Written on January 11th, 2010 by jono shouts
By Jon Ward
The bloody-knuckled brawl this year over whether President Obama is bringing back jobs will go a long way toward deciding whether Democrats in Congress retain their hold on power past this year’s midterm elections. At this point, according to economists, it’s a fight that is stacked against the White House.
Even if the economy begins to show modest job growth, as it is expected to soon, the overall unemployment rate is likely to stay at its current level of 10 percent, or continue to rise, according to most economic experts.
“I would expect it to start drifting steadily up to 10.5 percent,” the president of the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, Lawrence Mishel, said.
That is a major problem for a White House that promised just a year ago that the unemployment rate would not rise above 8 percent as long as Congress passed the $787 billion stimulus bill.
“To show that the recovery is not a jobless recovery they need to get it back to where they initially projected it, around 8 percent,” the director of the New America Foundation’s economic growth program, Sherle Schwenninger, said.
All evidence suggests that will be an extremely tall order.
The Senate is set to take up a $154 billion jobs bill — the Congressional Budget Office scored it at $180 billion — passed out of the House in December. Mr. Mishel said that even with a $400 billion second stimulus, which he favors, the unemployment rate would likely only come down to 9.7 percent or so by the fall.
“The job numbers will go up, but the unemployment rate is still going to remain uncomfortably high for some time, even if it improves,” said Jeffrey Schott, with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The Democrats’ majority in the House and 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate – both at risk this fall – will likely rise or fall based on what judgment the country comes to on this central issue.
Complicating Democratic efforts to stimulate job growth is the growing concern among many Americans, and many foreign creditors, about the nation’s exploding budget deficit and national debt. Spend too much on jobs, and you push the deficit even higher. Spend too little, and the employment picture stays grim.
The president and congressional Democratic leaders have already begun to focus their rhetoric on the “job growth” metric, in an attempt to nudge public attention away from the unemployment figure and toward more favorable measurements. They’ll also point to gross domestic product, which contracted for much of 2008 and 2009 but is forecast to grow by 2 to 3 percent a quarter.
“I think we are on a path of, you know, of steady progress, that by all accounts, you know, GDP, which grew in the third quarter of last year, is going to grow even more strongly when we get the numbers for the fourth quarter,” said Christina Romer, the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, during an appearance Sunday on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous.
“And I think, you know, if you look at basically every forecast, they are saying steady GDP growth over 2010,” she said. ” The real question is going to be, is it going to be strong enough to really add a lot of people back into employment?”
The answer to that question is probably in the negative, but Democrats are trying to make the case that they can survive without that.
“If when in fact November rolls around, GDP has grown significantly, and people begin to see that job creation is existing and continuing, while we may not have a dramatic downturn [in the unemployment number] … they’ll reward us on election day,” said New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the current chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in an interview.
The unemployment rate does not always go down even when there are job gains because the economy often needs to create at least 100,000 new jobs a month – sometimes even double that – just to keep pace with the number of new entrants into the work force.
Friday’s job number demonstrated another dynamic, where the economy lost 85,000 jobs but the unemployment rate stayed flat at 10 percent. The reason it did not increase is because the overall labor force shrank, as 661,000 jobless Americans gave up their search for work. If those unemployed workers had remained in the labor force, unemployment rate would have risen to 10.4 percent, according to EPI’s Heidi Shierholz.
The contraction of the labor force only adds to the Democrats’ challenge in nudging the unemployment rate down. If jobs do begin to return, that may encourage many of the jobless who gave up back into the market, increasing the size of the labor force and likely causing the overall unemployment number to rise.
There are currently about 3.6 million “missing workers” who are currently not looking for work but who likely will if jobs begin to be added to the economy.
So far, Obama has focused on a narrative of saving the economy from total collapse and beginning to turn the ship of state around and pointed in the right direction. But much of the country has not responded favorably to the White House’s decision to spend most of its first year on health-care reform.
“When Americans think the top priority for government … should be job creation, for six months all they’ve heard Congress talk about is health-care reform, not job creation,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told The Daily Caller.
Sen. Ben Nelson, the Nebraska Democrat who cast the deciding vote to pass the Senate health-care bill, said late last week that “it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy.”
“Working on the economy would have been a wiser move,” he told the Fremont Tribune, a local newspaper in Nebraska.
It is an uphill slog for the Obama White House, which will try to persuade the country it is turning things around even as it faces renewed concerns over terrorism in the U.S. and manages two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Obama acknowledged Friday that in December the job market “slipped back, losing more jobs than we gained.”
Romer, on Sunday, acknowledged that when she delivered the job numbers for December to him in the Oval Office Friday, the president was “subdued” and “disappointed.”
“We’re all desperate to see progress,” she said.
The president, on Friday, attempted to point to a positive: “The overall trend of job loss is still pointing in the right direction.”
While that is true, it is small consolation to most Americans, and the White House knows it. They also know that this issue will continue to plague them past this fall’s midterms.
Read the original article on The New Daily Caller
Written on November 9th, 2009 by jono shouts
by Jed Babbin
Has there ever been a president who had to govern in more difficult times?
