Are You Doing Better Than You Were Four Years Ago Under Obama’s Failed Fiasco Of A Presidency? ‘No, But That’s Not The Question,’ Say His Minions

This is the key stat to the answer, “Are you better off than you were four years ago”:

Household income is below recession levels, report says
By Michael A. Fletcher, Published: August 23

Household income is down sharply since the recession ended three years ago, according to a report released Thursday, providing another sign of the stubborn weakness of the economic recovery.

From June 2009 to June 2012, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 4.8 percent, to $50,964, according to a report by Sentier Research, a firm headed by two former Census Bureau officials.

Incomes have dropped more since the beginning of the recovery than they did during the recession itself, when they declined 2.6 percent, according to the report, which analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. The recession, the most severe since the Great Depression, lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.

Overall, median income is 7.2 percent

ABC News has a survey.  As of now, nearly three out of every four answer “No” to the question and say they are NOT better off under Obama.

Answer: HELL No.  You want to blame the recession and even the first year of Obama’s utterly failed presidency on Bush?  Fine.  But the fact remains that the median household income has gone down nearly TWICE as much during Obama’s “recovery” than it did during the entire recession that Obama blames Bush for.  Which is to say that even the very “best of times” under Obama’s failed presidency have paled in comparison even to the worst of times under Bush – with the very “worst” of “Bush’s times” happening while Bush was at home watching Obama stick his skinny legs up on the Oval Office desk.

THAT is what they call a “failed presidency.”  There is NO FREAKING WAY Americans are better off now than they were when this failure took office.  And when you add to that that the “failed Bush policies” led to a 5.26% unemployment rate whereas Obama’s messianic policies have led to a 9.33% average unemployment rate, well, you tell me which you like better.  Especially given the fact that when you consider people who have simply dropped out of the job market all together in despair due to Obamanomics, and when you consider the labor participation rate, the real unemployment rate under Obama is about 11.6% rather than the still-miserable 8.3%.

O’Malley: We’re Not Better Off Now
By Jonathan Miller
Updated: September 2, 2012 | 2:58 p.m.
September 2, 2012 | 11:27 a.m.

Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, who is considered a possible contender for president in 2016, bucked other Obama surrogates on Sunday, saying that the country was not better off now than it was four years ago.

On CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer asked: “Can you honestly say that people are better off today than they were four years ago?”

(RELATED: Axelrod Calls GOP Convention a Bust)

Responded O’Malley: “No, but that’s not the question of this election. The question, without a doubt, we are not as well off as we were before George Bush brought us the Bush job losses, the Bush recession, the Bush deficits, the series of desert wars — charged for the first time to credit cards, the national credit card.”

Quipped Schieffer: “George Bush is not on the ballots.”

The most senior Obama campaign simply refused to answer the question:

David Plouffe (who frankly should have been explaining why he took money from IRAN):

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Is he right, can the president argue unequivocally that Americans are better off today than they were four years ago?

DAVID PLOUFFE: Listen, George, I think the American people understand that we got into a terrible economic situation, a recession, only that the Great Depression — the only thing the country has ever seen like it. So they know we had a deep hole. It took us a long time to get into that hole, it’s going to take a long time to out of it.

First of all, Governor Romney is offering the same, exactly policies that led to the recession in the first place.

To paraphrase Plouffe’s response to Stephanopoulos’ question:

“Mumble, mumble, mumble.  Blame Bush.  Blah blah blah.  And in conclusion, blame Bush.”

If you want your president to be a demagogue who will NOT accept responsibility for his record and who will blame and lie, then Obama truly is your “hope and change” and this really is your “fundamentally transformed America.”  Because that’s all that Obama has done and it is all that he will continue to do.

And of course that “that’s what led to the recession” line might sound good, but let’s point out that RONALD REAGAN USED CONSERVATIVE ECONOMIC POLICIES TO PROPEL AMERICA TO 10 PERCENT GROWTH AND CREATED OVER A MILLION JOBS A MONTH.

