Obama Keeps Attacking Businesses, Yet Keeps Demanding They Create More Jobs While He Attacks Them

It’s not all that unlike a drunk husband punching his wife in the face every day while constantly saying she needs to love him more:

Editorial: Dems Blame Business For Own Bad Policies
Posted 07:02 PM ET

Economy: President Obama says he wants businesses to “step up” and hire more. If he’s really sincere about wanting more jobs, he should stop demonizing and punishing American corporations for their success.

‘Companies … (are) making a lot of money,” President Obama told a town hall meeting Thursday, “and now’s the time for them to start betting on American workers and American products.”

But the fact they’re not “betting” more isn’t their fault. It’s Obama’s — and his Democrat allies in Congress. Their tax-and-spend policies have pushed our nation to the brink of financial ruin, creating uncertainty and an unstable investment environment for companies.

The president let his true feelings slip later Thursday, telling a laid-off government worker there’s “nothing more important” than working for the government. He then blamed “huge layoffs” in government for our current job ills. So why do businesses have to “step up”?

There are, as a matter of record, 418,000 more government jobs today than when the recession began, as noted by the National Review’s Jim Geraghty. And face it, government “jobs” are mostly a waste, far below the private sector in productivity.

Even so, Democrats have in recent weeks implied repeatedly that companies are somehow unpatriotic for refusing to invest the $2 trillion in cash on their books.

But what sane company would invest at a time when it’s in the government’s greedy cross hairs? Or when both the White House and Congress repeatedly criticize “millionaires and billionaires,” and threaten to crush small businesses — the engines of job growth — with higher taxes and new regulations?

As Obama spoke about jobs Thursday, oil CEOs were being grilled by Senate Democrats at a hostile hearing. Their crime? They’re making fat profits. Time was, profits were a sign of success. Today, far-left Democrats think “profit” is a dirty word.

For the record, oil companies’ profits are up because oil prices have soared. This isn’t due to “speculators,” but to the White House’s foolish policy of keeping hundreds of millions of barrels of offshore oil off-limits — driving up prices and boosting foreign dependence.

Instead, the White House subsidizes money-losing alternative energy sources, none of which is ready to replace our current energy supply. Prices can only go up.

Then there’s Boeing, one of America’s great companies. It wants to open a $2 billion factory in South Carolina, creating thousands of new jobs. A cause for celebration by the White House? Hardly.

The National Labor Relations Board has charged Boeing with a labor-law violation because South Carolina is one of 22 right-to-work states. If you look at which party gets union donations, you’ll understand why.

Fact is, we’re 7 million jobs short of where we were when the recession began, there are eight unemployed people for every job opening and, despite April’s gain of 244,000, we still aren’t creating new jobs fast enough.

Yet Obama & Co. continue to play games, destroying jobs and blaming others for the economic carnage.

I learned today that the oil companies receive 13% of the tax subsidies for the energy industry.  And produce 67% of all the energy America uses.  All the other energy sources combined – including all the “green” energy sources the left loves so much – receive 87% of the tax subsidies.  Even though they produce only 33% of all the energy America uses.  So Democrats want to drive the producers of two-thirds of our energy out of business and reward the remaining third of our energy with massive tax subsidy boondoggles.

And apparently businesses are supposed to say, “Hey, that’s brilliant!  We need to climb on board THAT kind of brilliant-mobile!!!”

The Hindenburg Omen: How Long Before Americans Cry, ‘Oh, The Humanity!’ As Obama Policies Fail?

A cartoonist used the image of the Hindenburg to describe the ideologically-biased mainstream media’s horrified reaction to Obama’s plummeting poll numbers back in July 2009:

But now there is another, far more frightening connection between Barack Obama and the infamous Hindenburg explosion.

