The laws of economics are the new Jim Crow laws. If the Democrats cannot paint their opponents as racist or greedy, then they are pretty much out of solutions for any issue.
Economic numbers tend to be more biased when the administration overseeing them knows nothing about business and the economy. Attorney General Eric Holder has a team of lawyers trying to figure out whom to sue over our dismal economic state. As every liberal Democrat from John Edwards to Eric Holder knows, the way to make money in America is to sue someone who is productive and has money to take.
But the Democrats’ problems are nothing some nice word-smithing cannot fix. Instead of focusing on the four million jobs lost in 2009 alone, they have invented their own metric, “jobs saved or created.” The main jobs they are looking to save now are their own in November.
The “me, my and I” speeches Obama gives, in which he takes credit for his minor accomplishments and blames Bush for all else, no longer work. The economy has been under Democratic House and Senate rule since 2006. Obama taking credit for jobs “saved” is like the 9/11 hijackers taking credit for creating TSA jobs.
I would not be surprised if the White House spins the latest bad jobs numbers to somehow make them look better for businesses in America. To their way of thinking, each month businesses have a larger and more talented pool of unemployed workers from which to hire. But businesses are not hiring, because they have no idea how much extra cost ObamaCare will mean for each employee and how much increased regulation will be placed on them at the fiat of this bumbling administration.
The states with the worst unemployment are Democratic-dominated bastions where years of liberal policies have wrought havoc. States like California, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, which have been the Petri dishes of Democratic economic theories, have the highest unemployment rates. If that is not a leading economic indicator of the results of Obama’s economic policies, I do not know what is.
My guess is that by continuing to use semantics and by nuancing each economic issue, the Obama White House will appeal to its base for re-election. These are the 51% of Americans who can be told “things are better” but who are not good enough at math to know they are, in fact, not. We know them as the liberal Democrat base.
The Obama cabinet seems like it was assembled at Ikea by a college poli-sci professor. JP Morgan did a study of administrations which had the most and fewest cabinet members with business experience. The result helps explain our current economic mess.
The president whose cabinet had the highest percentage of private sector folks was none other than Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw an era of sustained economic growth. Fifty-eight percent of the members of his cabinet had private sector experience. Until Obama, Kennedy’s cabinet had the lowest percentage of members with private sector experience, at about 27%. The average since 1900 of every president is about 38%. As he has with many things, Obama’s cabinet has set a new low on this metric of real world experience; only 7% of his cabinet members have private sector experience. That 7% probably matches the percentage of his cabinet members who paid their income taxes properly.
The reason businesses are sitting on $1.7 trillion in cash, and banks hoarding another $1 trillion in reserves they could be using to make loans, is that they have no confidence in this administration. Many believe there will be a “double-dip” recession caused by those double-dips in Washington. Until it knows it will not be taxed through the roof, regulated to death, and then lambasted for political gain, no business is going to make the leap of faith to invest in the USA. Ultimately, growth and expansion are private businesses’ expressions of faith and confidence in the economy, something they currently do not have.
Hopefully, come November Nancy Pelosi will learn some economic truths, like the cost of a coach airline ticket from Washington D.C. to San Francisco.
Ron Hart is a syndicated op-ed humorist, author and TV/radio commentator. Email Ron@RonaldHart.com or at visit RonaldHart.com.