Time magazine -- an unlikely source and part of the coterie of tongue-bathing, knee pad mainstream media -- questions the wisdom of The Pantload running on the central premise of his policies and accomplishments creating two million jobs.
As it now stands, the President’s stump speech features a backward-looking message at its core. Obama trumpets “more than 2 million jobs in the private sector” that have been created in the last 15 months. At a recent speech in Ohio he dismissed May’s bad jobs numbers as “bumps on the road to recovery.” In Greenberg’s estimation, this is an error on par with President Obama’s midterm election pitch, which described the nation as a car that had just gotten out of a ditch that Republicans drove into in the first place. The metaphor didn’t work, Greenberg explained in a recent memo, because “people thought they were still in the ditch.”
The usual suspects -- incompetent Ivy League faculty lounge refugees on Obama's revolving-door team of economic advisors and his campaign team -- seem to be agreeing with Greenburg that this "Mission Accomplished" approach is folly:
President Obama’s own strategists agree — but only in part. New projections of tepid economic growth under 3%, and unemployment over 8.5%, have all but erased hopes that Obama can run for reelection as the guy who saved America from the worst economic crises since the Great Depression. It’s not a convincing message when four out of five Americans still rate the economy as “poor.”
Irrespective of the flailing going on over at Team Obama Headquarters, even marginally referring to any policy of his rescuing the economy represents pure delusional folly. Going near that hoary old bromide of two million jobs "saved or created" is kind of like firmly grasping the to secondary poles of a 25 KV substation transformer -- bound to be a shocking experience.
This is especially true when you consider that fully 45% of these two million so-called new jobs were created in the state of Texas:
Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, dropped by our offices this week and relayed a remarkable fact: Some 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas. Mr. Fisher’s study is a lesson in what works in economic policy—and it is worth pondering in the current 1.8% growth moment.
Using Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, Dallas Fed economists looked at state-by-state employment changes since June 2009, when the recession ended. Texas added 265,300 net jobs, out of the 722,200 nationwide, and by far outpaced every other state. New York was second with 98,200, Pennsylvania added 93,000, and it falls off from there. Nine states created fewer than 10,000 jobs, while Maine, Hawaii, Delaware and Wyoming created fewer than 1,000. Eighteen states have lost jobs since the recovery began.
The data are even more notable because they’re calculated on a “sum of states” basis, which the BLS does not use because they can have sampling errors. Using straight nonfarm payroll employment, Texas accounts for 45% of net U.S. job creation. Modesty is not typically considered a Texas virtue, but the results speak for themselves.
Texas is also among the few states that are home to more jobs than when the recession began in December 2007. The others are North Dakota, Alaska and the District of Columbia. If that last one sounds like an outlier at first, remember the government boom of the Obama era, which has helped loft D.C. payrolls 18,000 jobs above the pre-crisis status quo. Even so, Texas is up 30,800.
Interesting factoid and one you should slip into your ammo bag for those upcoming debates with the nouveau bitter clingers, the die-hard Disciples of The Boy King. It will be interesting to see the scales drop from their eyes when that data is presented to them -- especially if Texas governor Rick Perry gets into the race.
Still in all, it is becoming more and more apparent that there are cracks in the fortress wall of the Team Pantload castle.It is delicious to visit them, to chew on each morsel as it were, to watch with glee as the corpse twists slowly in the wind:
This is a time when the president needs to find his inner Bill Clinton, and feel Americans’ pain. If he wants to be one of the few presidents to win reelection in a stagnant economy, he’ll have to devote less time to defending past policies, like the auto bailout, and more to offering specific solutions to help people get back to work. Think a 21st century version of FDR’s fireside chats.
..oh, puh-lease!
Just how is this ass clown and his coterie Keystone Kops advisors going to get it right now when they still espouse more taxes on businesses using that laughable mantra of taxing the rich.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that President Obama believes taxes on small businesses across the country must rise in order to prevent a general reduction in the overall size of government programs. Geithner added that the administration seeks to raise taxes on all individuals earning $250,000 per year or more, and this would necessarily include small business owners who file as individuals.
It's 2011, fercrissakes, and after almost three years of nothing but bad news, stagnating growth, and steadily-UN-improving unemployment Geithner and his boss still don't get it. So, given they have about 15 months to go, its unlikely that anything short of a miracle will cause a turnaround.
But Hopey-Changey is still out there giving those clueless speeches and makin' all that jive talk. Like Ramirez' cartoon above, you can put a dress and lipstick on a pig but, in the long run, it's still a pig.
UPDATE: It's instructive to read the comments of the articles one cites in posts. I was sourcing some of my assertions over at this article at The National Journal when I came upon one of those remarks that isn't edgy political dialog, but rather common business strategy:
Click to Embiggen |
Deal with that, pig-boy.
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