Obama aint going down quietly: he’s taking the entire American economy with him:

The Hindenburg Omen IS Scary, but So Are the Fundamentals
Posted Aug 25, 2010 01:37pm EDT by Aaron Task in Investing

After tumbling below 10,000 yet again Wednesday morning, the Dow rebounded to close above that psychologically important level and was slightly higher early Thursday. Still, fear in the market is being expressed by the continued rally in Treasuries and widespread chatter about an ominous sounding technical indicator: The Hindenburg Omen.

The Hindenburg Omen has a roughly 25% accuracy rate in predicting big market upheaval since 1987, meaning it’s far from infallible but isn’t inconsequential either. The indicator’s creator, mathematician Jim Miekka, compares the Hindenburg Omen to a funnel cloud that precedes a tornado in a recent interview with The WSJ. “It doesn’t mean [the market’s] going to crash, but it’s a high probability,” he said.

Complex and esoteric even in the world of technical indicators, the Hindenburg Omen is triggered when the following occurs, Zero Hedge reports:

• — The daily number of NYSE new 52-week highs and the daily number of new 52-week lows must both be greater than 2.2% of total NYSE issues traded that day.
• — The NYSE’s 10-week moving average is rising.
• — The McClellan Oscillator (a technical measure of “overbought” vs. “oversold” conditions) is negative on that same day.
• — New 52-week highs cannot be more than twice the new 52-week lows. This condition is absolutely mandatory.

These criteria have been hit twice since Aug. 12, prompting Miekka to get out of the market entirely, The WSJ reports. Judging by the recent market action, many others are following suit — or at least moving in the same direction.

Worry List Lengthens

As Henry and I discuss in the accompanying clip, there are a lot of reasons to be worried right now that having nothing to with The Hindenburg Omen, the “Death Cross”, Mercury being in retrograde or myriad other indicators cited by market pundits of various stripes.

More fundamental reasons to be concerned include:

It’s the Economy, Stupid: This week’s weak durable goods and home sales reports are just the latest in a string of desultory data. In sum, the macroeconomic data strongly suggest the job market isn’t going to improve anytime soon. And if the job market doesn’t improve, there’s really not much hope for a turnaround in housing, consumer sales or anything else really. Oh, and the stock market is still expensive on a cyclically adjusted P/E basis, making it more vulnerable to an economic slowdown.

Unusual Uncertainty: On July 21, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke testified on Capitol Hill that the Fed’s forecast called for real GDP growth of 3%-3.5% for 2010 and 3.5%-4.5% in 2011 and 2012. Less than a month later, the Fed announced plans to buy Treasuries again (a.k.a. “QE2”) and, as The WSJ reported this week, there’s a tremendous amount of dissention within the Fed about the ‘right’ policy prescription.

Financial Follies: Whether it’s renewed concerns about Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, more U.S. bank closures or reports of commercial developers walking away from properties, it’s clear the problems in the financial system were not resolved by various and sundry bailouts and government stimulus … not by a long shot.

Good Politics vs. Good Economics: S&P’s downgrade of Ireland’s debt and Greece’s revenue shortfall show the short-term perils of the austerity measures that have swept Europe. But promising to cut government spending and slash deficits appears to be a winning political strategy in America right now. Certainly, it’s a key message of Republican and Tea Party candidates, who appear to have the momentum heading into the November mid-term elections. But if Europe’s ‘PIIGS’ are any example, gridlock might not be so “good” for the economy this time around, much less the financial markets.

Of course, the “good” news here is that there’s so much to worry about and the markets typically are darkest just before dawn.

CEOs of large corporations see a mess created by Obama to blame for the malaise that we haven’t seen since Obama’s long-lost twin Jimmy Carter was president:

This week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Jim Tisch, CEO of Loews Corp. both blamed the President’s policies for creating an environment of “uncertainty” that is crippling America’s economy.

The Obama administration is “flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working,” Otellini said Monday in a speech in Aspen.

Higher taxes and more regulation add an additional $1 billion to building a semiconductor manufacturing plant in the U.S. vs. overseas, the CEO said.

As a result, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here,” Otellini said, warning of “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe…this is the bitter truth.”

