Obama's Pushing Us Toward a European-Style Economy

By Donald Lambro

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

WASHINGTON - We are in the sixth year of the reign of Obama where America's prolonged economic illness is met with one excuse after another. Where accountability is evaded at all costs by replacing Harry Truman's "The Buck Stops Here" with "Blame Somebody Else."

Exhibit A: Last week, administration supporters, advisers and the news media were insisting the anemic number of jobs created in December (74,000) and January (113,000) was due to the severe winter weather and would soon turn around.

But if the polar vortex was the cause of the lower jobs count, how is it that construction was one of the relatively stronger job sectors in the last two months?

After December's shockingly weak jobs report, liberal economists and administration officials were predicting we would see the monthly jobs count soar in the new year.

President Obama told the nation that 2014 would be "a breakout year," but the minuscule number of jobs added last month fell far below the 200,000 jobs predicted by forecasters.

Liberal Wall Street economist Mark Zandi said he was "very sure" December's tiny job count would be "up and revised away" in the months to come.

Zandi, one of the talking heads on the CNBC business channel, insisted the economy was on the brink of seeing much higher job growth in January.

"I wouldn't pay any attention at all to these numbers," he said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" about the worrisome December report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

When the show's host, Andrew Sorkin, asked him "to take us a month out. What do these numbers... look like?" Zandi replied: "It's 200 k, we're looking at 200 k monthly job growth."

Jared Bernstein, a former top economic adviser in the Obama administration, similarly wrote a column in The New York Times saying December's jobs number "will later be revised."

But the one thousand jobs added, after the feds had massaged December's numbers, didn't change the math equation much, and there were grave doubts job creation would improve significantly in the coming months.

Even Washington's top economic reporters, who had been talking up the Obama economy every chance they got, were surprised as the back- to-back, shallow jobs reports came in.

"This was supposed to be the year the economy took off. Instead, new data released Friday show that 2014 stumbled out of the gate," wrote The Washington Post's economics reporter Ylan Q. Mui.

This was "the second straight month of lackluster hiring," Mui wrote, noting that economic analysts were now saying "that the results reflect a genuine slowdown in economic growth."

This is a story of monumental implications -- economic, political and social -- yet the Washington news media has been complicit in playing it down, coming up with excuses, whitewashing the numbers, or ignoring them altogether.

In a nation with a work force that once numbered in the 160 million range, and that suffers from a serious shortage of good-paying jobs, two straight months of mediocre job numbers is front page news. But the Post buried January's jobs report inside.

The White House must have breathed a sigh of relief.

The nightly network news shows dutifully did their part by kissing off Obama's dreadfully sluggish job numbers. NBC's Brian Williams gave the report a few sentences and quickly went on to other, lesser stories.

When the networks do stories on unemployment, which is rare, one name is never mentioned: Obama. It is as if he is on one planet, and the chronically weak economy was on another, and neither he nor his policies have anything to do with the latter.

Not so when we heard about "Reaganomics" over and over each night in the 1980s, until Ronald Reagan ended the recession in two years, with the help of huge, monthly job creation figures in the hundreds of thousands.

Well, Obama and his supporters can make all of the excuses they want, and the news media can ignore it night after night, but the jobless American people who suffer so from Obamanomics know what's going on. And they're fed up.

The Gallup Poll, which regularly takes the pulse of the nation for its Economic Confidence Index, released new numbers Tuesday that found public confidence in the U.S. economy has fallen to its lowest level since December.

Last week, when the polling took place, only 39 percent of Americans "said the economy was getting better, while 55 percent felt it was getting worse." Nearly 40 percent of the latter called the Obama economy "poor."

"Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the future of the economy," Gallup said.

And no wonder. Look at the abysmally low economic growth rate under this administration, when compared with more recent presidencies. Here's what New York Times economics writer Nelson D. Schwartz wrote on Jan.30:

Even after including the fourth quarter's 3.2 percent GDP growth rate, "the economy has expanded at an annual rate of 1.8 percent under President Obama, half the pace of growth in the first five years of the Clinton administration," and below the 2.5 percent annual growth rate for George W. Bush in his first five years.