What have you done for us lately remains on every voters mind.
By Donald Devine
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas The good news for the Democrats running for Congress this year is that statistically the recession is over. The bad news is that the recession is over. The last official unemployment rate before the election was recorded at 9.6 percent. Since the recession is over this must be what a Barack Obama recovery looks like.
The main success of the Obama stimulus has been to create or save jobs but only government jobs. If a person worked for the Feds state or local governments or government contractors mostly unionized the stimulus worked quite well.
For a while anyway. The September final report showed that the number of local government jobs mostly teachers dropped by 77000 the largest drop in city jobs in one month in thirty years. State governments lost 7000 more. The stimulus did provide temporary relief for this key Democratic constituency but it ran out just when they needed its votes the most.
Speaking after the new employment data were issued President Obama claimed that layoffs by state and local governments would have been even worse without federal stimulus funds over the last 20 months. As a remedy he called for an ambitious program to modernize the nations transportation infrastructure.
The National League of Cities however estimated that even with the September job losses local governments were not halfway through the 480000 layoffs projected to occur through next year. Oops!
President Obama then boasted that the U.S. economy had witnessed nine straight months of private-sector job growth totaling more than 850000 jobs compared with a loss of nearly that many in a single month" when he took office in 2009.
While the September data show that private sector jobs did increase it was only by 64000 new jobs a drop in the bucket considering that there were still 15 million unemployed.
Moreover most of the private-sector job gains were lower paying part time or short term and were at peripheral businesses such as temporary help companies and eating and drinking establishments. Manufacturing jobs dropped for the second straight month and construction declined too.
Poor President Obama just cannot get it right.
While he talks about private sector jobs his proposals to stimulate growth are aimed at public sector growth as with his highway and bridges building program. He does not seem able to distinguish between the nature of government jobs and private jobs.
After working his entire adult life in the government and the academy and surrounded in the White House by those with similar backgrounds this is understandable. He is apparently unaware that government jobs need to be paid for by collecting taxes or borrowing from the private sector to pay government salaries and benefits which are in fact higher than private compensation.
Private jobs are real jobs that in fact produce new wealth and pay taxes not paid for by taxes.
The president is even disparaging the private market as he is campaigning for Congress blaming blind faith in the market" and letting businesses do whatever they want" and then expecting somehow automatically America is going to grow and prosper" for todays difficulties.
Does he think that is what he has being doing for two years? The very fact he will not let the market adjust is why the economy remains in a funk.
As the presidents comments and Democrat attack ads demonstrate their only response is to blame poor old George W. Bush for their current economic troubles. But it is difficult to escape the fact that unemployment was only 7.7 percent when Present Obama entered office.
What have you done for us lately remains on every voters mind.
Since the recession ended back in June 2009 the Obama stimulus could not possibly have had time to deliver whatever recovery took place. In fact it is the so-called recovery that is what concerns voters today.
The recovery" looks more and more like long-term lower economic growth and stagnation as Japan has witnessed for over a decade rather than a formal recession. For voters looking for hope this is even worse news than being in a recession.
This looks to them like stagnation forever.
The only good news for Democrats facing elections next month is that the stock market is up on the hopes the Fed will follow through on its hints to soak-up billions more in bonds so inflation can spur the economy into growth. Of course this would only create a new unsustainable bubble like the one that caused the current difficulties and be disastrous financially over the long run although it might be worth a few votes come November 2nd.
On the other hand it is doubtful there are enough such bankers and brokers in the electorate to avoid the coming political catastrophe.
Donald Devine the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is Senior Scholar at Bellevue Universitys Center for American Vision and Values.