Loews’ Tisch made similarly themed comments in a Bloomberg interview on Wednesday. “Part of the problem is that business has very little confidence in what’s been going on and very little visibility,” he said.

But is it just CEOs?  Is it just big business?  Surely Obama’s anti-business policies are making things easier for the little guy, right?

Wrong:

For America’s Middle Class, the Hits Just Keep on Coming
Posted Aug 25, 2010 07:50am EDT by Aaron Task

A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled this week over the ICI’s report that equity mutual funds suffered net withdrawals totaling over $33 billion in the first seven months of 2010. Myriad reasons were cited for the trend, including a mistrust of stocks, the flash crash and an aging population. (See: The Next Bubble? Investors Flee Stocks in Droves In Favor of Bonds.)

Perhaps the biggest reason of all hasn’t gotten enough attention: Americans are making due with less and don’t have the money to put into stock funds, and many are taking money out of their investments to pay for basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter.

With wages stagnant for those who still have a job “a lot of people are having to tap into their nest egg to keep their living standards going,” says Damien Hoffman, co-founder of WallStCheatSheet. “A lot of people are living out of principal. There’s no other way to get around that.”

Fidelity’s recent report of a sharp increase in the number of 401(k) participants seeking loans or hardship withdrawals in the second quarter is further evidence of the disappearing middle class. “These are basically emergency ways to fund yourself. We think it’s a scary statistic,” Hoffman says. “Where is the middle class going to be if they draw down their 401(k)s drastically over course of next few years?”

Obama’s anti-business and profoundly socialist policies seek to punish business in every way he can.

A lot of Americans were probably happy with that in November of ’08.

But that was before they began to realize the truth that either all boats rise, or all boats sink.  Nancy Pelosi never drained the political swamp, as she falsely promised, but Barack Obama has certainly drained the ocean of economic opportunity (and very likely poisoned the bluebird of happiness, but that’s a crime for another day).  We need the rich, and the big businesses, in order to have jobs.  When they profit, the rest of us do.  And when they are demonized and attacked and regulated to death, the rest of us suffer, too.

Because name the last time a poor person hired you and gave you a good paying position.  If you’re a liberal, let me add, “It was never, wasn’t it, dumbass?”

It’s not really accurate to say that Obama is “anti-business”; he’s the MOST anti-business president ever.

A glance at Obama’s appointments and their actual world business experience should suffice to reveal how important business was to Obama.

Obama filled his administration with radicals out to “fundamentally transform America.”  And being the kind of man or woman who was oriented toward meeting payrolls and expanding businesses really didn’t need to apply.

And these eggheaded Marxists are seizing money from the private sector – and even from the future – and making terrible decisions about how to invest it.  We get turtle tunnels and monkey cocaine studies rather than infrastructure investment.  Had it been up to businesses as to how to invest the trillions of dollars that Obama pissed away, things would have been a lot better now.

I love the title from a US News & World Report article: “Obama’s Anti-Business Policies Are Our Economic Katrina.”  It’s written by Mortimer Zuckerman, who used to be a huge supporter of Barry Hussein, until he finally realized that “the One” was nothing more than a great big fart in the wind.

And even Obama’s own Democrat Party is now finally beginning to realize what a great big fart in the wind Obama truly is.  They hitched themselves to the Obama bandwagon; and now the wagon is burnt to ashes.

On November 4, 2008, the voters of the United States of America voted for national extinction.  And yet many are surprised that we’re now following in the footsteps of the Dodo bird.

Obama Keeps Lying About The Economy

“Fish story.”  “Such statements hurt his credibility.”  Let’s just call it what it is: a pile of lies from a profoundly dishonest man.

JULY 21, 2010
Obama’s Economic Fish Stories
On unemployment, the president claims that the stimulus bill was several times more potent than his chief economic adviser estimates. Such statements hurt his credibility.
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN

A president’s most valuable asset—with voters, Congress, allies and enemies—is credibility. So it is unfortunate when extreme exaggeration emanates from the White House.

