Offering no new ideas on job growth, President Obama states the obvious, “we still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.” Only 18,000 jobs were created last month, and unemployment rose .1 percent to 9.2 percent.
And did you notice Obama’s sleight of hand on people in the construction industry who are out of work? He used them as potential workers to push his proposed spending on roads, bridges and infrastructure.
The transcript illustrates Obama’s support for public sector labor union jobs, to the exclusion of private sector jobs in general. And that those jobs were a result of budget cutting, aka reduced spending. Too bad for everyone else that represents the majority of working people. Those are the ones out of work, not because of budget cutting, but because of Obama’s economic strategy.
And over the past few months, the economy has experienced some tough headwinds — from natural disasters, to spikes in gas prices, to state and local budget cuts that have cost tens of thousands of cops and firefighters and teachers their jobs.
There are a few things that we can and should do, right now, to redouble our efforts on behalf of the American people. Let me give you some examples. Right now, there are over a million construction workers out of work after the housing boom went bust, just as a lot of America needs rebuilding. We connect the two by investing in rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our infrastructure. {emphasis added}
If creating jobs in the private sector construction industry was important to him, he might have instead tried to connect the devastation caused by natural disasters all over the country and the massive rebuilding that is required, with the people who can and would do it. In my fantasy I was hoping he would try something like that. Putting those contractors to work, and all the employees and families that they support, would be the kind of job creation that the economy is starving for.
But no. Rather than try to do that, and not trying to rally the American people and their entrepreneurial spirit, he chose to stick with government spending projects that produce very little towards economic recovery and job creation.
Undaunted by public opinion and the economic reality of the consequences of his policies, President Obama is hell-bent on more of the same. Doing nothing to eliminate the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) from business and investment decisions. So this is the record he expects to run on next year?
