Waiting for the post-Labor Day pivot to jobs?
If you’re like me, you are awaiting President Obama’s post-Labor Day jobs proposals not without a sense of dread. The frustrating thing is that there are things that can be done to get us on the road to recovery-as opposed to “recovery.” The bad news is that doing these things would require a presidential philosophical conversion.
Lurita Doan, who writes frequently on matters affecting the federal government, says waiting for job creation is beginning to remind her of Waiting for Godot:
In fact, considering Obama has no street creds in the area of job creation, and considering few of his advisors have ever created jobs, and considering that two of the most powerful Democrats in the House and the Senate represent the two states with the nation’s highest unemployment, it’s hard to imagine the president will have an innovative, cohesive or potentially effective job creation plan to roll out in his speech.
What, if the president could bring himself to do it, could be done? Doan’s has five good prescriptions, including announcing a “drill, baby, drill” policy, and seeking advice from people who know about job creation. The second would include getting advice from governors with proven job-creating records. Since Governor Rick Perry, who is running for president, is one of these governors, I am going to go out on a limb and guess how the president might respond: ixnay.
Doan suggests one action the president is likely going to propose: extending the payroll tax cuts. But Doan points out that these cuts must be accompanied by something the president likely won’t propose: serious federal budget cuts, including the time people can collect unemployment benefits.
Meanwhile, two entrepreneurs, Edward Muller, CEO of GenOn Energy and Larry Limpleman, CEO of the Principal Financial Group, say in today’s Wall Street Journal that “there is no hope of giving consumers renewed confidence in America unless governments at all levels mount a vigorous effort to get rid of rules that discourage entrepreneurs from launching and growing new businesses.”
Among their proposals are reducing the capital gains tax, regular sunsets for regulations, and barriers to IPOs by permitting shareholders to opt out of Sarbanes-Oxley. Yeah, don’t hold your breath.
An editorial today in the Wall Street Journal suggests that a moratorium on new EPA regulations that will shut down 8 percent of all power generation in the United States would be a good idea. My prediction: Not gonna happen.
It may be that we must reconcile ourselves to a deathly still economy for the near future. Entrepreneur John Mariotti argues in Forbes magazine that no recovery is possible under President Obama’s policies. I hope Mariotti is wrong about a double-dip recession, but his piece makes a lot of sense:
There will be no significant recovery in the United States of America while Barack Obama is President. The evidence is overwhelming: everything Obama has tried to fuel a recovery (with his Democratic allies in Congress) has failed. Statistics claiming jobs saved by the stimulus package were mostly fiction, and cost American taxpayers about $275,000 each. Nearly 2-1/2 million fewer Americans have jobs than before the stimulus.
Barack Obama has been President for 30 months-2-1/2 years. He spent the first year obsessed with passing Obamacare, a program that doesn’t create jobs, but might destroy a lot of them.