Topic: Decline of the West
Barack Obama’s progressive economic policies may not be creating jobs, but they’re generating plenty of excuses.
The President is going to performing another “hard pivot to jobs” when he addresses a joint session of Congress on September 8—and the first item on the agenda is likely to be a heartrending hard-luck story. Such a mess Barry inherited! And how gosh-darned unlucky he’s been! Gee whiz, if it hadn’t been for Bush’s stupid wars and the Gulf oil spill and the Japanese earthquake and the Arab Spring and Hurricane Irene we’d all be commuting via high-speed rail to well-paying green jobs! (Pause to allow the audience to dry their tears while contemplating what might have been.) But that’s OK! Because he’s frustrated with Congress, just like we are, and so…and so…he’s going to raise taxes on “millionaires and billionaires”! Wow! Why didn’t anyone else think of that?!
Sorry, Barry, but we’re not buying. Out here in the real world, the economy added zero net jobs in August. The official unemployment rate remains stuck at 9.1%. Consumer confidence is nonexistent. The stock market is heading south. The housing market remains moribund. Signs of a double-dip recession are multiplying. The only growth industries are the national debt and your own disapproval rating.
It’s hard to see how the President can recover from the poisonous political effects of this mess—a mess largely of his own making. He gambled that America could tax, spend, subsidize and regulate its way back to prosperity. Now we see the results. Future historians may well highlight August 2011 as the moment when Barack Obama’s presidency went into terminal decline.