Even Franklin Roosevelt had years to deal with the Great Depression before World War 2 came upon him.
Are we asking too much of Barack Obama? No, because so much of the confusion and commotion that surrounds him of his own making.
Our young president has always been a man in a hurry. His rhetoric is of urgency, emulating Churchill’s red “action this day” labels attached to the most urgent memos to subordinates. But Churchill didn’t attach the red label to every memo. Obama does.
For him to define a problem as a crisis and demand that congressional action be taken now, and not delayed a year, a month or a day, is a commonplace. But when the action is taken and subsequently fails, the president ignores the failure and moves along to demand action on another “crisis.”
Since his inauguration – just shy of ten months ago — President Obama has stampeded Congress into a $1.2 trillion “economic stimulus” package that has caused unemployment to rocket to a 26-year high, a $3.6 trillion federal budget that will carry the federal deficit to a dangerous level of our Gross Domestic Product and taken over two of the three major car makers, losing tens of billions in “loans” to GM and Chrysler. (The only major American carmaker not owned by the government, Ford, reporting a positively bountiful profit last week.)
Obama spent the last three months on his signature issue, the nationalization of healthcare (one-sixth of our economy) despite the fact that a majority of Americans oppose it. And he and the House Democratic leadership have spent the last weeks twisting arms to produce that Saturday night razor-thin approval (220-215 votes) of the Pelosicare bill with the “public option” – the government-run insurance provider – included.
The day after the House vote President Obama was asked if he was confident that the Senate would also pass his healthcare proposals. Never given to understatement, he said, “I’m absolutely confident that they will. I’m equally convinced that on the day that we gather here at the White House and I sign comprehensive health insurance reform legislation into law that they’ll be able to join their House colleagues and say that this was their finest moment in public service. The moment we delivered change we promised to the American people.”
And while he has pursued this artificial crisis, he ignores a real one. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s “3 am phone call” to the president remains on hold. McChrystal’s August 30 report says that if we don’t reform our strategy to the counterinsurgency he recommends and adequately resource it – i.e., send at least 40,000 more troops to accomplish it – we may, within a year of his report, be unable to defeat the Taliban. It’s nearly ninety days since that report was submitted, and the president has yet to decide. Many meetings are held, and nothing comes out of them.
There is a constant commotion and agitation of Americans by the president, a continuous uproar over the subject of the day, combined with a confusion of voices from the media, the public, and the White House team. According to the dictionary, this is tumult. Our president is tumultuary: characterized by commotion, impetuosity and, importantly, in disregard of the Constitution.
We are used to tumultuous Hollywood starlets such as Megan Fox, tumultuous foreign leaders such as Hugo Chavez and Dominique de Villepin, the former French foreign minister who famously refused in 2003 to say which side he wanted to win in Iraq. But American presidents are supposed to be calm custodians of the public weal. Not so Mr. Obama.
The president wants to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, allow gays to serve openly in the military, and renew the political war over amnesty for illegal immigrants. His administration and his party – represented by Attorney General Eric Holder and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — are still at war with the CIA. All of these “crises” are artificial, cut out of whole cloth to advance a political agenda. The president could end them as easily as he and his team created them.
While the president’s time is taken up with manufactured crises, real crises go unattended. The president is leaving for Asia this week, reportedly to convince China and other Asian nations that he isn’t distracted by other crises, such as Afghanistan and the economy. He could cancel the trip to deal with them, but he will not. The trip speaks for itself, unless the president wants to drop in on Gen. McChrystal on a detour to the trip home.
Or he could stay home to deal with the economy. But that would require a reassessment of his failures to date.
Obama’s team proclaims the current “jobless recovery” – an economic oxymoron – is proof that his leadership has brought us out of the Bush-induced economic slump. Before he was even inaugurated, his economic team proclaimed (on January 9) that by November Obama’s stimulus plan would hold unemployment to about 7.7%, and that it would be a full percentage point higher without the plan.
But unemployment is now at 10.2% — 50% higher than Team Obama promised — and still climbing. The chaotic economics of the Obama White House – and this includes the costly House-passed healthcare bill – has kept the economy unstable. Businesses can’t determine the cost of any hiring or investment when the government is constantly fiddling with the basic elements of cost. So they don’t hire, and don’t invest.
The president, who seems to make a speech every day, seeks omnipresence. In the immediate aftermath of the mass murder at Fort Hood last Thursday, the president – his breathless press team explained – was in the White House Situation Room coordinating the response. The president cannot be blamed for the tragedy, but neither can he be credited for doing anything about it.
President Obama wants to make big decisions that change America and, unfortunately, he is well along in his plan to do just that. But what he either doesn’t understand, or of which he is willfully ignorant, is that neither American voters nor the world shares his priorities.
Americans expect their leaders to solve problems and they set their own priorities by what affects them most immediately. To the overwhelming majority of Americans – including among them the unemployed and the businesses who could hire them if government economic policy every stabilized – the economy is still Job One for the president. The longer it remains unstable, the longer the “jobless recovery” will continue.
Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea won’t wait. They are real crises that the president apparently believes are above his pay grade. They will, soon, be beyond America’s ability to solve.
See the Original Article on HumanEvents
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