Democratic House candidate Matt Varilek makes a strong case against Rep. Kristi Noem when he points out that she has repeatedly voted to end Medicare as we know it. The South Dakota GOP tries to change the subject, but Noem enablers never address the facts: the Paul Ryan plan that Noem eyes and ayes would smash Medicare into voucherized bits that lots of seniors could not afford.

The Medicare-over-millionaires argument can have legs for Varilek, quite simply because there are a lot more folks counting on Medicare than there are millionaires who can afford to opt out of it. Noem and the Medicare privatizers try to dodge the bullet by saying they won’t change Medicare for folks currently 55 and older. That’s clever politics (old folks vote the most), but it’s shortsighted policy. As technology increases increases, we may need fewer workers. As the chart here shows, the U.S. economy is currently putting just 68.5% of those between the ages of 16 to 54 to work, a low not seen since just after the recessions of the early 1980s. That employment rate dropped and stayed lower after the 2001 recession throughout the Bush Administration; the 2008 recession may have brought another hard reset to an economy that can meet consumer needs with fewer workers.

And if the economy can do without over 30% of workers in their prime, those shed workers are going to be a lot more nervous about a Congresswoman telling them to save up to pay for their own health care when they reach age 65. They will need a guaranteed safety net, not a long old age still at swim in a private market that already is telling them, “We don’t want you.”

Keep beating that Medicare drum, Matt: today’s nervous workers will hear it.

Hey, y’all remember Dan Lederman and John Thune and their SDGOP friends’ braying about President Obama’s clever strategy to win re-election by raising gas prices, right? Turns out that man in the White House can’t even do that right:

Officials at AAA South Dakota said residents can look forward to [gasoline] prices diving even lower in the near future.

“Headed towards summer, it would start to bounce back and that’s exactly what we’re seeing so I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve seen the worst of it and we’re on our way downhill which is great news for the summer driving season,” said Mark Madeja.

…Madeja said that the price of regular gasoline in South Dakota is $0.12 lower than one month ago.

The last time Sioux Falls had a summer spike in gas prices was in July 2008, where the regular gasoline was $4.04 per gallon [Ashley Kringen, "Residents Happy about Low Gas Prices," KDLT, 2012.04.28].

That last line points out the salient fact that President Obama or oil speculators or the Flying Spaghetti Monster blunted the gasoline price spike before it reached its historic high under President Bush.

So, Dan, John, GOP: gas prices up, you give Obama the blame. Gas prices down, you give Obama the credit, right? Right?!?

Or would you like to pretend to take the long view and continue to blame Obama for an overall upward gasoline price trend over the last three years? I might grant you that point and say that yes, President Obama did increase gasoline prices… by stopping the recession that killed global demand and caused gas prices to tank?

Or do you want to surrender to the Mitt Romney thesis that the President can’t set the price at the pump and move on to other issues?

Mr. Sohl highlights the distastefulness of Republican efforts to stoke our fear of the other to win elections. He also notes new data that shows that Republican freak-outs over illegal immigration may not provide a winning issue against President Obama. A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that since 2007, the number of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. has declined 15% from 7 million to 6.1 million.

The recession has accounted for much of that change, but so have decreasing birth rates among Mexicans. Worth noting, however, is the fact that the economic downturn has not descreased legal immigration: from 2007 to 2011, the number of legal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. increased from 5.6 million to 5.8 million. Still, the total Mexican-born population in the United States has dropped for the first time since the Depression.

This change in immigration changes leaves our Border Patrol agents less busy than they’ve been in four decades:

In spite of (and perhaps because of) increases in the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents, apprehensions of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally have plummeted in recent years—from more than 1 million in 2005 to 286,000 in 2011—a likely indication that fewer unauthorized migrants are trying to cross. Border Patrol apprehensions of all unauthorized immigrants are now at their lowest level since 1971 [Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, "Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less," Pew Hispanic Center, 2012].

We are deporting Mexican illegal immigrants at records levels: the Obama Administration deported 282,000 in 2010.

The net result of these economic, demographic, and policy changes: after seeing the number of illegal Mexican immigrants surge above the number of legal Mexican immigrants in 2002 and stay above that level throughout the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration is seeing the number of illegals return to parity with the number of legals. That trendline shows that we can add illegal immigration enforcement to the list of Obama Administration policies that appear to be working.

Update 06:54 MDT: Interestingly, I just heard an immigration expert on the  Marketplace Morning Report contend that militarizing the border during the Bush Administration actually increased the illegal immigrant population here, since illegals found it more difficult to head back home to Mexico.

Mitt Romney’s trip last week to the Ohio drywall factory that closed during the Bush Administration speaks volumes about the GOP’s disconnect from economic reality. Romney and the Tea Party (there’s an odd couple) need you to believe that President Barack Obama is killing jobs by expanding the government.

Actually, President Obama is killing jobs… by shrinking government:

Compare President Obama’s first term to President Bush’s, and you see a phenomenon we’ve discussed previously: Contrary to crazy cries of creeping socialism, President Obama has overseen a steady decrease of folks working for the government, with the predictable exception of the Census hiring spike. The Obama decrease in public payrolls is so far almost 3%. At this point in President George W. Bush’s first term, we had seen an increase in government of over 3%.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, President Obama has been gaining ground on private-sector job losses. As of February, the net private-sector job losses under President Obama stood at 274,000. At the same time in President Bush’s first term, the private sector had lost ten times as many jobs, 2.7 million, since inauguration.