David Axelrod took the plunge and said, yeah, we’re better under the man who lowered the level of our oceans and healed our planet before ultimately saying, okay, maybe we AREN’T better off:

“Can you honestly say that Americans better off today than they were four years ago?” Wallace pointedly asked Axelrod.

“I can say that we’re in a better position than we were four years ago in our economy, in the sense that when this president took office, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month,” Axelrod responded. “And the quarter before he took office was the worst since the Great Depression and we are in a different place.”

“29 straight months of job growth, 4.5 million private sector jobs,” the adviser cited as statistical evidence, but conceded: “Are we where we need to be? No.”

That 29 straight months of job growth might actually sound impressive if Democrats hadn’t utterly pooh-poohed George Bush when he had FIFTY-TWO STRAIGHT MONTHS OF JOB GROWTH from September 2003 to December 2007 thanks to his TAX CUTS.  It takes so much freaking chutzpah to decry fifty-two months of job growth and then laud a number barely half of that as magnificent that only a Democrat could possibly be hypocrite enough to do it.  But there you have it.

Then there’s the “monkey math” that Axelrod cites: basically, it first depends on the theory that Barack Obama really didn’t assume the presidency until 2010.  It was the devil BOOSH who was president in 2009 and so all of those numbers only apply to the devil Bush.  We only take credit for things we can make look good; Bush is responsible for everything else whether it happened during Obama’s watch or not.  I say that because Barack Obama has been president NOT for 29 months, ye Democrat dumbasses, but for going on 45 months.  And it is a national disgrace that we have such a completely failed leader that he can’t even assume responsibility for over a year of his failed presidency.

Then there’s the 800,000 jobs lost a month when Obama took office.  Well, Democrats are such liars they even fabricate when they’re getting close to trying to tell the truth.  We never lost “800,000 jobs a month.”  The most jobs we ever lost was in January 2009 (during that year that Obama was president but refuses to acknowledge) when we lost 741,000 jobs.  If you’re going to round that number honestly, David, you liar, we only lost 700,000 jobs that month, didn’t we?  And for Axelrod to oh so conveniently round way, WAY up and then make it sound like it was happening every single month – we got to that 700k number in only ONE month – is a lie from a serial liar.

What’s always been interesting to me is that we had a crisis that was created by Democrat-OWNED Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going bankrupt which triggered the meltdown as private banks held Fannie and Freddie mortgage backed securities that they suddenly discovered were “toxic assets” because the GSEs had loaded up so much bad debt in those securities that nobody could tell good debt from bad debt.  And that month, in September 2008, we lost 280,000 jobs under Bush’s watch.  In October, things looked a little better and we only lost 240,000 jobs that month.

Then America made the stupidest decision in its history and elected Obama.  And businesses immediately responded in November by giving up 333,000 jobs – nearly a hundred thousand more jobs than the month before.  The panic of a future-failed Obama presidency continued as we lost 632,000 jobs in the first full month after Obama was elected.  What kind of fool can look at this reality and say, “Obama’s election calmed frightened businesses?”  Because businesses said, “This turd is going to kill us.  Let’s cut our losses now.”  And so the month Obama took the oath of his failed office, we lost 741,000 jobs that month as businesses cut and ran on his presidency.

To document that the huge job losses that Obama demagogues actually occurred because of sheer terror of a pathetic failure assuming office, let me go back to an article I wrote in October of 2008: “Actual Job Creators Favor McCain 4-1 Over Obama.”  I note an article from CEO Magazine:

People are most concerned about jobs right now; maybe they should stop listening to mainstream media ideologues and start listening to the people who actually create jobs:

Chief Executive Magazine’s most recent polling of 751 CEOs shows that GOP presidential candidate John McCain is the preferred choice for CEOs. According to the poll, which is featured on the cover of Chief Executive’s most recent issue, by a four-to-one margin, CEOs support Senator John McCain over Senator Barack Obama. Moreover, 74 percent of the executives say they fear that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for the country.

