President Obama’s job-killing agenda
Yesterday, President Obama traveled to Ohio to speak with workers at a local pipe manufacturing plant. While there, he touted the success of the $787 billion “stimulus” package that he and fellow Democrats forced through Congress back in February of 2009:
Despite all the naysayers in Washington, who are always looking for the cloud in every silver lining, the fact is our economy is growing again.
But despite the President’s optimism, workers in Ohio and around the country are still searching for the jobs that he promised to create. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) is one of the many Ohio residents wondering where the stimulus jobs are:
The fact that the president has come to cheerlead the stimulus in a city where unemployment is 15.1 percent demonstrates just how out of touch Washington Democrats are with the harsh realities many communities are facing today. During this time of hardship, the last thing the people of the Mahoning Valley need is more of the president’s jobs-killing agenda that is only making matters worse.
A closer look at job creation figures shows that even with the most optimistic predictions, the economy will still lose jobs under the Obama White House from 2009 to 2010. In a recent National Review article, Cesar Conda and Diana Furchtgott-Roth use Ron Brownstein’s “overly generous” job creation predictions to calculate the number of net jobs that will be lost by the end of 2010:
Using Brownstein’s assumption of 290,000 monthly jobs for the remainder of 2010, the net job loss since the start of January 2009 would be 1.8 million, the sum of 4.7 million lost jobs in 2009 and 2.9 million potential jobs created in 2010. Even under Brownstein’s generous assumptions, the economy would lose jobs during the Obama presidency during the period 2009 to 2010. That’s right, not only zero net new jobs, but a job loss of 1.8 million.
With unemployment high at 9.9 percent and the administration’s own 2011 budget forecasting that it will remain close to double-digits for the next two years, there is little reason to celebrate the “success” of the stimulus package. As Conda and Furchtgott-Roth’s calculations show, the stimulus has not only failed to create the 3 million jobs that it was suppose to but the economy will have lost an additional 1.8 million jobs by the end of 2010.
Even with this shocking revelation, the President refuses to admit that his near trillion dollar spending package has fallen short of expectations. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, he seems unwilling to acknowledge that individuals–not governments– create success and that businesses– not tax dollars– create jobs.
