We're Stuck In a "McJobs" Style Downturn

Employment: When a fast-food "National Hiring Day" resembles the Depression's unruly food lines, it doesn't back up President Obama's rosy picture of economic recovery. Want some fries with that "hope and change"?

If it were a Republican president in office at a time when high unemployment is so persistent that McDonald's holds a nationwide help-wanted day, the establishment media would be sinking their teeth into him like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

The legendary hamburger chain has promised to expand its company workforce by 7% by hiring 50,000 new employees in a single day, thus scoring a publicity boon by having Ronald McDonald personally give the jobs market a shot in the arm.

But the event comes after Obama and the Congress have spent trillions on a stimulus strategy that hasn't stimulated.

Companies sit on potential investments that could generate many millions of jobs - because they see no hope of this ever-increasingly regulated economy rewarding them for their risk.

Yet the president gets a pass from the liberal-dominated press for his McJobs economy - and for claiming to have "saved millions of jobs" and promising to "keep making the investments that create jobs."

Government spending is not "investment." Investment is what investors do with their own money.

When the government spends at unprecedented levels, as it is doing today, it leaves investors with neither enough of their own money to invest, nor feasible destinations for their investments.

Nearly two years ago Obama's Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, brandished the president's hit-the-ground-running policy "to enact the largest economic recovery plan since World War II."

Geithner promised that "by the time the plan has been fully implemented by the end of next year, we will have injected nearly $800 billion into the U.S. economy, saved or created 3.5 million jobs and raised our real gross domestic product over where it would otherwise have been by more than 3%."

Since we remain in the economic doldrums, the president and his minions have been forced to make the absurd contention that his administration saved America from another Great Depression.

But it's what we saw at all those McDonalds this week - massive throngs unhappily settling for work burger-flipping, and nearly rioting in Cleveland, where three were hit by a car because of a fight - that is reminiscent of the 1930s slump.

Ronald Reagan was falsely accused by Democrats of presiding over a recovery that produced miserable "McJobs." In Obama's case, unexpectedly large crowds around the country are vying to get hired for actual jobs working at McDonald's.

The statistical indicators are alarming. As USA Today recently reported, "Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010, the lowest rate since 1983," and, "Last year, just 66.8% of men had jobs, the lowest on record."

Even liberal economists are not on Obama's side on this. Eileen Applebaum of the Center for Economics and Policy Research, for instance, says that in a healthy economy another 25 million people would be working.

And last September, Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities criticized Obama's latest "recovery plan" consisting of business tax writeoffs for equipment purchases; Marr recommended payroll tax exemptions on new hires instead.

In fact, what we really need is a rollback of big government, high taxes and hyper-regulation - the kinds of things that are inimical to job creation. And that begins with a repeal of the ObamaCare government health care takeover.

Nothing against McDonald's, mind you. It's a fine corporation. But it's time to give anxious-to-work Americans the break they deserve, and get up and get away from Obamanomics.