“The stakes for this presidential election are higher than they’ve ever been in recent memory,” said Edward M. Kopko, CEO and Publisher of Chief Executive magazine. “We’ve been experiencing consecutive job losses for nine months now. There’s no doubt that reviving the job market will be a top priority for the incoming president. And job creating CEOs repeatedly tell us that McCain’s policies are far more conducive to a more positive employment environment than Obama’s.”

“Disastrous for the country.” That doesn’t sound good. And that’s about as optimistic as the CEO’s get about Barack Obama:

“I’m not terribly excited about McCain being president, but I’m sure that Obama, if elected, will have a negative impact on business and the economy,” said one CEO voicing his lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, but particularly Obama.

In expressing their rejection of Senator Obama, some CEOs who responded to the survey went as far as to say that “some of his programs would bankrupt the country within three years, if implemented.” In fact, the poll highlights that Obama’s tax policies, which scored the lowest grade in the poll, are particularly unpopular among CEOs.

“Bankrupt the country within three years.” There. You want socialism, you can have it. “Spread the wealth around” so that country itself is as broke as the defaulting homeowners and the defaulting mortgage houses we keep hearing about.

We didn’t listen to those CEOs.  And here we are very nearly damned bankrupt just as they predicted, as Democrats gather for their convention, with the national debt about to hit $16 TRILLION (now well above our entire GDP) and an actual fiscal gap of no “mere” $16 trillion but a supermassive black hole of death $222 trillion.

You want to see the market tank and employers cut their losses again?  Just re-hire Obama.  You’ll see things go to sh!t right quick as business reacts to the fiasco.

Let’s see, what did the lying dishonest weasel say back in 2008?

“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.” — Barack Obama, 3 July 2008

That’s right.  Six trillion dollars in debt from Obama in one four-year term is responsible and patriotic; four trillion dollars over EIGHT YEARS is “irresponsible and unpatriotic.”  Again, there’s that thingy about Democrat=hypocrite and hypocrite=Democrat.  And if you are a Democrat, it is only because you, personally, are a hypocrite and a bad person.

The 4.5 million private sector jobs that Axelrod credits Obama for first of all utterly refuses to consider that 13 first months of Obama’s presidency (to quote that Servpro commercial jingle, “Like it never even happened!”) and second of all counts all the job gains but refuses to consider the rather disturbing factoid about all of those new jobless claims that have racked up every single month during Obama’s presidency. But you see, all the job gains are because of Obama but all the nearly 400,000 job losses every single damn month four damn years after Bush left the White House are still because of the devil Bush.  Third, given our population growth, ten million Americans have actually entered the work force during Obama’s presidency; which is to say that Obama is nowhere NEAR keeping up with simple population growth even according to his own asinine horn-tooting.  And fourth, this “4.5 million jobs” is a full-of-crap talking point parroted by rabid ideologues. 

This turd needs to go.  He needs to go now.  And if he doesn’t go soon this country is simply doomed.

AP-Reported FACT: U.S. Economy The Worst Since The LAST Time We Let A Socialist Run It

The Los Angeles Times print edition ran this story on July 2 under the considerably more Marxist headline, “Wealthy benefit from recovery as workers struggle“:

U.S. Recovery’s 2-Year Anniversary Arrives With Little To Celebrate
First Posted: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET Updated: 07/ 1/11 05:33 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — This is one anniversary few feel like celebrating.

Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.

After previous recessions, people in all income groups tended to benefit. This time, ordinary Americans are struggling with job insecurity, too much debt and pay raises that haven’t kept up with prices at the grocery store and gas station. The economy’s meager gains are going mostly to the wealthiest.

Workers’ wages and benefits make up 57.5 percent of the economy, an all-time low. Until the mid-2000s, that figure had been remarkably stable — about 64 percent through boom and bust alike.

[…]

But if the Great Recession is long gone from Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, it lingers on Main Street:

— Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent — this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.

— The average worker’s hourly wages, after accounting for inflation, were 1.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier. Rising gasoline and food prices have devoured any pay raises for most Americans.