All presidents wind up saying some things that make even their own economists cringe (often the brainchild of political advisers unconstrained by economic principles, facts or arithmetic). Usually, economic advisers manage to correct these problematic statements before delivery. Sometimes they get channeled into relatively harmless nonsense, such as President Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” buttons. Other times they produce damaging policies, such as President Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls. The most illiterate statement was President Jimmy Carter’s late-1970s plea to the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to combat high inflation, the exact opposite of what it should do. Not surprisingly, the value of the dollar collapsed.

Martin Kozlowski

President Obama says “every economist who’s looked at it says that the Recovery Act has done its job”—i.e., the stimulus bill has turned the economy around. That’s nonsense. Opinions differ widely and many leading economists believe that its impact has been small. Why? The expectation of future spending and future tax hikes to pay for the stimulus and Mr. Obama’s vast expansion of government are offsetting the direct short-run expansionary effect. That is standard in all macroeconomic theories.

So, as I and others warned in 2008, the permanent government expansion and higher tax rate agenda is a classic example of what not to do during bad economic times. Worse yet, all the subsidies, bailouts, regulations and mandates are forcing noncommercial decisions on the economy, which now awaits literally thousands of new diktats as a result of things like ObamaCare and the financial reform bill. The uncertainty is impeding investment and hiring.

The president does not say that economists agree that the high future taxes to finance the stimulus will hurt the economy. (The University of Chicago’s Harald Uhlig estimates $3.40 of lost output for every dollar of government spending.) Either the president is not being told of serious alternative viewpoints, or serious viewpoints are defined as only those that support his position. In either case, he is being ill-served by his staff.

Mr. Obama’s economic statements are increasingly divorced not only from competing viewpoints but from those of his own economic advisers. It is surprising how many numerically challenged pronouncements come from this most scripted and political of White Houses. One slip is eventually forgiven, but when a pattern emerges, no one believes it is an accident.

For example, on the anniversary of the stimulus bill, Mr. Obama declared, “It is largely thanks to the Recovery Act that a second Depression is no longer a possibility.” Yet his Council of Economic Advisers just estimated the stimulus bill’s effect on GDP at its trough was 1%-2%.

The most common definition of a depression is a long period in which GDP or consumption declines at least 10%. The decline in GDP in the recent recession was 3.8%, in consumption 2%. No one disputes the recession was severe, but to reach a 10% GDP decline requires tripling the administration’s estimate (three times their 2% effect) added to the actual 3.8% decline. On the alternative consumption standard, the math is even more absurd. The depression statement isn’t credible. The stimulus bill has assumed certain mystic powers in administration discourse, but revoking the laws of arithmetic shouldn’t be one of them.

The recession would have been worse if not for the Fed’s monetary policy and quantitative easing. Also important were the unmentioned automatic stabilizers—taxes falling more than income, cushioning declines in after-tax incomes and consumption—which were far larger than the spending and tax rebates in the stimulus bill. Arguing that all these policies (including injecting capital into banks, which was necessary but done poorly) may have prevented a depression is perhaps still an exaggeration but at least is within hailing distance of plausibility. On that scale, the effect of the stimulus was puny.

On his recent “Recovery Tour,” Mr. Obama boasted, “The stimulus bill prevented the unemployment rate from “getting up to . . . 15%.” But the president’s own chief economic adviser, Christina Romer, has estimated that the stimulus bill reduced peak unemployment by one percentage point—i.e., since the unemployment rate peaked at 10.1%, it prevented the unemployment rate from rising to just over 11%. So Mr. Obama claims that the stimulus bill was several times more potent than his chief economic adviser estimates.

Perhaps the most serious disconnect concerns the impending expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, which will raise the top two income tax rates and the rates on dividends and capital gains. If these growth inhibiting tax increases occur—about $75 billion in tax increases next year, $1.4 trillion over 10 years—there will be serious economic damage.

