I'd say it gets right to the base of what our present President has managed to accomplish, all while spending over a trillion dollars more than the government took in for revenue, such spending supposedly needed to stimulate job growth. Call it a major failure on his part.
It's time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer.
It looks like Obama is trying hard to outdo two previous presidents in regards to their failures, those two being FDR and Jimmy Carter.
FDR managed to find a way to extend the Great Depression for years, his various economic interventions doing far more harm than good. A couple were even outright unconstitutional.
Jimmy Carter managed to take a moderate recession and turn it into a major recession all while making American foreign policy look like a joke. His one foreign policy success has managed to outlive the other two parties involved, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachim Begin of Israel, with his Camp David Accords bringing peace between those two nations that has lasted 33 years.
So far President Obama is looking to blow right past both of them on his way to being the worst president in modern history in regards to socio-economic and foreign policy issues. One example of the former: ObamaCare.
The unintended consequences of this major intervention into the health insurance/medical care industry are already being felt even though the major parts of ObamaCare don't go into effect until 2014. Two of the biggest side effects of this ill advised and poorly written law? The loss of experienced medical personnel from the health care ranks and businesses doing away with health insurance for their employees because ObamaCare will make it too damn expensive for them to continue providing it.
Under the many restrictions being laid upon health care providers by ObamaCare, doctors and nurses are seeing no future in remaining in their chosen professions and will be leaving them over the next few years. How is that supposed to translate into better healthcare for all? The answer: It doesn't.
With the new requirements for providing employee health insurance laid upon businesses, many of them, primarily smaller businesses, see no economic sense in continuing to do so. Again, ObamaCare provides big disincentives for those businesses. How does this help anyone? Again, the answer: It doesn't.
In the end, both of these unintended consequence will have a negative effect on the economy, and in turn, on jobs.
Even with some businesses now hiring again, the question that must be asked is What kind of jobs need to be filled? It certainly isn't going to be the kind that were lost over the past 3 years. Instead, the jobs needing to be filled will be lower paying jobs.
Where are the good jobs Obama promised? They certainly aren't out there in the real world. Of course they might have been if he hadn't done everything in his power to extend the length and depth of the recession by providing all kinds of incentives for businesses to hold off expanding and for people to remain on unemployment.
The good news for people out of work is that overall job vacancies are up 21 percent over the past six months, based on a separate Labor Dept. report. The bad news is that there are still five unemployed people for each job opening. That’s down from a peak of 6.2 at the end of last year, but at the beginning of the recession in December 2007, there were only 1.8 people competing for each vacancy. That means, for many months to come, a lot of talented people will be going head-to-head for new positions, a lot of which are still concentrated in lower-wage industries.
With the hundreds of billions of dollars slated for 'stimulus' spending, very little of it went for things that would have actually helped during and after our country's economic recovery. Every dime of that money should have gone into infrastructure for things like the thousands of bridges, roads, and highways that need upgrades or replacement, water and sewer system upgrades and expansion, port facilities, airports, electric power distribution systems, and telecommunications systems upgrades (particularly for rural areas of the nation). Instead, most of what was spent went to creating more government jobs, jobs which produce nothing in the way of goods or services like private industry. The government jobs also produce little in the way of actual revenue for government, unlike private sector jobs.
Tax increases also place a greater burden on the economy, reducing the amount of discretionary spending by wage earners. Obama hasn't grasped the fact that every time the government takes more from the taxpayers they have less to spend on the goods and services that drive the economy. By allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of this year, Obama will not see a great increase in revenue next year. Instead he'll see revenues fall, as will the GDP. The fall in revenue will have a number of causes, one of the biggest being individuals and corporations shifting income, dividends, or capital gains payouts forward to this year in order to avoid paying the higher taxes next year.
The increase in tax rates will cause businesses and individuals to change how they do business in an effort to minimize their tax burdens, something quite normal for them to do. For some individuals that means foregoing pay increases or bonuses that push them into the next higher tax bracket. This is because if they pay at the higher tax rate they'll end up with less money than before their raise. In effect, the pay raise punishes them for doing well because of the higher tax burden it brings.
The return of the estate tax - the so-called “death tax” - at the end of the year will also collect very little in revenue as the smarter folks will find ways of transferring their estates before their deaths, avoiding paying 55% of its worth to the federal government. Of those failing to do so, the 55% estate tax may end up costing jobs as some family owned businesses will have to be liquidated in order to pay the taxes. Somehow I doubt that was the original intent of the estate taxes. But because the “soak the rich” mentality permeates Congress and appears to be Obama's economic raison d'être, it will come back with a vengeance and will end up hurting far too many American business owners, their families, and their employees. More jobs will be lost because of it. (If you don't believe that, all one needs to do is look at the effects of the now defunct “luxury” tax on cars, boats and planes. Sales fell off to almost nothing and thousands lost their jobs. The amount of revenue collected by that tax was minimal, but the government paid out millions in unemployment benefits. While not a perfect illustration of the unintended effects of a poorly thought out tax policy, it does get the point across that the government is vastly overestimating the potential revenues to be gained while ignoring the side effects. No surprise there.)
I could go on and on with a list of things Obama has done or wants to do that will have the effect of killing jobs here in the US, but I have better things to do. I also have to include Congress in this as well as we've seen the Democrats in the House and the Senate working towards the same outcome with poorly written, unreadable legislation that does nothing more than burden taxpayers and businesses with increasing levels of regulations that will, in the end, help no one and kill jobs.