— The jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that vanished in the recession. Higher-paying jobs in the private sector, the ones that pay roughly $19 to $31 an hour, made up 40 percent of the jobs lost from January 2008 to February 2010 but only 27 percent of the jobs created since then.

[…]

Hard times have made Americans more dependent than ever on social programs, which accounted for a record 18 percent of personal income in the last three months of 2010 before coming down a bit this year. Almost 45 million Americans are on food stamps, another record.

[…]

Because the labor market remains so weak, most workers can’t demand bigger raises or look for better jobs.

“In an economic cycle that is turning up, a labor market that is healthy and vibrant, you’d see a large number of people quitting their jobs,” says Gluskin Sheff economist Rosenberg. “They quit because the grass is greener somewhere else.”

Instead, workers are toughing it out, thankful they have jobs at all. Just 1.7 million workers have quit their job each month this year, down from 2.8 million a month in 2007.

The toll of all this shows in consumer confidence, a measure of how good people feel about the economy. According to the Conference Board’s index, it’s at 58.5. Healthy is more like 90. By this point after the past three recessions, it was an average of 87.

How gloomy are Americans? A USA Today/Gallup poll eight weeks ago found that 55 percent think the recession continues, even if the experts say it’s been over for two years. That includes the 29 percent who go even further — they say it feels more like a depression.

Allow me to start with the second paragraph in the story:

“Two years after economists say the Great Recession ended, the recovery has been the weakest and most lopsided of any since the 1930s.”

The weakest and most lopsided of any recovery since the 1930s, you say???

WHO WAS PRESIDENT IN THE 1930s?  WHICH PARTY DOMINATED BOTH THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE IN THE 1930s?

And next let me ask you, “Are there any similarities between socialist Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and socialist Democrat Barack Hussein Obama???  And the answer is, “HELL YES THERE ARE!!!”:

Which is to say, “This is the worst the U.S. economy has ever been since the LAST time we had a socialist just like FDR – and the mainstream media proudly hailed Obama as FDR and Obama’s as a NEW “New Deal.”

But here’s the truth:

FDR prolonged — not ended — great depression

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

”Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. ”We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

[…]

”The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. ”Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

And of course all the “experts” the mainstream media love to trot out have all bought hook, line and sinker the notion that capitalism is something to be loathed and feared.  So they demand that America pursue asinine government stimulus policies that fail even by the “experts'” own standards, and then these same “experts” proceed to argue that the economy failing to recover somehow is proof that more of the same thing that already failed is necessary.

These “experts” whom the mainstream media give a loud microphone to to espouse their socialist views are pathologically incapable of seeing this connection between socialist policies and an economy in the doldrums.  Every bit of negative economic news is invariably “unexpected” (liberals favorite adjective to wave a hand at bad economic developments whenever a Democrat president is in charge), because these “experts” cannot separate the inevitable results of their ideology from their terribly failed ideology.  There has to be a disconnect, or more commonly, a scapegoat.

I can simply re-cite my conclusion from a previous article to find a particularly laughable example of this phenomena:

I think of the Soviet Union, which literally blamed the total failure of their entire political philosophy and the ruinous policies that philosophy entailed by claiming that their agricultural output had been adversely affected due to 72 years of bad weather.  And the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Dodo bird for that very reason.

Is America under Obama the next Dodo bird to fall apart while we’re assured that everything is fine while some suitable scapegoat bears the blame for every failure that can’t be ignored???

It couldn’t be the fact that socialism is nothing more than state-planned economic failure.  It had to be something else, ANYTHING else.

The Big Brother from the novel 1984 had Emmanuel Goldstein.  The Big Brother who is now occupying our White House has George W. Bush.

The next obvious question to ask and answer is, “Why are the wealthy benefitting while the workers struggle?”

The answer is twofold: 1) because when you attack the employers, the first thing to go is the employees and 2) because that’s exactly how crony capitalism works.