In the most recent issue of the American Economic Review, Ms. Romer (and her husband David H. Romer) conclude that “tax increases are highly contractionary . . . tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.” Their estimates imply the tax increases would depress GDP by roughly half the growth rate in this so-far-anemic recovery.

If Mr. Obama is really serious about a second stimulus, by far the best thing he can do is have Congress quickly extend the expiring Bush tax cuts, combined with real spending cuts set to take effect as the economy improves.

The president badly needs to make more realistic pronouncements. No one expects him to say his policies have failed (although most have delivered far less than claimed at large cost). A little candor about the results of experimentation in uncharted waters would go a long way. But at the very least, his staff needs to avoid putting these exaggerations on the teleprompter. It undermines confidence and raises concerns about competence. It’s doing nobody any good—not the economy and certainly not Mr. Obama.

Mr. Boskin is a professor of economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

Day after day after day, Obama touts slivers of good news as magnificent, while ignoring pile on top of pile of bad news.  We keep getting these tortured numbers, cherry-picked out of a a rotten mess.  And we’re constantly told the increasingly laughable narrative that Obama’s incredible leadership is what kept everything from being even worse than it is.

The funniest aspect of all is when Obama and his mouthpiece Robert Gibbs keep assuring us that no economist disagrees with their policies when their very own chief economist is on record disagreeing with Obama’s policies.

Obama mouthpiece Gibbs declares:

I’ll let Congressman Boehner unwind his eloquent argument for preserving the tax cuts for those that are quite wealthy.  I don’t think the President believes — I don’t think there’s an economist that believes there’s a stimulative effect to — or a good reason in terms of economic growth to extend those tax cuts, particularly given the choice that one has to make about the budget deficit.

Forbes Magazine demonstrates how fallacious and even dishonest Obama’s and Gibbs’ statements have been in pointing out that the:

chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, herself a Keynesian, has done research that undercuts the Keynesian view of good fiscal policy.  Some of this research is in a March 2007 paper, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks,” co-authored with her husband, fellow University of California, Berkeley, economist David Romer.

In their article, they find that “tax increases are highly contractionary” and that tax cuts are highly expansionary.

And Forbes goes on to conclude:

“In other words, if she believes her own research, Christina Romer should be a strong critic of her new boss’s policies.”

So maybe you guys should stop making flagrantly false statements that all the economists agree with you, when in point of fact even your own economist doesn’t agree with you.  Or, at least only agrees with you by denying her own academic research for the sake of appearances.

That may be why she’s leaving the White House.  She can finally tell the truth – something that the Obama White House would never even dream of allowing her to do.

‘The Forgotten Man’ Demands Unfavorable Comparison Between Obama And FDR

From Wise and Frugal Government:

History Repeating Itself and Not in a Good Way

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression. Barack Obama’s presidency and his economic policies are placed in context once you read Shlaes’ account of FDR and his policies. Written in 2007, there is no way Shlaes could have manipulated the similarities.

Consider this account of the Roosevelt Administration in 1937, four and a half years after the New Deal was introduced and the economy refused to budge. She refers to this time as “a depression within the Depression. “

“…the Economist would conclude…that the United States “seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, how to grow.”

Yet Washington was doing all the wrong things. Officials in the capital seemed arrogant, obsessed with numbers, and oblivious to the pain the nation was suffering. People were angry that Congress and the president had recently raised taxes. With business so hard, why make it harder?” (2)

Sound familiar? Shlaes continues with a story of the treasury secretary giving a speech before the Academy of Political Science during this time:

“There had been a national emergency in the past, the secretary told listeners. But now it no longer existed. The secretary then went on to conclude that the country must now “continue progress toward a balance of the federal budget.”

A member of the audience laughed out loud in shock. The remark seemed so much at odds with the painful reality of that November.

