Bad News: Obama to Refocus on Jobs

Because his previous attempts have been so successful...

White House spinners are working furiously in the final 72 hours before President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Their job: convince the recession-scarred American public that economic recovery is Obama’s top priority — after everything he has said and done to suggest otherwise.

The unemployment rate is 7.9 percent — one tenth of a point higher than it was when Obama took office in January 2009. But the true toll of joblessness is far higher. The Labor Department’s so-called U-6 rate, which includes people who want a job but have become so discouraged they have quit looking, is 14.4 percent. And a new study, by Rutgers University scholars, shows that 23 percent of those surveyed have lost a job sometime in the last four years, while another 11 percent have seen someone in their household lose a job. That is one-third of the American people who have experienced unemployment during Obama’s time in office, along with many more who have experienced other hardships of the economic downturn.

Obama and his henchmenpeople will, of course, claim that the economic downturn was due entirely to the lack of regulations on the banking industry during the Bush era, never-mind the fact that the industry is one of the most highly regulated in the United States.  And never-mind the role of the Community Redevelopment Act in the feeding and eventual crash of the housing market, and the role of the Democratic Congress in the last two years of Bush's term in raising the deficit.

Economies are self repairing.  People want to work, earn more money and make a better life, and business want to grow and make a bigger profit (thereby supplying the jobs as a means, not an end).  Government can help this process by making it easier to build business and hire people, or it can stifle business growth with too much regulation, and by taking too much money out of the economy as taxes, and spending wasting it on essentially unproductive ventures, often to cronies of the government officials who find a $1 investment in a politician beats a $100 investment in business.

The fact that the economy is still stuttering 5 years after the crash is evidence that the approach taken by the administration to date have been ineffective at best, and in all likelihood detrimental.  There's zero evidence that the Preznit and his cronies have learned that lesson; the only lesson they appear to have learned is that you can demagogue the economy into another 4 years in office 

And before I go,  a video from "The Lonely Conservative" to remind us of how successful Obama's previous attempts have been: