GM, still partially owned by the federal government, has the largest inventory ever of unsold vehicles—enough for over 100 days of sales. What is any possible explanation why a private company would continue to build stock like this?  

Richard Epstein isn’t exactly a fan of the American Jobs Act:

What is so striking about Obama’s shopworn rhetoric is its juvenile intellectual quality. His explanation for how the AJA will create jobs is a non-starter because he does not explain how we get from here to there. As in so many other cases, the president thinks that waving a wand over a problem will make his most ardent wishes come true, even when similar earlier efforts have proved to be dismal failures. This dreadful hodgepodge of a bill will likely be dead-on-arrival in Congress, but it remains a patriotic duty to explicate some of its worst provisions.

The most evident feature of the AJA is that it is a combination of ill-conceived, disparate measures. The wandering quality of the bill makes it impossible to cover all of its silliness, but it is possible to focus on some of the core job provisions, all of which kill the very jobs that the AJA is supposed to create.

One does not have to dip very far into the bill to find trouble. Section 4 of the AJA imposes "Buy American" restrictions on the use of funds appropriated under this statute for work on public buildings. "[A]ll the iron, steel and manufactured goods" used on such projects are to be fabricated in the United States. There are obvious administrative difficulties in deciding what counts as a "manufactured good" for the purposes of the act. But don’t sweat the small stuff. The fatal problem with this form of jingoism is that, in the name of economic efficiency, it forces American taxpayers to pay more for less. That upside down logic may seem sensible to a die-hard Keynesian, but not to ordinary people who realize that deliberate overpayment for inferior goods makes no more sense in the public sector than in the private one.

Steve Moore compares Obamanonics vs. Reaganomics:

If you really want to light the fuse of a liberal Democrat, compare Barack Obama’s economic performance after 30 months in office with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s not at all flattering for Mr. Obama.

The two presidents have a lot in common. Both inherited an American economy in collapse. And both applied daring, expensive remedies. Mr. Reagan passed the biggest tax cut ever, combined with an agenda of deregulation, monetary restraint and spending controls. Mr. Obama, of course, has given us a $1 trillion spending stimulus.

By the end of the summer of Reagan’s third year in office, the economy was soaring. The GDP growth rate was 5% and racing toward 7%, even 8% growth. In 1983 and ’84 output was growing so fast the biggest worry was that the economy would “overheat.” In the summer of 2011 we have an economy limping along at barely 1% growth and by some indications headed toward a “double-dip” recession. By the end of Reagan’s first term, it was Morning in America. Today there is gloomy talk of America in its twilight.

My purpose here is not more Reagan idolatry, but to point out an incontrovertible truth: One program for recovery worked, and the other hasn’t.

The Reagan philosophy was to incentivize production—i.e., the “supply side” of the economy—by lowering restraints on business expansion and investment. This was done by slashing marginal income tax rates, eliminating regulatory high hurdles, and reining in inflation with a tighter monetary policy.The Keynesians in the early 1980s assured us that the Reagan expansion would not and could not happen. Rapid growth with new jobs and falling rates of inflation (to 4% in 1983 from 13% in 1980) is an impossibility in Keynesian textbooks. If you increase demand, prices go up. If you increase supply—as Reagan did—prices go down.

It would be nice to live in the fantasy-land world envisioned by the New York Times editorial board. They are sad that a year after the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill was passed that, the new regulatory body isn’t properly staffed. This shows two flaws in relying on regulations to control misbehavior. 

First, if your regulations rely on getting the “right people” or “tough and experienced regulators” as the NY Times wants, then the regulations are destined to fail or fall short. The reason is simple. If you are a “tough and experienced” regulator, would you make $150,000 at most working as a federal bureaucrat, or would you many multiples of that working for big Wall Street firms figuring out how to game the regulations.

Second, your regulations are destined to fail if they can’t be implemented within a year. This means they are too complex and therefore possible to be gamed.

Rather that relying on getting the right people, the federal government should be in the business of transparency, information, and being the sheriff for disputes. Instead of rushing to save big banks and their investors from their bad decisions, banks need to fail as a result of their mistakes and misdeeds instead of being bailed out by the average Joe. Dodd-Frank was created because President Bush and Obama wanted to help their friends on Wall Street. It would have been far better to practice tough love.

There are many more problems with Dodd-Frank. If you want to know why here’s a primer on how its quack federal corporate governance.