…Washington had already made thousands of efforts to help the economy, yet those efforts had not brought prosperity.” (3)

Policy is not where the similarities end. “Roosevelt offered rhetorical optimism, but pessimism underlay his policies. …Roosevelt cared little for constitutional niceties and believed they blocked progress. His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.” (6)

And finally: “The problem was their naivete about the economic value of Soviet-style or European-style collectivism–and the fact that they forced such collectivism upon their own country.” (7)

Arm yourself with historical fact. Read The Forgotten Man. For as Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Sure sounds familiar to me.

I mean, “rhetorical optimism” sounds a lot like “hope and change.”

The basic premise of Amity Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man is one shared by economist Robert Higgs, namely, that the paralyzing uncertainty over the FDR administration’s strategy actively discouraged business from investing or hiring as they struggled to respond to the government’s numerous and simultaneous counterproductive policies.

This is something that has been going on since Obama took office.

Some recent articles I’ve written on this area (all having numerous supporting resources):

Obama’s Backdoor Taxation And The Coming Consequences Of Obamanomics

Obama Bank Restructure Attacks Market, Terrifies Investors, Hamstrings Economy

VIA CNBC: ‘Many Firms Reluctant To Hire Because Of [Democrats’] Taxes, Rules’

Obama Job Summit Deliberately Snubs Primary Job Creators

Liberals Say Recession Behind Us While Small Businesses Go Belly Up

Obama Continues Rampant Dishonesty With Stimulus ‘Jobs ‘

Why Is American Unemployment Under Obama Rising Faster Than In Other Countries?

Even Liberals Realizing Obama Has Been Total Bust At Creating Jobs

China Alarmed By Obama’s Deficits, Shocking Irresponsibility

Miniumum Wage Increase Means Maximum Employment Decrease

Tax Increases on ‘Rich’ People Planned by Democrats Would Hit Over A Million Small Businesses

An important article for consideration is this one:

Obama Administration Admits It Will Leave Unemployment Higher Than It Found It

because it jives so well with what history told us about the result of FDR’s policies as told by his very own treasury secretary:

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

In April 1939, for the record – a full six years and change after FDR assumed office – unemployment was still at 20.7%

Obama Job Summit Deliberately Snubs Primary Job Creators

Do you remember Obama publicly attacking the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over it’s opposition to ObamaCare? Obama sure does.

Barack Obama is a petty, vindictive man.  And petty men do petty, vindictive things.  He is the kind of man who deceitfully and cynically claimed that he would uniquely transcend the political divide – only to be the most politically divisive figure we have ever seen in the White House.  And he is the kind of man who would cut off his nose to spite America’s face.

Case in point: the Obama job summit.

Obama gathered liberal economists (no conservatives allowed), pro-Democrat corporate CEOs, and union chiefs to tell him only what he wanted to hear.

But one business group was entirely shut out by Barack Obama, namely, the U.S. Chamber of commerce, which represents businesses that employ 115 million Americas (well more than half of the total U.S. work force).  And, according to USCoC executive vice president of government affairs Bruce Josten, “Not only were we not invited, but not a single business organization HQd in Washington DC was invited.”

Small businesses create three out of every four jobs in America.  Not that Obama gives a damn.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) – which also crossed Obama on ObamaCare – was also deliberately excluded.

Just in case anybody actually believed the White House or lamestream media propaganda that Obama’s “job summit” had anything to do with actually creating jobs.

An incredibly petty and vindictive president decided to punish the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business for refusing to help him small business destroy jobs.   And in doing so, he is punishing millions of American workers.

Just imagine a job summit which is openly hostile to the actual creators of jobs.  Just imagine that job summit being depicted as being for the purpose of informing the president of all of the job-creating possibilities, when no one who disagreed with the president’s leftist views was even allowed to attend.

