December 11, 2009
Did you catch President Obama’s jobs speech this week? Is this guy kidding? He wants a do-over of the stimulus. Of course, you can understand his motivation. The Obama-fronted Radical Progressive Movement (RPM) promised Americans that a massive fiscal stimulus was the last, best way to ignite economic growth. The president’s own economic team projected that a mere $800-billion stimulus was all that was needed to prevent unemployment from rising above 8.5%. Today, the unemployment rate stands at 10%, not counting the millions of discouraged and underemployed workers. The stimulus is an utter failure. The program was poorly designed, and money was doled out too slowly and to the wrong people. The voting public is starting to notice. President Obama’s job approval ratings are plummeting, and he and his fellow progressives are panicking. The message is clear: if the unemployment situation doesn’t improve fast, come next November, the president’s RPM partners in Congress will be sent packing.
Obama’s Stimulus II proposal is unlikely to make a meaningful dent in the employment situation. Of course, the administration will claim victory no matter what the outcome-much as they already have, by resorting to an immeasurable claim that the stimulus “saved or created millions of jobs.” If Obama were serious about creating jobs, he would remove the massive barriers to job creation that his administration has erected. What sensible businessman is going to hire new employees in the face of such great uncertainty regarding the future of health care, taxes, card check, and carbon emissions? The proposals in Congress on these issues create real liabilities for businesses. If the president really wanted to create jobs, he would propose a two-year furlough for the legislative and executive branches of government.
