When the administration announces that, say, 160,000 jobs were created in a month, the media get pretty excited because it sounds like a big number. But when we get news like today, that the rolling average of new people filing unemployment claims remains at around 340,000 every week . . . crickets.
This economy is stalled. Obama says on The Tonight Show that the economy “is growing” but that means nothing at all. Between 1995 and 2005, the GDP grew by an annualized average of 3.1 percent. Between 2006 and 2012, the average was a mere 2 percent. The first two quarters of this year have been 1.2 percent and 1.7 percent respectively.
The economists at J.P. Morgan, who are among the best in the business, tell us 1.75 percent is about what we should expect in coming years.
Horrendous. This is the new normal Obama wants Americans to accept. But Americans do not have it in their DNA to adjust their expectations downward in that way. We know we can do better than this because we have done better than this for most of our history.
By the way, since I know Harry Reid is very concerned that opposition to Obama be based on substance and “not because he is an African-American,” this African-American would like to remind Senator Reid that Obama’s economic performance is abysmal, and that’s substance, sir.
Obama keeps telling us we have more work to do. Yeah. But the last thing we need is to do more of the kind of work Obama’s been doing. That’s getting us nowhere.
