Obama's Jobs Speech is D.O.A.

By Alan Caruba

Not only is President Obama’s forthcoming “jobs” speech a self-inflicted embarrassment when he was told he could not deliver it to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday—the first time any President was refused the day and time of his choosing—but it is essentially D.O.A.; dead on arrival.

Every one who has had to endure the last two and a half years of Barack Hussein Obama knows he has no idea how to “create” any jobs other than government jobs or how to cut through the Gordian knot of Washington’s regulatory and taxation bureaucracy. For starters, since taking office his administration has accelerated regulations more than the entire two terms of the man he blames for his problems.

Obamacare has stalled hiring as businesses large and small wait for its repeal. Already repealed by a vote in the House of Representatives, if the November 2012 elections give the nation a Republican Senate and President, this huge burden will be removed. On September 1, Wayne Crews, a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and nationally recognized authority on federal regulations, wrote a commentary in The Washington Times in which he said, “Mr. Obama’s slate of yet more regulations is beyond merely alarming in this tense environment. The Federal Register already stands at more than 54,000 pages so far this year.”

Crews especially cited the cesspool of over-regulation, the Environmental Protection Agency, for its proposed “Maximum Achievable Control Technology” pollutant control mandate for fossil-fuel utilities, for cement plants and boilers widely in hospital and factor use, for “dust” that is stirred up during normal farming, and for power-plant coal ash.

Obama just asked the insane EPA to withdrawal its proposed ozone rules that Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com says “would provide no health benefits, but cost $1 trillion per year in compliance, and kill 7.4 million jobs by 2020.”

“Far from a jobs agenda,” said Crews, “Mr. Obama advances an explicit anti-jobs program, one totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in costs and hundreds of thousands in jobs lost and jobs that can never appear. On top of an orgy of rule-making, our government, as deliberate public policy, prohibits access to safe and efficient extraction of fossil fuels on land and offshore.”

Everyone agrees that small business and entrepreneurship is the engine that actually creates new jobs. Crews noted that “Back in the early 1990s, the proportion of all regulations impacting small business stood at 14 percent of the total number of regulations. Today, 21 percent of rules impact small businesses—up three percent from 2009.”

Obama has also become well known for his advocacy of “green jobs” and, one day after Wayne Crews was lamenting the regulation explosion, Stephen Moore was writing in The Wall Street Journal that “President Obama is expected to seek another $250 billion or so in new stimulus funds next week, with plenty of money for clean energy and the creation of so-called green jobs.”

Future economists will calculate how much money the Obama administration has wasted on the fantasies of wind and solar energy, but what we know for sure is he has utilized all the powers of government to ensure that access to the fossil fuels on which ours and every other economy worldwide is based is thwarted, slowed or punished.

Moore wrote of an Obama-appointed U.S. attorney who brought criminal charges against seven oil companies for “causing the deaths of 28 migratory birds found in oil waste pits.” No such charges have ever been levied against the owners of wind farms that routinely slice and dice hundreds, if not thousands, of birds and bats.

Virtually every program the Obama administration has launched to turn around the economy has been a failure

The Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success recently pulled together data on the state of unemployment today, two years after Obamacare, two years after the “stimulus” act, two years after the bailouts of GM and Chrysler, et cetera. There are, according to the Center, 14 million Americans unemployed and still actively looking for work. There are five unemployed workers for every job-opening and, in August, NO NEW JOBS were created.

In terms of long-term unemployment, about 6.2 million workers have been unemployed for six months or more. Among them, 4.5 million have been jobless for a year or more. Unsurprisingly, the least educated are the hardest hits. Since January 2010, the Center says there has been a net loss of 500,000 jobs for people with high school diplomas or less, but a net gain of 1.2 million jobs for college graduates. Unemployment among blacks and Hispanics is significantly higher than for whites.

His brain clogged with Marxist and Keynesian nonsense that puts government at the center of the economy, Obama’s Thursday speech will be a hodge-podge of failed programs, proposals to spend billions we don’t have, and a tinker-toy constructed of various tax credits and other efforts, none of which have worked since the day he took the oath of office.

Watch what the stock market does when it opens Friday morning. Then watch as businesses sit on what money they have, hire sparingly, and wait until Obama is gone as of January 20, 2013.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Still Shoveling

People Have Noticed

By Alan Caruba

"Apres moi le deluge”, “After me, the flood” and though attributed to the French King Louis XV, historians believe it was actually said by Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour. The last members of the monarchy spent France into the poorhouse until they had their heads separated from their bodies via the guillotine.

People have noticed the same eerie disconnect from the suffering of the populace as Barack and Michelle Obama party on. There has been a succession of vacations topped off by Michelle in Spain on the U.S. dime. Keeping track of the vacations, about seventeen this year, has become a media pastime.

Twenty months into his first and last term, President Obama, has wasted a trillion dollars we didn’t have on a stimulus package that was little more than a wish list of pet projects for Democrat congressmen and bailouts of the teacher’s unions whose members would otherwise have to join the long lines at the unemployment office.

People noticed.

