Recovery Summer Becomes “Eh, Maybe The Jobs’ll Come Back In A Few Years”

Written By : William Teach

As more and more media outlets publish stories about just how bad the economy is, particularly the unemployment situation, I wonder if they will finally place the blame where it belongs, namely, on President Obama and the elected Democrats? You know that they will certainly blame Republicans in the House, which they are sure to win back, sometime around March. For many unemployed workers, jobs aren’t coming back

The U.S. economy will eventually rebound from the Great Recession. Millions of American workers will not.

What some economists now project — and policymakers are loath to admit — is that the U.S. unemployment rate, which stood at 9.6% in August, could remain elevated for years to come.

The nation’s job deficit is so deep that even a powerful recovery would leave large numbers of Americans out of work for years, experts say. And with growth now weakening, analysts are doubtful that companies will boost payrolls significantly any time soon. Unemployment, long considered a temporary, transitional condition in the United States, appears to be settling in for a lengthy run.

“This is the new reality,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “In the past decade we’ve gone from the best labor market in our economic history to arguably one of the worst. It’s going to take years, if not decades, to completely recover from the fallout.”

The LA Times works hard to assign no blame to anyone for what is going on, yet, based on the last paragraph of the excerpt, who else is there to look to other than those in charge? Coincidentally or not, the economy started tanking when Democrats regained Congress. And since they won back the White House, the jobs market has stagnated further. Throwing money at short term fixes doesn’t work, as born out by this paragraph

Many small businesses, squeezed by tight credit and slow sales, similarly aren’t in a hurry to add employees. Some big corporations are enjoying record profits precisely because they’ve kept a tight lid on hiring. And state and local governments are looking to ax more teachers, police officers and social workers to balance their budgets. Meanwhile, U.S. legislators have shown little appetite for a new round of stimulus spending.

Why should they show an appetite for more stimulus? Privately, we can be sure that most Democrats understand that the public is correct in that the stimulus efforts, if you can call it that, have been failures. So much of the money simply went to propping up the employees of the government, particularly at the state, county, and local levels. Yet, because so many people are not working as well as no spending, the revenues coming into state, county, and local levels is reduced. Reduced revenue from less sales tax, reduced revenue because you can’t charge a property tax on property no longer owned, and reduced revenue from tax returns, since you can’t get income tax when people do not have a job. Among others. Now they are out of cash. Repairing roadways, bridges, and runways, as Obama wants, will do nothing but create short term jobs for projects which people can’t use because they have no jobs and can’t afford to travel.

Oh, BTW, you do know that Obama and his administration will take credit when Republicans regain the House and come up with legislation that actually provides incentives for long term hiring, right?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. Re-Change 2010!

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billdalasio

What's it going to take for the Democrats to get that the problem with the economy is not Keynesian? Even Keynes would be rolling his eyes in exasperation with them right now. Keynes addressed a very specific economic phenomenon. When there is an excess of saving, he claimed, the economy suffers from lack of consumption and a lack of viable business investments. To get the economy moving again, he went on, a level of dissaving (deficit spending) by the government can stimulate economic activity to the point that the savings rate in the private sector falls. Now, you can believe that this is hokum (as I do) or you can believe that it is ethically problematic (I'm inclined to). But, it has no relevence to the current economic environment. The key element of Keynes' argument for fiscal stimulus was that there was excessive savings. That is most emphatically not the case here. Our current economic problems result from quite the opposite – an excess of debt. The way to resolve such an imbalance is to increase wealth creation relative to consumption – to increase the savings rate.
baoxian

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN…congratulations, we're now a tax-and-entitlement Europia with permanent double digit unemployment and a crippling national debt. Thanks Democrats!

There's no doubt left that Obama is a Cloward-Piven socialist that has no intention of allowing the economy to recover. States are gutting essential public services while they spend upwards of 50% of their budgets on entitlements and public employee pension funds.

The entire Federal government is nothing but one big socialist wealth-transfer engine, with every penny of tax revenue going out the door as redistributed income. We borrow the entire operating budget of the government from foreign countries. Yet Obama's only idea is continue to borrow and spend money that will have to be repaid with interest by future generations.

Worse, he's squandering that wealth on nearly useless make-work that is of no real benefit to the country. The Manhattan and Apollo projects created a bountiful scientific and financial legacy. Obama's legacy will be caulked windows and bridges to nowhere.

The only bright spot is that voters seem to have caught on, and Obama's agenda will slam to a halt when he loses his rubber-stamp majority in Congress this November. Of course there will still be much work left to do to repair the damage done by the Dilettante-in-Chief.
Proud Infidel

Man is not free unless government is limited.”, and “Government does not solve problems, it subsidizes them” – Ronald Reagan

“When special interests put their thumb on the scale and distort the free market, the people who compete by the rules will come in last.” – Barack Obama

HOW TRUE, both of them. Obama's regulation and burdens put on private enterprise have successfully snuffed out plenty of jobs, and the cycle continues. Just look at the burden that Obamacare puts on businesses alone, as well as his proposals to cater to the unions!
UFKA_Smithwick

Obama is a lawyer and community organizer. He has no experience actually functioning in our economy apart from politics and the law.

It would be insane for anyone to expect him to know what the hell he's doing on the economy.

It would be even more insane to actually put him in charge of said economy.

We're F-ed.
http://conservativebootcamp.com Martin Hale

In business, when you're starting a new campaign of any sort, it's axiomatic that you have all of your ducks in a row, at least if you like your job and wish to keep it. You've not only created the slogan and the advertising collateral, but you've tied down the myriad details which ensure that the end product of the campaign can be delivered (that's why we in business talk so much about deliverables, donchaknow), and you've taken steps to deal with any foreseen and unforeseen contingencies.

Sadly, the “Summer of Recovery” aka “Recovery Summer” campaign seems to have been stillborn at just the slogan stage with little else behind it. But, not content to deliver an incomplete product to the public, the White House doubled down on their incompetence by assigning joltin' Joe “The Gaffer” Biden as it's chief spokestool. So we've had a summer of amiable, but ineffectual, Uncle Joe trying to shame us into agreeing that things are looking up, when they really aren't.

Don't expect much real recovery (in the form of mass job creation) until the Demicans make some effort to remove the question marks about taxes, health care costs, energy costs and borrowing costs which haunt the business community. And since none of that seems to be on the front burner in DC, it's likely that the creation of new jobs will continue to languish for a while longer.
KoS

“in the past decade”? How about you actually look at an unemployment/time chart? How about “since 2008″?

Debbie Spend-it-now is selling America’s future to the Chinese

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