Obama tunes out, and business goes on hiring strike

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

Last week I noted that various forms of the word "unexpected" almost inevitably appeared in news stories about unfavorable economic developments.
You can find them again in stories about Friday's shocking news, that only 54,000 net new jobs were created in the month of May and that unemployment rose to 9.1 percent.

But with news that bad, maybe bad economic numbers will no longer be "unexpected." You can only expect a robust economic recovery for so long before you figure out, as Herbert Hoover eventually did, that it is not around the corner.

Exogenous factors explain some part of the current economic stagnation. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a slowdown in manufacturing. Horrendous tornadoes did not help. Nor did bad weather, though only a few still bitterly cling to the theory that it's caused by man-made global warming.

But poor public policy is surely one reason why the American economy has not rebounded from recession as it has in the past. And political posturing has also played a major role.

Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional supermajorities of 2009-10 raised federal spending from 21 to 25 percent of gross domestic product. Their stimulus package stopped layoffs of public employees for a while, even as private sector payrolls plummeted.

[pollyannaish]

Obama's spokesman out on the talk show circuit this morning was breathtakingly detached from main street. His argument was basically that things are going find and we shouldn't abandon the president's fixes just because they aren't working.

 

Whaaaat? For some reason, I'm not very convinced.