GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

The 7.6 Million Job Gap

by

7.6 Million jobs are not here.  Where are they?  Ask President Obama.

Total employment in the United States economy now stands at 130.2 million. This is 7.6 million jobs short of where the President promised the economy would be by December 2010 if Congress adopted his economic policies. 9.6% unemployment. A 7.6 million jobs gap. Unemployment is actually higher now than when the recession ended in June. If this is not the definition of failure, then what is?

Ask Conn Carroll (no relation) from the Heritage Foundation asks, “when will Obama Administration admit that their economic policies have been a complete failure?”

Remember, the $816 BILLION stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment at 8.5%.  No higher.  They promised.  They said if Congress DIDN’T pass the Stimulus, things would get much worse.  They were both right and wrong.  Congress passed the Stimulus and now things have gotten much worse.  Quite the pickle for “the most brilliant” President evah, wouldn’t you say?

By contrast, when the 1980s recession ended in December 1982, unemployment stood at 10.8%. Fifteen months into President Ronald Reagan’s economic recovery, and unemployment had already fallen three full points to 7.8%. Why was the Reagan recovery such a success? And why is the Obama recovery such a failure? Well, for starters, President Reagan did not saddle our children with a brand new $1 trillion entitlement. But more urgently, President Reagan also did not threaten the U.S. economy with the largest tax hike in American history.

There still is time for Congress to act to prevent the Obama tax hikes. Tax hikes that include higher rates on individual income, capital gains and dividends. No Americans will escape the damage from the Obama tax hikes including: 1) Destroying an average of 693,000 jobs every year through 2020; 2) Draining $726 billion from disposable income, $38 billion from personal savings and $33 billion from business investments; 3) costing the average non-farm small-business owner $3,500 more in taxes, and much, much more.

This seems a good time to re-pimp the upcoming movie “I Want Your Money” which opens on October 15.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Comments

  1. I do accounting work for several different small companies. I was pointing out to my co-workers now that Congress has adjourned and won’t be back until after the election, there really is no time to extend the Bush tax cuts. Payroll services are already calculating the taxes to be taken out of the January checks. The IRS will have to come out with the new tax tables. Accounting people won’t have time to make adjustments over the holidays. Payroll people take time off, too.

  3. It seems clear that hiking taxes is the wrong thing to do. But so is running deficits: America is approaching the point where it can’t borrow any more, as Greenspan (whose 1% interest rates enabled Bush’s $400 billion deficits) admitted a couple days ago.

    Mass government borrowing blocks recovery by several means: it prevents capital formation and investment in new businesses (redirecting resources to consumption – and to government bureaucrats); it gives ‘the smart money’ a sense of uncertainty and even doom; it pushes the Fed to maintain 0% interest rates which causes commodity prices to go up (food, oil, industrial inputs); etc.

    Hiking taxes can only end in disaster; same with Obama’s borrowing. What other solutions does that leave? Spending cuts. And letting failed businesses fail, so that assets can be cheaply acquired and re-deployed by competent businesses. And deregulation, including the repeal of Obamacare, so that entrepreneurs will be free to create jobs again.

    Spending cuts, “no more bailouts” and Obamacare repeal will mean short-term pain for some, perhaps great pain. But we have a fake economy: instead of saving and investing to produce things better, we just borrow to pay for consumption and for ever-growing government. That is the problem. Ending it is the solution. Ending it will be very painful and will make things appear worse at first, but will be step 1 of the solution. Ending our fake economy is what Obama can’t bring himself to do (and before him, Bush). Step 2 of the solution will be getting government off of people’s backs, so they can start new, productive businesses and create new jobs.

    That will be the real recovery. We can never have that recovery, until we do both steps 1 and 2. The bottom line is: Massive cuts in our present government. Cutting government way, way down to size. Reagan knew that. His spending cuts were blocked in large part by Congress, but even cutting and deregulating things a little caused a much better recovery.

