Economy Improves For The Fortunate Few
Remember back to the heady first months of the Obama Administration when President Obama stated that if Congress did not pass the nearly $1 Trillion stimulus package, the unemployment rate would soar above 8 percent? Remember how, despite the showering of billions of taxpayer funded largess on every ridiculous scheme, scam and sham, unemployment still rocketed above 10 percent? How in the world could “the One,” Barack Obama, blow this call and the billions that went with it? The answer is simple; government spending does not create lasting nor meaningful employment. Jobs are created by the private sector and private enterprise is scared witless at this time.
Job creation, much like consumer spending, requires confidence and faith in the future. President Obama, despite his puff and posturing, has simply failed to inspire business to hire because of the fear that Obamacare, high energy costs, high commodity costs, threat of significant tax increases and a morass of government regulation will seriously erode corporate earnings. This fear has driven American businesses to make do with their current staff, rely to a greater degree on mechanization and to further expedite outsourcing and off-shoring of labor. The truth about government is that despite its massive powers, it just can’t mandate the hiring of labor. Employment will not increase until business and industry become more confident that their enterprises will not be co-opted, restricted, hijacked or destroyed by President Obama and his coterie of quasi-socialist and societal engineering czars.
Yes, the sad little truth, while Obama is traveling the country on his “I killed Bin Laden” tour, is that unemployment actually rose from 8.8% to 9.0% in April. This increase in unemployment was in spite of the powerful efforts of McDonalds to hire 60,000 seasonal workers. Wow! Remember when President George Bush’s Administration created millions of new jobs and those jobs were derided by the left as nothing but “hamburger flipper” jobs? My how times have changed!
But surely you say; my standard of living must be rising. After all, I’m employed. Well, sorry to say, but your earnings have been eroded by sky high gasoline prices and the Obamaflation created by the willful destruction of the United States currency. You are paying more for fuel, utilities, food, clothing and healthcare. Why is there so much inflation when so many are out of work and underemployed?
Let’s call it Obamanomics, led by the geniuses of American fiscal policy, Secretary Tim Geitner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The scheme dreamed up by the Obama economics team could easily be dubbed “Backdoor Keynesian Failed Economics.” Knowing that he could not go back to the Congressional well for another trillion dollar giveaway plan, Obama needed a backdoor way of achieving the same questionable strategy. The plan called for the Federal Reserve to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at the Treasury Bond market in an attempt to drive down interest rates to zero and get the consumer to go out and borrow money to buy homes, cars, computers and you name it. It’s like priming the pump without pumping the handle. You can see where this is going.
This questionable strategy, masquerading under the mystical name of Quantitative Easing, has brought interest rates down. It has also been successful in driving money to the stock market. After all, money goes where it is treated best! Quantitative Easing has also served to drive up oil prices and a litany of commodity prices in the process.
Who has benefitted from this latest failed version of Obamanomics? Stock investors, oil speculators, Arab sheiks, gold and silver speculators and the very special interests that candidate Obama pledged to curtail. The unemployed and underemployed still await the miracle. Senior citizens living on a fixed income have seen their costs shoot through the ceiling and their income derived from interest bearing investments shattered. This just wasn’t what President Obama told us. I’m shocked, totally shocked!
You can’t expect a President who has never worked in private enterprise, never met a payroll and never struggled to navigate the massive Federal roadblocks to success to have a clue as to how to re-fire the economy. A socialist believes that everything flows from government, including jobs. So we all must now face the staggering truth that once the temporary firemen and policemen have been hired, the trolleys purchased, the flowers planted, the jogging paths paved and the bumpouts bumped to their bumpiest, the lines at the unemployment office have continued to grow. It’s time for change that “We the People” can believe in!
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