As Economy Sputters, Obama Tries Distraction

 

IBDEditorials.com

Economy: It's no wonder President Obama wants to direct everyone's attention to far-off Afghanistan these days. The economic news here at home is looking increasingly grim.

Just 28 days after Time magazine ran an April 2 cover story boasting that "in the past few weeks, signs of economic expansion have been everywhere" it warned that "the economy might be stalling."

The article pointed to "disappointing" news that Q1 GDP had climbed just 2.2% — below expectations — and job growth in March was 120,000, also a miss.

Now, two more troubling signs have emerged. The government reported on Wednesday that new factory orders fell 1.5% in March, the steepest drop since March 2009, when the country was still in recession.

Then ADP reported that private employment climbed just 119,000 in April — the smallest gain in seven months and also far below expectations. The April employment report comes out Friday, which economists think will show an unimpressive 160,000 job gain.

Seems that, once again, all the talk about "green shoots" and "turning the corner" and reaching "escape velocity" are just more false hopes.

Instead, we're starting to get another round of economic reports that contain "unexpectedly" bad news.

What's surprising, though, isn't that the economy's still struggling nearly three years after the recession ended; it's that anyone could have expected anything different.

Obama's economic policies have put a stranglehold on the private economy, turning what could have been, and should have been, a powerful recovery from a deep recession into a record-breaking slog.

Just think about what his policies have produced:

• Unemployment has been stuck above 8% for the longest stretch since the government monthly records began in 1948, and the pool of long-term unemployed is twice the size of the previous post-World War II peak.

• GDP growth hasn't exceeded 4% once in the 11 quarters since the recovery officially started in Q3 2009. By contrast, GDP growth averaged 6.1% during the comparable quarters in the Reagan recovery.

• Household incomes have fallen steadily for three years, to the point where median incomes are almost 10% below where they stood when Obama took office.

We could go on and on.

Indeed, the only thing Obama has managed to produce in abundance since taking office are excuses.

The GOP was able to mostly stop Obama from doing still more damage after it took control of the House. But Obama also refuses to take any of the steps needed to unleash the country's true economic potential.

Too bad Obama doesn't have any more foreign policy triumphs left to distract voters from that fact.