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Economy: How many jobs will the recovery bring? Not enough, if the latest forecast from the president's top economists is to be believed. So it doesn't go without notice, this is an admission that the stimulus has failed.
Early last year, President Obama's advisers made it clear: By the end of 2010, there would be 3.5 million new jobs created if the stimulus bill then being crafted in Congress was passed. Unemployment would peak at 8%.
The reality was a tad different. No net new jobs — zero — were created. Indeed, the White House had to make up jobs "created or saved" through numbers-fudging and statistical legerdemain to show any new jobs at all.
The sad fact is, private U.S. businesses cut 4.7 million jobs — 392,000 a month — in 2009. All told, we've lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.
Now we're told this year will see a job recovery, with payrolls adding an average 95,000 per month. Yet the unemployment rate will be around 10% — higher than the current 9.7%.
Some in the media seem surprised by this. But as we explained a week ago, since 1990 the U.S. work force has expanded by 113,000 workers each month — mainly from young people and immigrants entering for the first time.
Monthly job growth below 100,000 isn't enough. It's the economic equivalent of paddling a boat five miles an hour upstream against a current going 10 miles an hour the other way. No matter how hard you paddle, you still end up downstream.
Even at 200,000 new jobs a month, it would take 3 1/2 years just to make up the jobs lost.
So if businesses create 95,000 jobs a month as expected, we'll still end up with higher unemployment.
Also as noted, the new Council of Economic Advisers report amounts to an admission that past "stimulus" efforts have failed.
Yet, even now, Congress is crafting a new $85 billion "jobs" bill. Instead of creating jobs, this bill will do what the last did: create a sluggish economy and long-term dependency on government.
We're not saying every element of it is bad. But it's built around a special tax credit for businesses that hire workers or give them a raise. Even those who would benefit from it are skeptical.
"There's certainly nothing wrong with giving a tax break to a business that's hired a new worker, especially in these tough times," Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, told the Associated Press. "But in terms of being an incentive to hire a lot of workers, we're skeptical."
Iran: The great "punch" that the Ayatollah Khamenei promised was going to stun the West turned out to be a blow that Iran's been telegraphing for years: The Islamist regime in Tehran has officially gone nuclear. This year's Super Bowl was graced at halftime by the Who singing "Won't Get ...
Climate Change: Will global warm-mongers admit that this winter's heavy snow in the East weakens their position? Of course not. They insist the record flurries are confirmation of their bogus theory. We've seen this before. In January 1996, when a nor'easter dumped 14 inches of snow in ...
Politics: Barack Obama the candidate repeatedly vowed no tax increases for those making under $250,000. As president, he has changed his tune. But cheer up: He now tells us he's a "fierce" free marketer. The rest of us, especially those in the middle class, could rest easy, he said. "I can ...
How could such smart people do so many stupid things? That question, or variations on it, is being asked in Washington and around the country about the Obama administration. The same people who directed the campaign that defeated Hillary Clinton and routed John McCain, a campaign that raised far ...
Energy: When even Chuck Schumer is upset with the White House, you know something's amiss. In this case, it's news that efforts to boost wind power with taxpayer stimulus dollars are filling foreign coffers and creating foreign jobs. According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at ...
Posted By: dwdrury(665) on 2/11/2010 | 9:32 PM ET
In a nutshell, BO Plenty and his administration is relearning the lessons of FDR's, who managed to turn a serious recession into a Great Depression via wrong-headed government intervention. Ignorant of history, most of these progressives believe in their own intellectual superiority when in fact they just cannot fathom human nature has remained unchanged since the ancient Egyptians. Similar to the belief by every generation that they're the ones who discovered sex.
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