After agreeing with Judge Andrew Napolitano’s point that America is not going to have any meaningful job creation as long as the Obama administration continues recklessly printing, borrowing and spending trillions of dollars even as it utterly abandoning free market principles, Josten went on to say:

We need to get some certainty back in the American economy.  And right now you have a business community that doesn’t know what their tax liabilities are going to be a year from now; have no idea what their health care costs are going to be next year; have no idea what their energy costs are going to be next year; and have no idea what kind of credit is going to be available next year.  So this ‘big bang theory’ of using the crisis if you will – as the administration said some time ago – to move and overhaul entire swaths of the American economy, at this point is fueling uncertainty in the business community – and I would suggest to your listeners – in the American public.  And that’s a prescription to defer making any decisions.

And let’s not forget other abominations to business such as the union-agenda-imposing “card check” that would massively add to businesses’ costs if passed.

In other words, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, OBAMA.

For all of Obama’s demagoguing and demonizing the Bush administration, this is Barack Obama’s economy (and any real leader would have long-since quit trying to blame his predecessor and started taking responsibility for what is happening in the country during his watch anyway).  It is HIS policies that have prevented the economy from recovering.  It is HIS policies that are killing jobs by creating paralyzing fear and uncertainty.

According to Jesus (see Luke 14:28), any wise man sits down and counts his costs before beginning a project.  But how can a business man do so in the climate of fear that Obama has created?

Statistically, this recession should have ended a while back, as the economy attained equilibrium and recovered on its own.  The average length of a recession is 11 months.  It’s only when elitist statist bureaucrats start screwing around with all the economic levers because they think they know better than the free market system that we get long-term economic recessions and depressions.

Obama “turned fearmongering into an art form” while he force-fed his massive pork-laden stimulus onto the nation:

As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

He promised us that if his stimulus passed, he would be able to keep unemployment under 8%.  Now it’s in double digits.  The rate dropped 2/10ths of a percent this month from last, primarily due to the fact that more people are simply giving up even bothering to look for jobs:

The unemployment rate also dropped because fewer people are looking for work. The size of the labor force, which includes the employed and those actively searching for jobs, fell by nearly 100,000, the third straight decline. That indicates more of the unemployed are giving up on looking for work.

The participation rate, or the percentage of the population employed or looking for work, fell to 65 percent, the lowest since the recession began.  Once laid-off people stop hunting for jobs, they are no longer counted in the unemployment rate.

The bait-and-switch and shell games being played by the mainstream media and the White House propagandists continues at Titanic-about-to-plough-into-an-iceberg pace.  Bad economic news that is not as bad as it could have been is projected as good news, while seriously bad news is buried in the 22nd paragraph of an optimistically-entitled and positively-spun article.

What we have is a numbers game in which actual unemployment could literally soar, even as the “official” unemployment rate actually decreases.

But you can bet your boots that actual unemployment will continue to go up.

Obama and his propagandists have since incessantly argued that they “underestimated” how bad the economy that “Bush left them” actually was.  That’s how they explain away their pathetic failure to do what they promised they could do if the got their porkulus.  But that argument utterly fails because Obama repeatedly compared it to the Great Depression.  In fact, Paul Volcker, the Chair of Obama’s handpicked President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, back on February 20th actually told us the situation “may be WORSE than the Great Depression.”

So I’ll leave it to you to figure out how the Obama administration could have argued on the one hand that the economy was the worst since, or even worse than, the Great Depression on the one hand, and then turned around on the other hand and said that they didn’t realize how bad the economy actually was.  Because if you know anything at all about the terrible conditions of the Great Depression, you know that our present economic situation has never been even close to being as bad as the Great Depression.

But don’t worry.  If you feel left out because you haven’t been able to experience the Great Depression, Obama’s policies are making sure you’ll be able to enjoy a Great Depression of your own soon.

Now we know this was just liberals using a “crisis” as an “opportunity.” As Obama’s Chief of Staff put it:

EMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before. This is an opportunity.

The point is that this unemployment “crisis” is just another “opportunity” for Barry Obama to “fundamentally transform America” and pay off his pro-liberal corporate and union special interests doing it.

Obama’s decision to deliberately snub the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business in a “job summit” was either pathologically petty, idiotically incompetent, or both.  And the American people are going to suffer as a result.

