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Columbus
Dispatch
Obama’s non-recovery
Now
in his second term, president can’t dodge responsibility
Wednesday
April 10, 2013
Last
week’s worse-than-expected U.S. jobs report gave even
supporters of Barack Obama pause.
Could
it finally be that those who gave him a pass on the economy
throughout his entire first term, arguing that he had inherited an
unprecedented challenge, are beginning to see that it’s time to start
holding
this second-term president responsible for an economy that keeps
shedding
workers and hope?
Four
years and four months into the Obama administration, he
clearly owns the nation’s sluggish economy and its weak job growth.
America is
experiencing the slowest recovery since the Great Depression, and the
emphasis
on the top-line unemployment numbers masks the reason for the decline
in the
unemployment rate: It’s not because plentiful jobs are being created,
but
because more people are giving up looking for work.
And
while the economy languishes, Obama continues to play the
blame game. When it was announced on Friday that just 88,000 jobs were
created
in the U.S. in March — less than half of what was expected — Obama
advisers
blamed the sequester, which they blame on Republicans.
Surely,
no one likes the sequester, and it is causing some real
pain, But when it comes to the jobs numbers, Obama’s fear-mongering,
rather
than the effect of the cuts themselves, may be to blame. The Conference
Board,
a business-focused research group, issued a statement calling March’s
job
slowdown “even more troubling ... (as) it takes place even before the
sequester
cuts materially hit the economy.” In other words, the report is bad
news
because it precedes the real impact of sequestration cuts, not because
of their
impact.
CNBC
host Jim Cramer posited that it was Obama’s own
“fear-mongering” about the sequester that might have dampened hiring.
“The
president did make people feel everything’s going to shut
down in this country because of the sequester,” Cramer said on NBC’s
“Meet the Press”
on Sunday. “A lot of CEOs were very scared. A lot of the small-business
people
held back ... It was fear that the sequester would cause massive
layoffs.”
Read the rest of the article at Columbus
Dispatch
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