There is a magnificent book entitled, New Deal Or Raw Deal?  How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, which should be required reading.  Burton Folsom Jr. points out that when FDR structured his many policies and regulations that strangled economic growth, he did so in such a way that favored the big crony capitalist corporations at the expense of the smaller businesses that could no longer compete given the costly regulatory requirements.  The smaller businesses were forced out of the market while the big businesses protected themselves with insider deals based on access to and influence with the government that only they could afford.  And there is no question whatsoever that – even as FDR employed the class warfare of socialism – the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.  Income tax revenues plunged as the wealthy sheltered their wealth from the high tax rates and the poor paid an increasingly high overall percentage of tax revenues via excise taxes.  Regulations mandating higher pay for workers priced those workers right out of their jobs.  Folsom provides the official data to back it up.

Check out this fact from page 127 of New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1929, prior to FDR demonizing the rich, income taxes accounted for 38% of total revenue collected, and corporate income taxes accounted for 43%.  Excise taxes which burdened the poor only counted for 19% of revenues.  By 1938, the rich and the corporations had protected themselves from FDR’s demagogic tax policies (but the poor couldn’t), such that the only 24% was collected in income taxes (versus 38%) and only 29% from corporate income taxes (versus 43%).  Meanwhile the poor-punishing excise taxes (e.g. gasoline tax) soared from 19% to 47% of the total taxes collected.  Meanwhile, when income taxes were kept low, the wealthy invariably paid FAR MORE in the total tax revenue as they put their money out to invest in and expand the economy in pursuit of the profits.  And they created millions of jobs in doing so.

And guess what?  Regulations mandating higher wages are STILL killing jobs now that Obama is doing it.

And the exact same mindset is yielding the exact same results ALL OVER AGAIN.  Obama has put the fear of God (actually the fear of the Soviet-style STATE) into the wealthy and the corporations.  They keep hearing Obama demagogue them, and they keep sheltering their money.  And they will CONTINUE to keep doing that until the threat of Obama is gone.  Just like they did with FDR.

Here we are today, with “the New FDR,” Barack Obama.  Who is the top dog on Obama’s economic team?  Why lo and behold, it is none other than GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, crony capitalist extraordinaire whose big corporation has REPEATEDLY benefitted from a cozy insider relationship with big government.  And consider how Obama literally took big auto makers GM and Chrysler away from their legitimate shareholders and gave them to big unions.

Regarding “crony capitalism,” I made a sweeping statement in a previous article:

That said, there is also a deliberate and fundamental misunderstanding of fascism by the left.  If you read leftists, you come away thinking that somehow “fascism” is the takeover of a state by corporations. But stop and think: Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Hess and all the other key Nazis WEREN’T corporate CEOs who took over the state; THEY WERE SOCIALIST POLITICIANS WHO TOOK OVER THE CORPORATIONS.  They usurped the corporations and FORCED them to perform THEIR agenda.  They either performed the Nazis’ will or they were simply taken away from their rightful owners and nationalized.

And to the degree that German crony capitalist corporations helped Hitler in his rise to power, THEY WERE JUST MORE USEFUL IDIOTS.

The same sort of takeover of German corporations by socialists is building in America.  Take Maxine Waters, a liberal Democrat, as the perfect example.  What did she say of the oil companies?

“This liberal will be all about socializing … uh uh … would be about … basically … taking over … and the government running all of your companies.”

THAT’S what Hitler did, too.  Hitler got this power through regulations that required corporations to do his bidding, just like Obama has now REPEATEDLY done.

And then consider how willing Maxine Waters used “crony capitalism” (which is the essence of developing fascism) to directly personally benefit even as she shaped the banking industry.

The Democrat party is the party of socialism.  It is the party of Marxism.  It is the party of fascism.

I stand by that sweeping statement.  People need to realize that “Nazi” stood for “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and that both Nazi socialism and Soviet socialism were big government socialist tyrannies that failed their people.  As to our own experiment with socialism here in the USA, I point out in an article that explains how “Government Sponsored Enterprises” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies led us into economic implosion in spite of warnings for YEARS prior to the 2008 economic collapse:

But rigid opposition from Democrats – especially Democrats like Senator Barack Obama – who took more campaign money from Fannie and Freddie and dirty crony capitalism outfits like corrupt Lehman Bros. than ANYONE in his short Senate stint – prevented any “hope and change” of necessary reform from saving the US economy.