If anybody should have been snubbed from attending the jobs summit, Barry Hussein, it was YOU.

As for the three-quarters of American workers who get their jobs from small businesses, well, screw you people.  That’s the “change” you get.

Democrats In Process Of Checkmating Themselves

Great article from Forbes:

Democrats Checkmate Themselves

November 10th, 2009

Liberals are fond of calling Republicans “the stupid party.” That might need revision. It appears to me that Democrats have checkmated themselves. Here is the logic:

If Obamacare makes it through the Senate, American small businesses will continue to shrink their payrolls to avoid the awful choice of paying higher health care insurance premiums or the 8% added payroll tax. Unemployment is sure to rise. The Dems will face the November 2010 elections with 12% unemployment … closer to Depression levels of 20% by the so-called broader measures.

If Obamacare fails to pass, the left-wing base will be so demoralized as to not show up at the polls in 2010. Or they will be so angry that they might start a 1968-like interparty war.

My Checkmate Theory is based on small-business fear of Obama’s signature issues–health care, cap-and-trade and union card check. Health care is at the plate now. The fate of health care in the U.S. Senate will set the passage odds for cap-and-trade and union card check next year. All three of Obama’s signature issues are opposed by most small businesses, including the American Chamber of Commerce.

Here are two revealing stories reporting the economic struggles and political fears of small businesses:

USA Today

Small businesses often lead the nation out of recession. Not this time.

The unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% in October from 9.8% in September, and economists say a big reason is small businesses. With sales weak, they’re still slashing jobs and faring worse than their larger rivals.

“Small business tends to lead the way out, and that’s just not happening here,” says Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com.

The Wall Street Journal

W. Michael Brown has scaled back hiring plans in his Virginia auto-parts stores. Carl Redman halted an expansion project at his Oregon contracting business. Bill Hammack is preparing layoffs at his road-construction company in Georgia.

The economy remains unsteady 22 months after the recession began, with banks restricting credit and consumers hunkering down. For these small businesses, and many others across the country, there’s an additional dark cloud: uncertainty created by Washington’s bid to reorganize a wide swath of the U.S. economy.

If American small businesses stay hunkered down, unemployment will stay up. That’s because small businesses historically have created the majority of net jobs in any economy. They’ve created almost all net jobs in the first two years of a recovery. But not this time. Not yet.

The liberal writer Michael Lind is happy to see government put the screws to small businesses. In Lind’s opinion, small businesses are nothing more than a collection of Scrooges and Marleys. No doubt his opinion of small business is shared by many in the Democratic Party’s activist wing:

The solution may be corporatism or corporate paternalism–by which I mean the mandatory universalization of private employer benefits. If the politics of ethnic diversity makes movement in a universalist, social democratic direction impossible in the U.S., then the alternative might be to mandate that all employers provide certain benefits to all employees, with no exceptions. The costs of such unfunded mandates might drive some small businesses out of existence. But small-business owners are the most vocal opponents of wage and benefit reform in the U.S. The replacement of Scrooge & Marley by a smaller number of bigger private and public employers who treat Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim better would not necessarily be a tragedy.

Not a tragedy? Don’t be so quick, Democrats. You can’t have it both ways. Stick it to small businesses (through higher payroll taxes, cap-and-trade and union card check) and the assaulted will trim their payrolls until conditions clear, if ever. But if you don’t stick it to small businesses, your party’s activist base will go nuts.

You have checkmated yourselves, Democrats.

I know Democrats thought that pure arrogance and power hunger would be attractive ingredients, but it doesn’t seem to be working out for them.

If ObamaCare passes, small businesses know that they will be forced to pay high costs for every employee on their payroll.  Ergo sum, they aren’t too eager to hire new workers until the coast is clear and Obamacare has finally gone away.

If it doesn’t pass, the Kool-aid liberal base will go even more nuts than they already are and start a war within the Democrat Party.

The horns of a giant dilemma begin to take shape.