Advice to Obama on Jobs Formation

President Obama has had a disastrous effect on US jobs and household income. If Obama were open to constructive advice, what would you tell him?

Here is one man's list of positive steps Obama might take, if he were serious about the problem:

Measure No. 1: Prove that you are not anti-business. Rebuke your National Labor Relations Board for persecuting Boeing for building a plant in a right-to-work state, place the burden on regulatory agencies to prove that the benefits of new regulations exceed their costs using realistic estimates of benefits, redress for the blackmail of secured Chrysler creditors during theDetroit bailout, and pass free trade agreements that have already been negotiated. Whatever you do, cease and desist talk of “you did not build that.” That insult revealed your true feelings about the business community, more than any other of your public statements.

Measure No. 2: Do everything in your power to reduce energy costs. Lower energy costs create jobs by reducing production costs and improving international competitiveness. Stop stalling and make drilling leases available on government land, call off frivolous environmentalist attacks on new fracking technology, and cease and desist on your plans to regulate coal fired electricity out of business.  Drop ethanol mandates for gasoline.

Measure No. 3: Create conditions that encourage businesses to hire and the unemployed to seek and accept jobs. Do not extend unemployment benefits beyond a generous date certain, lower the minimum wage especially for youths, and stop the rampant approvals by the Social Security Administration and the administrative courts of lifetime disability for minor illnesses, both physical and mental. Withdraw executive orders that overturn the signal achievement of the Clinton Administration, the welfare reform act of 1986.

Measure No. 4: Reduce uncertainty of households and businesses caused by unsustainable deficits and uncertain future tax liabilities. Extend all of the Bush tax cuts  until Congressional  passage of  broad tax reforms that eliminate all tax preferences and lower tax rates, eliminate the unnecessary and duplicative federal programs identified by the Government Accounting Office, bring  the proposals of the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission to Congress for serious discussion, include the one hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security in the budget deficit to show the urgency of entitlement reform, and replace  the convoluted and partisan Obama Care bill with bi-partisan health-care reform. Until these fundamental issues are addressed, business will not hire and people will not spend.

Measure No. 5:  Free the housing market from government intervention to work off excess inventories quickly. Government-decreed mortgage modifications, subsidies, and threats against mortgage companies prevent the housing market from finding its bottom from which recovery begins. Announce credible plans for the liquidation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Maeto remove the federal government from the mortgage business, where it does not belong.

Measure No. 6: Cease and desist promoting crony-capitalist government-private partnerships that serve political agendas rather than earning profits and creating jobs. Let private markets, rather than the energy department, allocate capital to companies that make products people wish to buy, rather than to Solyndras, Volts, and other green energy boondoggles. Let regular courts navigate failing companies like GM and Chrysler through bankruptcy proceedings so that they can emerge as competitive companies unbeholden to organized labor or government diktat.

Measure No. 7: Seek and accept the resignations of die-hard Keynesian advisors behind the failed trillion dollar stimulus and who favor more stimulus.  They are out of touch with modern economic analysis’s consensus that temporary fiscal measures are ineffective. Keynesian advisors have made the President look foolish and inept with ludicrous arguments that more expenditures on transfers for food stamps and unemployment benefits create jobs and generate recovery. (I guess we should all go on food stamps to promote recovery).

If Obama had enacted these policies (which would have garnered strong Republican support) a year ago, a strong recovery would be underway, the U. S. economy would be on its way to regaining its competitive edge, and jobs would be expanding. He would be sailing to an easy electoral victory by reaching across the aisles to get things done for the American people.

Instead, with two months until the election, Obama presides over the worst economic recovery in history, despite a catastrophic increase in federal debt under his administration. The unemployment rate is stuck at 8.3 percent, of which 40 percent are long term unemployed. The 13 million unemployed are joined by another 10 million, who are underemployed or have given up looking for a job. The poverty rate is the highest since the mid 1960s, and a half million workers have joined the ranks of the disabled, many as their unemployment benefits expired.

Obama’s enactment of a real jobs program a year ago would have been the equivalent of Bill Clinton’s 1986: “We must end welfare as we know it.” Clinton was a pragmatic politician who knew where the center lay.  Obama does not. He will not budge in his ideology or support of his special interests. His intransigence will likely cost him reelection.

In his stump speeches, Obama asks the crowd: “Do you want to go back to the failed policies of the past?”  Well, his economic policies have failed, and he is not offering any new ideas. In asking for votes, he is promising more of the same “failed policies.”_Paul Roderick Gregory in Forbes

Anyone who has studied the formation of Obama's mindset -- from his earliest memories onward -- will understand that Obama is not open to the advice offered above. He has other plans in mind, which do not allow for any strengthening of the US private sector, vis a vis the government.