The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Times pointed out:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.

And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM.  It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.

The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.”  It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.”  Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are.  But Wallison is nonpartisan

Barack and Michelle Obama have a documented personal history of crony capitalism:

The Chicago way is a very, very ugly way.  And Obama has been in it up to his eyeballs.  Chicago is a dirty place filled with dirty politicians – and Obama was perfectly at home with all the dirt.

That Chicago corruption extends right into Obama’s home, by way of his wife Michelle.  This is a woman who sat on high-paying boards in direct quid-pro-quo consequences of Obama advancing in public office.  And in some of those boards, she participated in the worst kind of hospital patient-dumping.

Here’s a video of Michelle Obama you ought to watch – if you can stand the revelations:

Too bad we voted to nationalize the Chicago Way.

I also pointed out that when you attacked employers, the ones who would be hit the most and the hardest would be EMPLOYEES.

Take a look at what’s happening to small businesses, which create at least half of all the jobs in America, under Obama.  How about the fewest new business startups since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it:

Through the 12 months ended in March of last year, 505,473 new businesses started up in the U.S., according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the weakest growth since the bureau started tracking the data in the early 1990s. It’s down sharply from the record 667,341 new businesses added in the 12 months that ended in March 2006.

And we can tie this right back to crony capitalism, as Obama has created a system in which larger businesses are protected against the threat of competition from smaller businesses:

Many times large corporations will even lobby for more regulations  for their  own industry because they know that they can handle all of the  rules and  paperwork far easier than their smaller competitors can.   After all, a  large corporation with an accounting department can easily  handle filling out a  few thousand more forms, but for a small business  with only a handful  of employees that kind of paperwork is a major  logistical nightmare.

When it comes to hiring new employees, the federal government has  made the  process so complicated and so expensive for small businesses  that it is  hardly worth it anymore.  Things have gotten so bad that more  small  businesses than ever are only hiring part-time workers or  independent  contractors.

So what we actually have now is a situation where small businesses  have lots of incentives not to hire more workers, and if they really do need some extra help the rules make it much more profitable to do  whatever you can to keep from bringing people on as full-time   employees.

And who do all these rules and regulations hurt the most but the very people Democrats cynically and deceitfully claim they are trying to help?  Meanwhile, who does it help the most but the crony capitalist corporations who DON’T do most of the hiring in America who can profit from Obama’s war on business that results in the destruction of their small business competition.

A recent report by the National Federation of Independent Business points out that small businesses are planning to SHRINK rather than EXPAND their payrolls under Obama.  From the New York Times:

A Slowdown for Small Businesses
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: June 14, 2011

In the latest sign that the economic recovery may have lost whatever modest oomph it had, more small businesses say that they are planning to shrink their payrolls than say they want to expand them.

That is according to a new report released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that regularly surveys its membership of small businesses across America.

The federation’s report for May showed the worst hiring prospects in eight months. The finding provides a glimpse into the pessimism of the nation’s small firms as they put together their budgets for the coming season, and depicts a more gloomy outlook than other recent (if equally lackluster) economic indicators because this one is forward-looking.

While big companies are buoyed by record profits, many small businesses, which employ half of the country’s private sector workers, are still struggling to break even. And if the nation’s small companies plan to further delay hiring — or, worse, return to laying off workers, as they now hint they might — there is little hope that the nation’s 14 million idle workers will find gainful employment soon.

“Never in the 37-year history of our company have we seen anything at all like this,” said Frank W. Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a publishing company in Salisbury, N.C. He says there is “no chance” he will hire more workers in the months ahead.

“We’re being squeezed on all sides,” he says.

So let me ask again the question that the Los Angeles Times phrased: “Why are the wealthy benefitting from the ‘recovery’ as workers struggle?

