The question we will be listening for when Janet Yellen goes before Congress has to do with jobs. She is famous for her focus on the second part of the Fed’s dual mandate. The first mandate is price stability and the second is jobs. How does she feel the Fed has done these five years? It has expanded its balance sheet into the trillions. It has picked up more than $2 trillion of the federal government’s own debt. Yet the unemployment rate is still higher than it was when Congress put through the jobs mandate in the first place.

To us that’s an amazing fact. We’ve mopped this floor several times, but just to run the buffer over it once more: The dual mandate was legislated in 1978 by the 95th Congress. It gave the measure the name Humphrey Hawkins, in honor of its sponsor in the House, Augustus Hawkins, and in the Senate, Vice President Humphrey. The short name of the bill is particularly useful not only because it reminds us of the illustrious liberals who concocted it but because the official “long-title” of the bill is:

“An Act to translate into practical reality the right of all Americans who are able, willing, and seeking to work to full opportunity for useful paid employment at fair rates of compensation; to assert the responsibility of the Federal Government to use all practicable programs and policies to promote full employment, production, and real income, balanced growth, adequate productivity growth, proper attention to national priorities, and reasonable price stability; to require the President each year to set forth explicit short-term and medium-term economic goals; to achieve a better integration of general and structural economic policies; and to improve the coordination of economic policymaking within the Federal Government.”

It happens that the New York Sun ran that title through one of our niftiest contraptions, the “Long-Title Legislative Compar-o-Graf.” It is an old vacuum tube model, but it still works. It turns out that the long-title of Humphrey Hawkins is one of the ten-most divorced from reality of all known pieces of modern legislation. Even, as we’ve noted before, the New York Times called it a “cruel hoax” on the American worker. It neglected to mention that it has made a fool of the Federal Reserve and the 95th United States Congress, both at the same time.

Now it may be that Mrs. Yellen is going to try to claim victory for Humphrey Hawkins and the Fed by pointing out that recent numbers have brought unemployment down below 7%. It is still above the 5.8% at which it stood when Humphrey Hawkins was passed. Even after all the trillions by which the Fed balance sheet was expanded, all the deficits Congress has run, all the columns Paul Krugman has written extolling Lord Keynes, even after all the speeches President Obama has made, the unemployment rate is still above what it was when the dual mandate was passed. What in the world will Janet Yellen say?