President Clueless About Job Creation

Fred Barnes:

Does President Obama have the foggiest idea how jobs are created in America? There’s not much evidence he does, beyond lip service to the helpfulness of the private sector. 

When the president begins a speech these days with praise for free markets, look out! What comes next are proposals for more government intervention in the economy and higher taxes. That’s the recipe, Obama says, to “encourage our long-term economic growth and stabilize our budget.”  

He said so in his Republicans-are-Social-Darwinists speech in Washington two weeks ago to newspaper editors. Near the outset, Obama declared: “I know that the true engine of job creation in this country is the private sector, not Washington, which is why I’ve cut taxes for small-business owners 17 times over the last three years.” 

Those cuts have had minimal effect, and not surprisingly. They were tiny and temporary, and few small-business owners bothered to claim them, if indeed they were eligible to do so. Meanwhile, the president has persistently sought to raise their income taxes. 

In Washington, Obama didn’t suggest, much less propose, a single incentive or spur to private investment, yet he insisted “we continue to make investments in growth today.” These consist solely of government-funded jobs, such as “putting some of our construction workers back to work” and “helping states to rehire teachers.” 

Obama yearns for a hefty increase in hiring by state and local governments. If hiring were “on par to past recoveries, the unemployment rate would probably be about a point lower than it is right now.” Restoring “huge cuts in state and local government” is “part of the challenge we have in terms of growth.” 

The lesson here is that Obama has learned no lesson from what Edward Lazear of the Hoover Institution has called the “worst economic recovery in history”—that is, the Obama recovery. The economy has grown at a rate of 2.4 percent since the recession ended in June 2009, a full percentage point below average long-term growth. But the president is sticking with his plan for a government-led economic boom. This is Obamanomics: If it doesn’t work, then double down.
Obama once told a group of investors that the private sector didn’t need incentives to invest because his administration’s massive subsidies of green technology would lead the way. Now the mention of “green jobs” has become a laugh line. The main news from the green sector is another company bankrolled by Obama going belly-up. 

In The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, Noam Scheiber describes the president’s “obsession” with green jobs. Eco-nomic adviser Christina Romer “would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. ‘I don’t get it,’ he’d say. ‘We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean there are no jobs?’ But the numbers rarely budged.” 

Obama’s latest fixation is the Buffett Rule, named after billionaire Warren Buffett. “We can’t afford to keep spending more money on tax cuts for wealthy Americans,” the president said last week. (Note: Under Obamanomics, untaxed earnings of private citizens are “spending.”) The new rule would force those earning more than $1 million to pay at least 30 percent of their annual income, whether earnings (already taxed at a marginal rate of 35 percent) or capital gains (now taxed at 15 percent), in income tax. “This is not just about fairness,” the president said. “This is also about growth.” And thus about jobs, and more.

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In the private sector an investment manager with Obama's track record would be fired.  The buffet Rule is becoming a laugh line for those who have bothered to do the math as the President first suggested.  Obama is still bent on punishing the success of job creators rather than encouraging them.  He is also bent on strangle domestic energy production which could created hundreds of thousands of jobs and grow our economy and revenues to the government.