How Could a US President Be So Abysmally Ignorant of the Nature of a Market Economy?

Mr. Obama has increased the US national debt by $4 trillion with very little to show for it in the way of employment or jobs. Obama's jobs program has become a program of political payoffs to cronies and supporters, while drowning the private sector under more and more layers of taxes and regulations. How could a US president be so utterly stupid as to how market economies work?

The heart of the problem is that Obama's idea of job creation largely revolves around public works projects that are rooted in Keynesian economics and driven by government funding and political payoffs.
What's needed now is a blood transfusion of self-funding jobs in the private sector that will enlarge the tax base and begin shrinking the deficit. Fortunately, there are four initiatives already in motion that could quickly create jobs and have a ripple effect throughout the economy.

First, the president could support the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011 (HR 1834), which would allow American multinational corporations to bring back to the U. S. some of the $1 trillion in cash they are hoarding offshore to avoid onerous U.S. corporate tax rates.

Why not allow those funds to be repatriated at greatly reduced tax rates, provided the money is invested in jobs, plants and equipment in the U.S.?

Second, the president can ask his appointees at the National Labor Relations Board to fast-track the hearings and decision-making that would allow Boeing to open its 787 Dreamliner assembly plant in South Carolina....

Third, President Obama can direct his Interior Department to cut through the red tape and renew the permit granted to ExxonMobil to develop the largest oil discovery in a decade located in the Julia field in the Gulf of Mexico. That discovery -- a deep reservoir of some 1 billion barrels of oil -- would reduce America's dependence on foreign oil and create thousands of jobs.

According to the American Petroleum Institute, by 2013 the ripple effects of this discovery and the lifting of the drilling moratorium imposed after the BP oil spill would cause "total employment supported by the Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas industry to (approach) 430,000 jobs or a 77 percent increase."

Fourth, jobs are just waiting to be created by American companies eager to help tap the third largest proven oil reserve in the world, located in Alberta, Canada. These oil sands are now technologically and economically viable, provided the heavy crude oil can be transported by a new pipeline to refineries on the Texas Gulf coast.

Eighty percent of that 1,660-mile pipeline would be in the U.S. and put 20,000 people to work in construction and manufacturing. Most of the planning and permitting for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline has been done.

The major holdup now is President Obama. He needs to approve the project and shepherd it through final State Department formalities.

So far, President Obama's jobs initiatives have relied on stimulus spending of public money that is largely borrowed. The debt ceiling debate and S&P downgrade shocked the nation into facing the fact that we must reduce the trajectory of borrowing and spending. The virtue of private sector job creation is that it is largely self-funding and that it provides a return on investment, which in turn generates new tax revenues. _MercuryNews

Mr. Obama knows how to read from a teleprompter, and look down his nose at his royal subjects. He can also put in a lot of time on the golf course, and puts on some impressive taxpayer-supported vacations and parties.

But if you ask Obama voters why they voted for him, it is unlikely that they would say "to play golf," or "to go on long and expensive vacations."

Most of us knew that Obama could only be a figurehead, all along. His real world experience is completely lacking of any ingredients for making a strong, competent, practical leader for the world's only superpower and largest economy. What we didn't understand was just how disastrously poor Mr. Obama is at choosing advisors and decision makers. Too late now.

But if anyone within 100 miles of Washington DC does have any idea how a market economy can be allowed to thrive, perhaps he could try to get a message through into the "DC dead zone" that things need to be done in a more competent way, more in accordance with the needs of market economies. Otherwise, the ugliness is apt to get completely out of control.