, and Nixon, who like Reagan added government jobs to lower the white color job numbers. They raised taxes and froze costs and all kinds of strategies. Now those were the days of real scandals and shenanigan.

One of the solutions to all this is full participation by an informed electorate. Or Walmart's paying a living wage and opening a garment factory in the US. I know unions, and cheap labor, blah,blah, but you guys insist America dumb down to the third world to compete and that's absolutely NUTS.

[speechlesstx]

Tal, funny how no matter the fact you resort to the same 3 talking points. Lots of Americans have given up looking for work and 97 percent of new jobs created this year are PART TIME. That's a problem, and forcing Walmart to pay your magical "living wage" is not the solution.

[talaniman]

That's a problem for the private sector, and the investor class and as you defend the unborn children, I defend the lives they have after birth. But you would never see what the private sector is doing and even Tom has said the capitalist business model is broken.

Supply side economics has been replaced with hoarding. Seems we should be training and hiring more meat and produce inspectors, not less.

[speechlesstx]

Well, your response was not unexpected, see above.

[tomder55]

In a few days, the U.S. State Department undoubtedly will reopen all of the 22 U.S. embassies and posts it closed last weekend across North Africa and the Middle East. In response to intercepted al Qaeda communications discussing a potential attack, the Obama administration shuttered the diplomatic missions, most likely to avoid a repeat of the Benghazi disaster of 2012. The move was widely praised on both sides of the political aisle, and indeed, protecting American lives is the primary responsibility of the U.S. government.

Yet amid the hosannas for the supposedly proactive response by the State Department, raising the drawbridges on nearly two dozen U.S. installations abroad sends a rather different message from simple prudence. It is an unmistakable sign of America's shrinking presence both at home and abroad. The message is broad, but simple: Expect less. Less security. Less economic opportunity. Less capable governance. Less hope. After four and a half years, Barack Obama's “yes, we can” has ushered in an age of reduced expectations.
Liberals will undoubtedly pounce on the lines above, claiming they are typical right-wing hyperbole, conflating necessary security measures abroad with dishonest calumny about conditions at home. Conservatives always claim the sky is falling, they complain, making it impossible to solve problems in a collegial, bipartisan way.

Leaving aside such a profoundly one-sided view of the reasonableness of the current crop of Democratic leaders in Congress (or President Obama himself), and even admitting that, yes, conservatives tend to have more skeptical dispositions, I defy anyone on the left to prove that there is some unrecognized swelling sentiment of optimism pervading America today. Instead, there is a growing perception that things are not getting better, and that the future holds more peril than promise. This is the consistent finding in the “right direction-wrong direction” polls posted by Real Clear Politics: Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and by a 32-point margin, according to the latest poll average.

Our collective psyche is neatly summed up by a mid-19th century Japanese phrase: naiyu gaikan, or “troubles within, dangers without.” Popular in the decades before the fall of the 250-year old Tokugawa shogunate, the phrase summed up the feeling of angst and helplessness at a system that was failing both domestically and in foreign affairs.

Millions of Americans feel exactly this way today, with less and less hope for the future. Call it malaise, call it pessimism: It will affect everything from investment to consumption to volunteerism to foreign policy. This is not to claim that America will totally withdraw from the world or collapse in an economic depression, but there is a grave and growing danger that we will settle for a future of reduced opportunity, less fulfillment, and greater dependence on a clearly dysfunctional government to somehow protect us and provide the chances that we once took for granted in a free-market society.

A country of 320 million people is too complex to reduce to generalities or specifics. America's innovative entrepreneurs, financiers, lawyers and lobbyists are doing ever better, as suggested by anecdotal evidence of top-line real estate prices in New York, California, and Washington, D.C. and headlines about bonuses at firms like Goldman Sachs. The stock market, too, has hit record highs in recent months, making it seem like nothing very serious happened way back in 2008. And the jobs are slowly coming back.

But scratch just under the surface and things don't look nearly so rosy. Americans know that $16 trillion of U.S national debt is a figure that will simply never be reduced or eliminated, and that we are a bankrupt country, despite the fact that we can continue to print money to keep ourselves afloat. They see taxes going up, if not always in Washington, usually at the state or local level. No one quite understands how Obamacare will work, but many will see their premiums rise, and fear that the implementation process will ultimately upend their ability to choose their doctors and medical plans. They see a major city like Detroit declare bankruptcy and know that others, and maybe even states like California or Illinois, are likely not far behind.

Blue-collar America is struggling. Median income has stagnated over the past decade, more for the lower class than the better educated. And there's no end in sight: Some economists say the trend may last into the 2020s, putting paid to many hopes for better housing and education, early retirement, or simply having something left over after monthly mortgages and bills. Talk to young people just starting their careers, and their sense of fragility is overpowering.

