Obama’s Economy: The Excuses Begin | Tom Blumer

The Obama economy goes into contraction in the 4th quarter of 2012.  President Obama issued an official statement: It’s not my fault!  Really?  Isn’t that what children always say?

If this “blame tech” mantra sounds mildly familiar, it’s because Obama himself has on a few unguarded occasions commented on how technology has destroyed jobs, indicting ATMs, airport kiosks, and the Internet for sending bank tellers, airline reservation agents, and others to the unemployment line. Apparently, never to return except perhaps as burger flippers or cashiers. I fear that the AP’s decision to identify tech as the scapegoat is no mere coincidence, and may foreshadow foolish attempts by the administration to slow down technological progress in the name of “saving jobs.”

Obamacare is already slated to do that very thing to the entire healthcare sector.

With all due respect to Professor Williams above, he would be right about enough replacement jobs being created if we were living in a genuine free-market economy. Unfortunately, that’s not where we are in this nation. Virtually all of the reasons why sufficient job growth isn’t occurring can be traced to the Obama administration’s market-hostile economic policies and postures.

Here are ten of the most obvious out of a list which could easily reach several dozen:

• The war on fossil fuels, which has limited job growth in energy-related industries and caused prices to be higher than they should be for everyone else.
• Cronyism on steroids.
• Trillion-dollar deficit spending.
• New bureaucracies like Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Financial Bureau, which Congress can’t legally touch.
• Sarbanes Oxley, a relic of the 2001 Enron debacle which the administration has done nothing to reform, and which has closed off the going-public option for many companies which would have done so before “Sarbox” became law.
• Unemployment and other government benefits which make remaining unemployed relatively attractive, or a least a more tolerable circumstance than it should be, and for a longer period of time than should be necessary.
• Onerous labor laws and regulations. I’ve spoken with many entrepreneurs in the past year, some of whom have had employees in the past. A vast majority of them have told me that they won’t hire any new employees in the current regulatory environment, even if the economy improves. Most start-up entrepreneurs likely feel the same way.
• Trade policy, a problem which spans the past four administrations but is being most acutely felt now.
• Federal, state, and local tax increases.
• Last but certainly not least, Obamacare, especially its career-killing definition of a full-time employee as anyone who works 30 or more hours per week, and the destructive impact it will have in slowing medical innovation and research to a crawl.

What the AP series really tells us is that the economy wasn’t performing as well as the government and the establishment press claimed it was during the presidential campaign — something I believe this week’s report on fourth-quarter gross domestic product will confirm — and that the White House really doesn’t expect the malaise to lift during most of Obama’s second term.

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And don’t miss these article on the state of the Obonomy:

Q4 GDP and Consumer Confidence Both Sucked Like a Turbomolecular Pump | RedState

Is the Worst Recovery In History Coming to an End? | Power Line

And for those who buy the administration and media-Matrix ridiculous excuses, there’s this:

Fact Check: Federal Spending Increased During 4th Quarter

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2013 at 2:22 am. It is filed under Top 10 Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.