    President Harding also knew it, when he cured the Depression of 1920. As he said in his Inaugural:

    We must face the grim necessity… [and] proceed with a full realization that no statute enacted by man can repeal the inexorable laws of nature. Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government… We contemplate the immediate task of putting our public household in order. We need a rigid and yet sane economy, combined with fiscal justice, and it must be attended by individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for the future.…

    The economic mechanism is intricate and its parts interdependent, and has suffered the shocks and jars incident to abnormal demands, credit inflations, and price upheavals. The normal balances have been impaired, the channels of distribution have been clogged, the relations of labor and management have been strained. We must seek the readjustment with care and courage.… All the penalties will not be light, nor evenly distributed. There is no way of making them so. There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh. It is the oldest lesson of civilization.

    He then proceeded to cut taxes, cut spending even more (thus balancing the budget), cut government controls over the economy, and let bad businesses fail… all of which transformed the Depression of 1920 into what people remember better, the Roaring 20s.

  5. Republicans are failures. They wrecked the economy by letting Wall Street run wild without any oversight.

    Bush didn’t create any jobs in 8 years. You jerks have short memories.

    And the $700 BILLION bank bailout was on HIS watch!

  6. Bush didn’t create any jobs in 8 years.

    Proud Ignoramus, that is literally true in the sense that *GOVERNMENT DOESN’T CREATE JOBS*. (Except of course government jobs; which, in the great excesses we see today, are not financially sustainable.)

    That being said: Bush “created” (i.e., followed policies that let the private sector to create) 1.3 million jobs, while Obama has destroyed 3.1 million jobs. Wikipedia says so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presidential_terms

    That is also reflected in their respective unemployment rates. Bush ran unemployment rates in the 4-6% range; Obama runs them in the 8-10% range.

    If you want to say “But Obama inherited a recession”, well then, so did Bush. Because Clinton left office with the dot-com bomb and the economy tanking. Remember?

    What matters is not what the President inherited, but what kind of recovery his policies allow. See my earlier comment. Bush followed lame policies ($400 B deficits, growing government excessively) that enabled a lame recovery. But Obama follows disastrous policies ($1.5 T deficits, growing government insanely) that allow NO recovery.

    They wrecked the economy by letting Wall Street run wild without any oversight.

    Which again, Proud Ignoramus, is just wrong. It was Democrats like Barney Frank who blocked reform of Freddie, Fannie and the housing bubble. Meanwhile, Bush increased regulation of Wall Street to the point where it drove financial firms overseas; google ‘Sarbanes-Oxley’.

    And the $700 BILLION bank bailout was on HIS watch!

    If by “HIS!” you mean the Democrats’ watch, Proud Ignoramus, then you finally got something right. Bush only proposed the bailouts; a Democratic Congress passed them, and a Democratic President carried them out.

  10. From the link: Obamunism ain’t so great for the poor either.

    The lowest earners spent 15.4% more on food last year than in 2007, shelling out more for cereals, meat and processed vegetables. Since many in the lowest income group may already rely on discount shops and make few discretionary purchases, it can be difficult for them to scrimp.

    Also, liberals are dead-set against letting stores like Walmart into the depressed neighborhoods, thus depriving the poor of low-cost grocery alternatives.

    Among the poor, rent expenditures increased 5.3%. Those who managed to stay in homes they owned saw their mortgage payments rise 27.8%, suggesting that policy makers’ efforts to reduce mortgage-debt burdens aren’t reaching the most needy.

    But Timmy Geithner’s Goldman Sachs buddies get so much money they can barely wrap their arms around it.

  12. … whose administration defends the bailouts as “essential” alleged “investments”: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705081.html?hpid=topnews

    Sorry, Proud Know-Nothing. Obama could have stopped the bailouts. Instead, He chose to carry them out… and then some. He owns ’em.

    It was better (though not by much) when you were praising Obama’s bailouts as a “wise leader” giving us peasants a “wise and measured response” to the financial crisis.