By Dr. Merrill Matthews
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas President Obamas forthcoming jobs package" is what the country gets when it elects a president who spent more time organizing people than hiring them.
Obama needs desperately to find a way to boost job creation both for the countrys sake & his own political future yet previews of his Thursday speech allow me to make an early prediction: The economy will ... continue to sputter and unemployment will remain in the 8-plus range until well January of 2013 (
if you know what I mean).
The president persists in pushing programs that cost billions of dollars and do not create sustainable jobs and he refuses to embrace policies that will.
Take for example the hints that Obama wants to expand his job-subsidization efforts to the private sector by giving employers a tax break to make it less expensive to hire workers. This from the man who has made the cost of hiring new workers so expensive and the cost of regulatory compliance so unpredictable that many employers refuse to hire.
- Obama supported an increase in the minimum wage as a senator;
- He has imposed countless new costs on business by pushing through his trillion-dollar-plus health care legislation and his financial reforms including 4870 Federal Register pages of proposed regulations on banks; and
- There are 219 new regulations for 2011 that impose economic costs of more than $100 million each and seven are being considered that would exceed $1 billion each.
All of the above significantly raise the cost of doing business and hiring new employees. So now the president wants to provide businesses with a subsidy to make it less expensive to hire a new employee.
Every business owner knows the subsidies are temporary while the new costs and regulations are permanentat least as long as Obama is in office. So while the presidents proposals might produce a little hiring at the margins it will be nowhere near what we need to jumpstart the economy.
And even as the president claims he is now laser-focused on job creation he wants the public to forget all of his previous taxpayer-funded efforts to create mostly those green jobs" of the future many of which have been abject failures.
Like the $20 million federal grant given to Seattle to weatherize houses. The promise? To create 2000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2000 homes in poorer neighborhoods" according to the SeattlePI. The reality a year later only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program."
The much-hyped company Solyndra which manufacturesum make that manufactured"solar technology has closed its doors and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Only a year ago Obama gave it $535 million in low-cost loan guarantees touting the company as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs" according to an NBC-affiliate report. Now another 1000 people have become unemployed victims of Obamas job-creating skills.
And taxpayers have become victims of another half-billion dollars sucked down the Obama job-creating drain.
Mr. Job-Creator also went to Michigan in August to puff his government handouts. He said at Johnson Controls We know there are things we can do right now that will help accelerate growth and job creationthat will support the work going on here at Johnson Controls here in Michigan and all across America." As was widely reported the company added about 150 jobsat an average cost of about $2 million each.
Perhaps the best example of the presidents job-creation failures is his green car" efforts. Talk about driving the economy into the ground! The president has set a goal of 1 million plug-in cars by 2015. And so he started doling out taxpayer money announcing a $2.4 billion program in March 2009.
Since the government was a majority stakeholder in GM at the time the Chevy Volt became a model to be emulated. Except … well nobody wants it. GM only sold 125 Volts in Julyand thats with the government buying some of them. At that blistering sales pace we could hit oh maybe 4000 on the road by 2015.
President Obama is going to address Congress and the country on Sept. 8 to announcefor the 4th time or is it the 6th or 7th Ive lost countthat he has a plan to create jobs and grow the economy. Based on his past and repeated performances there is no reason to believe a word he says.
Not that he will be lying I think he actually believes what hes doing will help the economy. But the man who never created a private sector job or signed a paycheck before becoming president except for his campaigns doesnt have a clue about what it takes to live by a budget and meet a private sector payroll.
And it is becoming increasingly apparent that one person will have to be fired before the rest of the country can be hired.
Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation. The Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) is an independent nonprofit public policy organization based in Dallas Texas.