And the answer is simple: because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are socialist who have destroyed the engine that creates the jobs that workers depend upon to flourish.

An interesting fact is that businesses are now forced to spend $1.7 TRILLION a year in regulatory compliance costs.  That is a massive hidden tax on their viability; it exceeds the overt income taxes businesses have to pay, and it most certainly exceeds their profits.  And right now Obama is attacking them via the Dodd-Frank regulatory legislation, via the EPA, via OSHA, via ObamaCare and via the ridiculous actions of the NLRB in addition to their tax burden.  Just to name a few.  The result is businesses terrified to expand and further place their necks under Obama’s axe blade.

Meanwhile, Obama’s socialist policies have not only devastated the worker by destroying his jobs, but they’ve ruined America on numerous other levels, too.  Take the housing crisis – which was THE cause of the economic implosion of 2008.  Did Obama make it better?  Well, here’s a headline for you from CNBC: “US Housing Crisis Is Now Worse Than Great Depression.”  Which is to say that Democrats – who first created the housing crisis by refusing to allow the regulation of their pet socialist wealth redistribution agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – took something awful and turned it into an American Dream-massacring nightmare.

The latest job figures simply further document my point: Obama is destroying America job by job.  Not only did the unemployment rate go up to 9.2% (Obama promised the American people that the unemployment rate would be 7.1% by now if he got his massive government-spending stimulus); not only were the previous two month figures adjusted DOWNWARD by some 45,000 jobs; not only have a third of the unemployed been unemployed for at least a YEAR with fully half of the unemployed having been unemployed for over six months (which is unprecedented); not only did the economy create an incredibly dismal 18,000 jobs (versus the 100,000 the economists naively expected); but a quarter million more people simply walked away from the workforce entirely – abandoning any hope that Obama will do anything more than crush their hopes of finding a job.

Obama Wreckovery Adding Whopping 260 Jobs PER STATE

Rush Limbaugh made me aware of the math: what’s 13,000 jobs divided by 50 states?  An infinitesimal 260 jobs per state.

So much for Obama’s “recovery.”

And, of course, it gets even worse when you divide that 13,000 jobs by the 57 states that Obama claimed he had visited [I’d forgive him for that if he were born in Kenya; but given that he claims to be a natural-born American, the ’57 states’ thing will always remain an example of the quintessential ignorance about America and everything American of our current president to me].

260 jobs per state.  That’s a record to boast about.  Want to wait in a line to get one of those jobs?

Report: Private sector added only 13,000 jobs in June

The private sector of the U.S. economy added only 13,000 jobs in June, according to ADP employment services, a disappointing number that came in below estimates and portends bad things from the government’s June jobs report due out Friday.

In May, according to ADP, the private sector added 57,000 jobs. But in June? Statistically, across a workforce as big as the United States’? Zero job growth; 13,000 new jobs is a statistically meaningless number.

This is bad news for the economy. If the ADP report is seconded by the Labor Department’s June jobs report, it means that the private sector — which is the engine of growth in this economy, lest we’ve forgotten that, amid all of our various government stimulus programs and subsides — is refusing to add jobs. That means employers are not comfortable enough with their prospects to hire.

In May, according to the government, the economy added more than 440,000 jobs. But almost every one of those was a census worker, jobs that will go away when the count ends in the fall.

Today’s report adds to concerns that the economic recovery is stalling and gives ammunition to the more bearish among us who worry that we’re headed into a double-dip recession.

That “Welcome back, Carter” “malaise” is just an accepted fact from the Obama administration.  They may say something different when they know their statements are going to be publicized, but here’s what they say in private when they think only their worshipers are around:

Vice President Joe Biden gave a stark assessment of the economy today, telling an audience of supporters, “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.”

Now, let’s go back to September of last year, when Joe Biden said of the stimulus:

“In my wildest dreams, I never thought it would work this well.”

Now we find that same guy saying all the jobs that were lost are gone forever.  How’s that for the stimulus working beyond your wildest dreams?

