President Obama has been in office for 65 months. During all but the first five of those months, we have been told that the economy has been growing; Washington has given us the "Summer of Recovery" and all manner of other statements about just how great America has been doing. Today we got the jobs report for May and it included a major milestone. For the first time during Obama's entire five and a half years, the number of people with jobs in this country has gotten back to essentially the same number as were employed before the recession. So, for all the great "recovery" that gets trumpeted so often in the Obama-loving media, America is just now getting back to the starting place for the recession. Of course, there is a big caveat to this statistic. It has taken so many years to get back to the same number of jobs, that there are now roughly ten million more people in the country than there were at the start. Clearly, those ten million people should include at least five million with jobs, so we really haven't recovered yet from the recession, let alone begun to grow.
It is important to understand that for every recession of the modern economic era (since World War II), the number of jobs has bounced back to pre-recession levels in a year or two at most. The kind of non-growth "recovery" that the Obama policies have brought us is something that America has seen only once before in its entire history and that was during the Great Depression. But Obama has not presided over a depression; there was a strong recession, but the economic contraction ended quickly enough. No, Obama brought in policies that tamped down growth during the recovery phase of the business cycle. Obama forced energy prices much higher. Obama forced healthcare costs much higher. Obama made labor costs much more uncertain and raised the regulatory burden imposed on employers. Obama promoted policies that encouraged America companies to continue to ship jobs overseas. Obama limited the ability of American inventions to prosper on the world stage. In short, Obama made it much harder for American businesses to thrive. As a result, we got a slow or no growth economy that only now is getting back to the number of workers with jobs that we had all those years ago.
It is important to understand that for every recession of the modern economic era (since World War II), the number of jobs has bounced back to pre-recession levels in a year or two at most. The kind of non-growth "recovery" that the Obama policies have brought us is something that America has seen only once before in its entire history and that was during the Great Depression. But Obama has not presided over a depression; there was a strong recession, but the economic contraction ended quickly enough. No, Obama brought in policies that tamped down growth during the recovery phase of the business cycle. Obama forced energy prices much higher. Obama forced healthcare costs much higher. Obama made labor costs much more uncertain and raised the regulatory burden imposed on employers. Obama promoted policies that encouraged America companies to continue to ship jobs overseas. Obama limited the ability of American inventions to prosper on the world stage. In short, Obama made it much harder for American businesses to thrive. As a result, we got a slow or no growth economy that only now is getting back to the number of workers with jobs that we had all those years ago.
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