If President Obama had simply behaved like that socialist President Bush and raided the private sector to hire lots more government workers, President Obama could right now brag of a net increase in jobs under his administration. Let’s see Mitt Romney drop by a closed Extension office and campaign on that issue.

Hat tip to Mark Thoma!

Quick breakfast quiz: Which of the following countries has the highest unemployment rate? And which has the lowest?

1. United States
2. Australia
3. Canada
4. France
5. Germany
6. Italy
7. Japan
8. Netherlands
9. Sweden
10. United Kingdom

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which converts the data to reflect U.S. concepts and seasonal variation, France has the highest unemployment rate among these ten countries. Japan has the lowest.

And what about the United States? We’re third highest. For a couple years, the recession actually kicked us into first place:

That’s just one more reason Mitt Romney should pivot and argue that America needs to be more like Europe.

Bonus Free Association: Honest-to-goodness Socialist François Hollande outpolled conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in the first round of France’s presidential election yesterday. Voter turnout was 80%. In the May 6 run-off, Sarkozy will tack right to draw the votes of France’s right-wingnut National Front, whose candidate polled 18%. Hollande will respond with his calls for higher taxes on corporations and millionaires, more teachers, and a lower retirement age.

Last year the Cornell Global Labor Institute knocked the snot out of TransCanada’s inflated jobs claims for the Keystone XL pipeline. Now the same nice folks come forward to argue that we need to balance the claims of Keystone XL’s economic advantages with a clearer accounting of the pipeline’s negative economic impacts.

GLI’s latest report, “The Impact of Tar Sands Pipeline Spills on Employment and the Economy,” makes the following points:

1. Keystone XL promises twenty (20, not 20,000, not 130,000, Kristi) permanent pipeline operation jobs in the six states it will cross.
2. In the same six states, agriculture employs 571,000 people and generates $76 billion in economic activity.
3. In the same six states, tourism employs 780,000 workers and generates $67 billion in economic activity.
4. Oil spills are generally bad for agriculture and tourism.

The backers of Keystone XL exaggerate the jobs and dollars Keystone XL would generate. They never give us the full picture of how much we will lose in clean-up costs and interrupted jobs and economic activity when that pipeline springs a leak (and TransCanada has done a poor job of predicting the reliability of its craftsmanship). Sensible policymakers must consider the externalities right alongside the profits Big Oil wants to make.

David Lias nicely dissects Senator John Thune’s deceptive decrials of rising gas prices. Of all possible numbers, gas prices are the one economic indicator posted prominently in every town in America (well, except for Norris, South Dakota, where apparently you can’t keep a gas station open without also resorting to the culture-wrecking force of alcohol). When we see gas prices everywhere, politicians can too easily associate them with everything.

(Just curious: how might our lives and economic perceptions be different if we posted the unemployment rate and GDP on the corner of Main Street in every town in America?)

Perhaps Senator Thune should take a cue from his pick for the White House, Mitt Romney. The eventual nominee said on CNBC Wednesday that “I think people recognize that the president can’t precisely set the price at the pump.” (Funny that Romney couldn’t just state the facts without running it through the filter of both his opinion and the recognition of people in general… but then that inflated rhetorical structure perhaps indicates something about Romney’s conditioned responses.)

Lias cites Rob Perks, who makes Romney’s point more forcefully:

The fact is, as a global commodity, gas prices rise and fall due to a number of factors: crude oil prices, refinery capacity, increasing demand and political unrest in oil-producing countries. It seems like some people think the Constitution guarantees Americans the “right” to cheap gas, but the only price that is right is whatever the market will bear. That’s why no president can control what we pay at the pump. Any politician that says otherwise is trying to sell the public snake oil [Rob Perks, "Empty Promises, Empty Gas Tanks," National Resources Defense Council: Switchboard, 2012.03.06].

Wishing for $2.50-a-gallon gas won’t make it so. And blaming the President for $4-a-gallon gas won’t make the causal connection true.

When our attention turns fully to the Congressional and Presidential elections here in South Dakota, I’m sure we’ll hear Kristi Noem and the Romney surrogates decrying all the money President Obama and we dastardly Democrats wasted on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the massive, failed stimulus package of 2009.

Wait, wait, wait: “massive”? Economist Mark Thoma questions that massiveness, noting that contractions in state and local government spending (caused by folks like Kristi Noem when she was in the South Dakota Legislature) offset much of the federal stimulus. To put the “massiveness” of the 2009 stimulus in perspective, Dr. Thoma points to the following chart from Menzie Chinn:

• EGTRRA: Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (Bush tax cuts)
• JBTRRA: Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (more Bush tax cuts)
• PPACA: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare, which, yes, saves us money)

Dang. If we’d have spent as much boosting our economy in 2009 as we did blowing up Iraq and redistributing wealth to millionaires, we might have beaten the recession much faster.