Gateway Pundit includes a graph summarizing the results of Obama’s wreckovery:

Let’s see.  Thanks to Obama, taxes on businesses are going to skyrocket – especially the small businesses, who file primarily as individuals and therefore fall prey to Obama’s shocking increases on those earning more than $250,000 a year.  Businesses are being forced to take into account that they won’t have nearly as much money under Obama, and must therefore plan accordingly.

From Politico:

… Obama’s stated plan to raise taxes on households making $250,000 or more in income is a tax increase on small business. The simple answer to this dilemma can be found in the IRS Statistics of Income Bulletin (Table 1.4, for those who are interested).So what do the data say?

In 2006 (the latest year available), $706 billion of such income was reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Of this, about half was reported by households in the top marginal income tax rate. Interestingly, two-thirds of this income was reported by households making $250,000 per year or more — the very same households that Obama wants to increase taxes on.

Intellectually bankrupt liberals are hyping the Marxist class warfare strategy of demonizing businesses.  But when the government taxes businesses and business owners, businesses and those who own them merely a) raise their prices and pass those taxes on to you the customer, and b) invest less and hire less.  And who ends up getting hurt the most?

Thanks to Obama, taxes on those who create wealth and build the economy by investment are going to shelter their money.  Stephen Moore put it this way:

[I]f you think it’s bad this year, you’re right. It’s going to get a whole lot worse next year because the Bush tax cuts expire. That means that we’re going to see an increase in the capital gains tax. We’re going to see an increase in the tax on dividends, perhaps a doubling or tripling of that tax. And then we’re also talking about higher income tax rates next year. So this is going to be a tough year this year, but I think things get a whole lot worse next year as we see rates across the board increase. And let’s not forget, there’s also a lot of talk about a value-added tax on top of all of that. […]

[T]here’s something called the Laffer curve, and that’s especially true with these investment taxes. I think it’s a big mistake to be raising taxes on stocks and investment at the very time we need businesses to be doing more investment. So a lot of economists think we’re going to have a pretty good year this year, in 2010, but once those new taxes kick in, in 2011, might cause a double-dip recession.

Intellectually bankrupt liberals are hyping the Marxist class warfare strategy of demonizing private investors.  But they are trying to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.  Rich private investors create opportunities for businesses to grow by their investments.  And private investors – who are investing their own money rather than someone else’s as government bureaucrats always do – are rewarding well-run businesses that will make the most of their capital to most effectively expand and create jobs.

If you tax the investments and seize the profits that investors took risks to obtain, then they will risk less and invest less.  It is as simple as that.  You are killing businesses by taking away the investments that sustain their growth.

Thanks to Obama, the cost of providing health care to employees will go up shockingly.  And employers will HAVE to provide health care insurance, or pay fines.

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Dumbass quiz: do you think that makes a business more or less likely to hire a new employee?

Meanwhile, Obama will massively tax every American by forcing them to buy health insurance, leaving us all with less money to spend purchasing goods and services from businesses.

Thanks to Obama, banks will soon face onerous new regulations that will burden the economy by sustaining the credit crisis:

While certain ramifications of the legislation will only emerge over the coming years, our initial reaction is that this bill will further hinder the U.S. economy’s already fragile recovery. Tough new restrictions on traditional credit products and more onerous capital requirements will further curtail credit availability and product innovation, including affordable credit options designed for higher-risk customer segments. As a result, both industry and economic growth will likely be suppressed for an extended period as banks continue to de-leverage and develop a more thorough understanding of the broad-based structural changes likely to affect the industry in the coming years.

Thanks to Obama, energy will ultimately become far more expensive to already-squeezed businesses.  As Obama taxes productivity, there will be less and less incentive to be productive.

And the added cost to the average household will be some $1,761 a year, leaving us all with less money to spend.  And thus hurting businesses even more.

You add all of these disastrous Obama policies up and you get… absolutely nothing.  At least nothing in terms of jobs.

One day Barack Obama will surely end up in hell, and Karl Marx will say to him, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”