Despite his campaign promise to govern as a moderate, President Obama has aggressively pursued what can only be described as neosocialist economics. This is a system of governance within which the government essentially runs business, but not in its own name — so that when failures occur, it can disown responsibility and blame business instead. It is a new and “improved” socialism, so to say.
The program has included outright government takeovers of most of the auto industry and the student loan industry, massive new control of the financial industry, near total control of the health industry, near total dominance of the energy industry, stimulus spending bills (often favoring campaign donors), housing bailouts, cash for clunkers, cash for weatherproofing, and so on. All of this is Obama’s doing. So is the $5 trillion he has added to the national debt — pushing us past France in debt as a percentage of GDP.
The result has been a long, lingering malaise — the Obamalaise — posing as a “recovery.”
The latest jobs report starkly illustrates the failure of Obamanomics. It shows that last month the economy — in the third year of an economic recovery — created a ludicrous 80,000 jobs. Considering that the economy needs to create about 125,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth, this was a profoundly pathetic report card. The unemployment rate stayed at 8.2%, only because — again — more people dropped out of the work force.
Worse, of the 80,000 jobs created, 25,000 of them — nearly a third — were temp jobs.
Even worse, in June, while a net 80,000 jobs were created, 85,000 people went on federal disability! Yes, more people got on the SSDI disability rolls than got productive jobs. Indeed, since June 2009, while Obamanomics has created 2.6 million jobs, it has put nearly 3.1 million new people on SSDI disability. Moreover, a whopping 275,000 additional people have applied for disability. Obama is truly the Disability King.
Add to this the fact that yet more people went on food stamps, cementing Obama’s rightful title as the Food Stamp King. In fact, from June 2009 to April of this year, the number of food stamp recipients exploded upwards by 11.3 million, or nearly a third.
Amazingly, while Obama has his highest support among blacks, followed by Hispanics, and his lowest support among whites, it turns out that white unemployment stands at 7.4%, Hispanic unemployment at 11%, and black unemployment at a gut-wrenching 14.4%.
The general unemployment rate has now been over 8% for 41 months in a row, which sets another new record — one that beats all previous administrations over the last six decades. And the length of time the average person has been unemployed under Obama’s “recovery” has been 20.6 weeks, completely eclipsing the earlier record of 10.5 weeks.
If the labor force participation rate were now what it was when this neosocialist administration took power, the unemployment rate would be 10.9%. It is only as “low” as it is because many people have stopped “participating” (i.e., looking for jobs).
Three years of Obamanomics recovery has created job growth of 75,000 a month on average, or 2.6 million in total. By contrast, Reaganomics (neoliberalism) over the same length of time averaged 273,000 a month, or 9.8 million in total.
Of course, the nation was smaller then. If we correct for population size, the Reagan neoliberal recovery produced the equivalent of 360,000 jobs a month over the same period, or a total of 13 million.
The “recovery” brought by Obamanomics created a total expansion of real GDP of only 6.7% over eleven months. Again, by comparison, Reaganomics brought a total expansion of real GDP of 17.6% in the same period — or well over two and a half times as great a growth rate.
So what shall we call the president: The Disability King? The Food Stamp King? The Long Term Unemployment King? The Slow Growth King?
Perhaps “the clown-prince of neosocialism” will do.
