It's The Jobs, Stupid

Heritage really knocks the ball out of the park (again) with this post from late last week:

Last week President Barack Obama hosted a seven-and-a-half-hour televised health care summit. This week the President launched his "final" campaign for passage of his health care plan. Next week, President Obama will travel to Missouri and Pennsylvania to continue this "final" effort to jam his unpopular plan through Congress. With this all-health-care-all-the-time White House agenda it seems like eons ago that the Obama administration announced, following the complete rejection of its health care plan in the Massachusetts Senate special election, that President Obama's first State of the Union would mark a "pivot" from health care and to a "razor sharp focus on jobs". So how is that pivot to jobs going? Well, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report

So why is our economy having such a tough time pulling out of recession? Here are the facts: the most recent data available show that the U.S. economy actually lost fewer jobs during this recession than were lost during the 2001 recession. Specifically, 50.8 million jobs were lost through the first six months of the '01 recession while 48.2 million jobs were lost through the first six months of this recession.

But if out economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama's stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That's a 7.9 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren't businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration:

• At one of President Obama's many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because "there's such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don't really know what they ought to do." That uncertainty, he added, "is really what's holding back the jobs."
• Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp,  told the Wall Street Journal: "Companies large and small are saying, 'I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.'"
• Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because "proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs."
• The New York Post's Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: "'There hasn't been one bankruptcy,' he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they're not — because 'they don't know what their costs are going to be.'"
• National Federation of Independent Business chief economist Bill Dunkelberg writes: "The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence."

Our economy's job creators have been trying to send a message to the Obama administration for months: stop creating so much uncertainty in the tax and regulatory environment so that we can figure out how to invest our money and start creating jobs. Stop taking over car companies. Stop shedding financing contracts. Stop taking over 1/6th of our economy. Stop raising taxes on our energy sector. Just stop.

Our economy will eventually recover and start producing jobs again, probably very soon. But that recovery has already been delayed by an administration that saw this recession as an opportunity to fundamentally rewrite our nation's relationship with the federal government. Unless this administration completely abandons its far reaching transformation agenda, this recovery will be a very slow one.

The bottom line is that until the jobs come back, this recession will remain with us.  Barack Obama is doing nothing to create an environment in which jobs can be created; to the contrary, he is implementing policies and issuing rhetoric that do precisely the opposite.  For example, he continues to tout so-called 'green jobs' like Europe has while somehow neglecting to mention how those 'green jobs' actually kill the economy of the nations who strive to achieve them.

On top of that, his own economic projections continue to be proven false and misleading:

The US budget deficit will be $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

CBO Deficit Estimate
But, don't worry. Team Obama was only off by a mere $600 billion in 2020, give or take $50 billion.

The CBO announced today that the US longterm deficit picture is even worse than originally predicted.
The AP reported:

A new congressional report released Friday says the United States' long-term fiscal woes are even worse than predicted by President Barack Obama's grim budget submission last month.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama's budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That's $1.2 trillion more than predicted by the administration.

The agency says its future-year predictions of tax revenues are more pessimistic than the administration's. That's because CBO projects slightly slower economic growth than the White House.

The CBO predicted that the federal deficit would hit $1.5 trillion in 2010 under President Barack Obama's proposals. This tops last year's record deficit and is more than three times the deficit during George W. Bush's last year in office.

Again, the key here is jobs.  Without jobs, the economy won't recover; without a recovery, consumer spending won't go back up; without consumer spending, tax revenues will not go back up; without tax revenues, the budget will come out even further short than the CBO is estimating.

This guy is an absolute disaster, and the longer he has a compliant Congress and media, he will continue to systemically destroy this country.  That's not an opinion, either...with each passing day, we see again and again that it is a fact in progress.  It's got to stop before this nation is irreparably damaged.

There's my two cents.