Obama has had notably little success in foreign affairs, failing to draw the line with the Russians on issues of defensive missiles in Europe, managing to insult the British in a dozen ways, and being mocked by the Iranian leaders as they get ready to fire up a nuclear reactor.

People noticed.

When he finally decided what to do in Afghanistan, he made the announcement at West Point, including a date when the new infusion of troops would leave. The cadets slept through the speech and the Taliban circled their calendar for 2011.

People noticed.

Barely in office a day, he was all for closing down Guantanamo until he learned there was no place for the detainees. The states did not want them in their prisons and foreign nations did not want them for any reason. When his Attorney General wanted to try the mastermind of 9/11 in New York City the outcry was deafening.

People noticed.

Many of those he wanted to appoint to his administration turned out to be tax cheats or had to withdraw due to charges of unethical behavior or corruption. Despite a pledge to drive out the lobbyists, a number of appointees were lobbyists. A whole slew of “czars” turned out to include a number of loonies who were either outright communists or who believed weird science theories.

People noticed.

Despite widespread, vocal opposition, Obamacare was forced upon an unwilling America and now we are learning it will increase costs and deny care, just as we knew it would.

People noticed.

Bush had his Katrina, but Obama had the Gulf of Mexico oil leak. His administration mismanaged it beyond belief and then he arbitrarily shut down oil production from other rigs, adding more people to the unemployment lines.

People noticed.

Obama used the occasion of a Ramadan dinner at the White House to wade into the controversy regarding a plan to build a mosque within two blocks of where 3,000 Americans died from an Islamic terrorist attack. Then he had to back off what he said.

People noticed.

Obama appointed two women to the Supreme Court, both of whom think the Constitution was written on silly putty. One had never been a judge.

People noticed.

Muslim murder at Fort Hood, a failed Christmas bomber on a commercial jet, and another failed bomber in Times Square. The response to all three incidents was slow and very, very politically correct, tip-toeing around using the word “Muslim.”

People noticed.

Rather than take dramatic action to stem the flood of illegal aliens along the southern border, the Obama administration brought a suit against Arizona at the same time twenty other states are writing and passing similar legislation to enforce immigration laws. Then they threatened Sheriff Joe Arpaio with a legal suit charging that he was anti-Hispanic!

People noticed.

Along the way the Tea Party movement occurred and Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. Harry Reid became even creepier than anyone could imagine. The voters elected Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, and a Republican Senator to fill Teddy Kennedy’s vacant seat.

People noticed.

On November 2nd, the voters will go to the polls for a midterm election and the odds are that many Democrats will just stay home while the independents and Republicans will turn out in huge numbers.

The power in Congress will shift, perhaps dramatically, because people noticed.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Shoveling Borrowed Dollars

By Alan Caruba

You will not find much about “shovel ready” projects on the White House website, but there is an entire site, Recovery.gov, that extols the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was signed into law a year ago.

I generally do not spend much time on federal government websites and especially on those that are the creation of those around President Obama. For example, the White House in November 2009 put out an announcement that Vice President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had “jumpstarted more than 10,000 transportation projects across America thanks to the swift allocation of Recovery Act dollars.” At the time of the announcement, “state agencies reported a total of 10,041 approved.”

As we have learned, news out of the White House has in the past involved state districts that don’t even exist, so I tend not to get too excited by such announcements. The projects mentioned included several stretches of new highway in Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. So far, good news.

The bad news in November was that, while more than $2 billion in federal highway funds had been allocated to California, only $837 million had been awarded for highway projects. “Even more surprising,” reported Eric A. Morris of The New York Times, “only $51 million, or about 2.5 percent of the total, had actually been disbursed.”

While Joe Biden and Ray LaHood were busy patting themselves on the back, Morris reported that “Overall, the U.S. Department of Transportation has managed to disburse only $5.5 billion to the states out of the $30.5 billion in available transportation funds.”

I don’t want to be too hard on the White House because, realistically speaking, major capital investments like highways require a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to jump before they ever begin. These are in place to ensure that the public doesn’t get ripped off and that those undertaking the projects meet fundamental industry standards.

Still, I recall President Obama telling Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press” back in January 2009 that he had met with several governors “and all of them have projects that are shovel ready.”

Shovel ready became the instant buzzword of 2009 and it evoked visions of crews of newly employed workers drawing paychecks as opposed to the ten million or more (much more) unemployed workers in the nation a year later.

It turns out that a lot of the “stimulus” money went to states that were in serious trouble meeting pension, Medicaid, and other obligations. By October of last year, reportedly the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had received $33 billion, the Labor Department $28 billion, Education $21 billion and the Social Security Administration $13 billion. That accounted for 86% of the spending to that point.

So, in fact, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act essentially authorized the borrowing of more billions of dollars to largely fund various government agencies. If any money falls off the edge of the table and some states get the scraps, well that’s a bonus.

A year later, however, most people have figured out that programs like the Recovery Act and “Cash for Clunkers” are just so much White House smoke and mirrors.

They have figured out that the U.S. simply cannot go on borrowing and spending. And they have begun to suspect that a few tax cuts that would put money back in the hands of consumers and investors would have done a far better job of getting the economy on its feet again.

Are You "Stimulated" Yet?