When you’re President of the United States (and only 44 of us can claim that distinction over the past 223 or so years of U.S. history) you tend to get the credit when things go right (killing bin Laden), and the blame when things go wrong (the U.S. credit rating is downgraded for the first time in history, the economy continues to muddle along and unemployment remains unacceptably high, etc.)
Now as for getting bin Laden, I would argue that even though it happened on President Obama’s watch, and to his credit he gave the go-ahead to go in, Candidate Obama had opposed the enhanced interrogation tactics (he called them torture) which made it possible to locate bin Laden in the first place and take him out. So how much credit does Obama deserve? Who cares? We got bin Laden.
But I want to focus on what President Obama has or hasn’t done relative to jobs. When he was sworn in as President, unemployment stood at 6.7%. At that time, Democrats controlled the House and the Senate by large margins and could pass virtually anything President Obama wanted to push. He said he wanted to focus on jobs (like a laser beam). So what did he do?
First, President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress passed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package, which virtually everyone, even liberal commentators agree, didn’t work. Even though President Obama promised that if it passed, unemployment wouldn’t go over 8%, it went over 10%, and still remains stuck over 9%. The Stimulus grew government, but not jobs in the private sector.
Then the President and the Congress shifted to Cap and Trade. In essence, it would have meant huge increases in the cost of energy and doing business in this country. The legislation passed the House, but not the Senate and therefore never became law. The relevance to jobs is that months were spent debating this dead-end bill in Washington, when that time should have been spent on debating policies which would have created jobs.
And then President Obama and the last Congress spent the rest of their time debating, and ultimately passing, what was arguably one of the worst job-killing bills of all time – Obamacare. Virtually, every small business person I talked to described this as one of the main reasons they are afraid to hire anyone – the additional costs they will incur just makes it too expensive. No wonder unemployment remains maddeningly high.
So after making all the wrong moves relative to the economy and job-creation thus far in his administration, what has President Obama just announced? That he will come up with a jobs plan and announce it to the world in September. (After spending the next 10 days or so roughing it with those millionaires and billionaires his Administration is always criticizing, in Martha’s Vineyard.)
Why has he waited nearly 3 years to come up with a jobs plan? And what happened to the jobs laser beam? And where are all those “green” jobs? And why hasn’t he fired Timothy Geithner yet? And whatever happened to all those shovel-ready projects? And how much did all those highway signs next to the pot-hole filling projects really cost?
In conclusion, it’s way passed time to start enacting free-market measures, which will re-invigorate the economy and begin creating real jobs, in the private sector. Hastily put-together jobs plans which are likely to be nothing more than thinly-veiled talking points for one’s reelection campaign are not the answer. I’m not sure that this Administration even knows the right questions.