But those are fears for those who at least have jobs: The broad U-6 underemployment rate in the United States is estimated to be as high as 14 percent, while more than 4 million Americans have been out of work for over six months and 11.5 million are searching for jobs. Just as disquieting is that the total labor force participation rate is at its lowest in post-World War II history; simply put, Americans are giving up looking for work, and a disproportionate number of them are healthy, working-age males, who used to be the backbone of the labor market.

At the same time, the Pew Research Center calculates that a record 21.6 million young adults aged 18 to 31 are living with their parents, due to college debt, lack of work, low wages, housing prices, and the like. Some of that is due to America's marriage rate, which is at its lowest in a century, according to researchers at Bowling Green State University. That, of course, affects the national birth rate, which also hit record lows in 2011 (and continues to drop for those under 25 years of age). Morbidly, America's suicide rate has jumped, rising 30 percent between 1999 and 2010, but especially among men in their 50s.

None of these statistics is evidence of a healthy society.

So how is any of that connected to America's closing of embassies abroad due to terrorist threats? It is the same sense of shrinking horizons. After a dozen years of warfare, and after the president assures us that our wars in the Middle East are over, we have to bar the doors and windows on our diplomatic residences abroad due to region-wide terror threats. Four years of President Obama's diplomatic outreach to the Muslim world results in the murder of our ambassador in Libya and the murder of other diplomats in Afghanistan. Large swaths of the Islamic world continue to hate Americans, even if it is impolite to say so in D.C.

The old adversaries haven't gone away – far from it. China has developed a military that may not be qualitatively superior to America's, but is by far the most modern opponent we've faced since the fall of the Soviet Union. As it rises, China is growing far more assertive in Asia, threatening U.S. allies and partners over territorial disputes, and refusing to help curb North Korea or Iran's nuclear program. And Beijing evidently had little fear that allowing NSA leaker Edward Snowden to escape to Moscow would have repercussions for its relations with Washington.

Smaller threats also fester and grow. Iran has used the past four years to come within spitting distance of building a nuclear bomb, a move that would profoundly destabilize the Middle East. North Korea continues to rattle its sabers without consequence.

And while all of this is happening, the average American understands that the Obama administration and Congress have found common ground on one thing: the need to dramatically slash America's defense budget, cutting Army troops and Marines, floating the smallest Navy since World War I, and temporarily grounding one-third of the Air Force's entire combat air fleet. The coming cuts are so severe, in the neighborhood of $1 trillion over 10 years (on top of another $400 billion of belt-tightening in Obama's first term) that even the editorial board of the Washington Post warned of the dangers in hollowing out America's ability to defend itself or maintain our power abroad.

The American people understand what is happening. They see that the murder of an American ambassador goes unpunished, and that the White House is far more interested in obfuscating what actually happened in Benghazi than in tracking down anyone responsible. They see an America that refuses to stand up to Chinese cyberattacks or industrial espionage. And they know that we are cutting our military capability while our chief rivals are expanding theirs.

No one thinks that we will collapse tomorrow, or that our military will suddenly be at risk of losing a war against Syria. But ask about America's power abroad in a decade, or a generation, and more serious doubt creeps in. Same for the economy. An America whose military commitments aren't credible is not the bulwark of democracy we know. A country in which wages are stagnant for over a decade is not the same economy that drew millions of immigrants to our shores for centuries.

What people feel down deep in their gut is that life for the foreseeable future will be more uncertain, less stable than what they've known. That hard work may not be enough to ensure their family's future. That government is both increasingly dysfunctional but also their only hope. That enemies still lurk over the oceans and that we may not be strong enough to deal with them. It is a vision of a country shrunken in size and pride, and the feeling of helplessness that most individuals feel against huge, impersonal forces that direct their fate.

Barack Obama once proclaimed the “audacity of hope.” How much more audacious must one now be to have hope for a shrunken country in an age of reduced expectations

.

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Follow him on Twitter @michaelauslin.


Opinion: The age of reduced expectations - Michael Auslin - POLITICO.com

[talaniman]

That's about what you would expect from gloom and doom conservatives. Why didn't he just ay the world is full of challenges and there is a lot of work to do?

[speechlesstx]

That's about what you would expect from gloom and doom conservatives. Why didn't he just ay the world is full of challenges and there is a lot of work to do?

Because that's nothing more than trite liberal talking point. It means nothing and does nothing.

[talaniman]

Because that's nothing more than trite liberal talking point. It means nothing and does nothing.

Same goes for the winger opinion.

[speechlesstx]

Same goes for the winger opinion.

And yet he had you pegged and you posted it anyway...

Liberals will undoubtedly pounce on the lines above, claiming they are typical right-wing hyperbole, conflating necessary security measures abroad with dishonest calumny about conditions at home. Conservatives always claim the sky is falling, they complain, making it impossible to solve problems in a collegial, bipartisan way.