Our Endless, Jobless Summer
By: I.M. Windee
Today’s jobs report showing that employment growth ground to a halt in August, as sagging consumer confidence discouraged already nervous businesses from hiring, was not your father’s standard labor report: this had historic import as it was the first time since 1945 that the government has reported a net monthly job change of zero. When you recall the severity of the downturns in the mid-70’s and early 1980’s, you know this is the kind of history in the making that we’d all rather not be a part of.
And this should come as no surprise to anyone, not least of which Liberals whose Great Society redux from 2009 to 2011 is finally showing its full reach; and we may only be at the very beginning of a lost economic decade.
The Obama/Pelosi Juggernaut that slammed into U.S. Business (and the economy) was both wide and deep. To name a few weapons from their anti-business arsenal: foot-dragging on foreign-trade agreements, a virtual moratorium on new deep-water drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico, over a trillion dollar deficit that takes money out of the economy for wealth-producing (read: job-creating) uses, strangulating new financial industry regulations that only enrich government bureaucrats and lawyers, a massive and harmful reallocation of resources within the healthcare industry and perhaps worst of all, an endless drumbeat against American Business and “the rich” who are the ones that have the capital to grow the economy and hire people. It is no wonder that confidence, at all levels of the economy from the line worker to the boardroom, is down. After all, we’re just following our leader who sees so much wrong with our society and when he’s not lamenting about the perceived inequities of our economy, he’s sweeping and clearing segments or players in it.
And as Candidate Obama in 2008 admired Ronald Reagan as a “transformational president” and conveyed that he too would like to be transformational as president, it is clear that he is following through with such goal except he’s doing it opposite to Mr. Reagan: instead of presiding over the creation of millions of jobs like the Gipper did, Mr. Obama will be overseeing millions of jobs that were not created because of his policies.
A “transformational president,” indeed.
