Obama and unemployment

I have been going through Hugh Hewitt's book The Brief Against Obama. So far I have covered some of Obama's domestic policy failures – Obamacare, the failed stimulus, the huge spending and borrowing binge, the depressed housing market. This time I want to focus on Hewitt's discussion of unemployment in America.

Bill Clinton bequeathed a low unemployment rate to George W. Bush. After the attack on America, the unemployment rate rose to 6% by 2003. Bush worked to drop the rate under 5% in 2007, but the panic in the fall of 2008 brought the jobless rate sharply higher.

This panic left our economy in a recession, so there was negative growth and a large unemployment leap to over 9% in 2009. However, the standard business cycle brought a recovery back to the country in 2010, but there the good news ended.

The recovery stalled. By 2011 the U.S. economy fell to near zero growth in some quarters, and confidence among US consumers plunged. Simply put, there was no recovery summer in 2010. So when Obama tells us today that things are looking up after a terrible economy that he inherited in 2009, be aware this is not true. The American economy recovered, and then slumped again – all on President Obama's watch. His policies have reversed the road to recovery.

Hmmm . . .  Isn't this the President who promised to cut the jobless rate in half, as well as the deficit? Instead, for over 40 months the jobless rate remained over 8%. Something like 23 million people are without a job. Many have quit looking, or otherwise the jobless rate would be much higher. When Obama took over, the jobless rate was 7.3%, yet it is higher than that today. Fewer people are working than when he took control in early 2009.

Obviously the President needs to establish steps for long-term growth so that unemployment drops. What he needs to encourage business growth are permanent cuts in corporate and individual tax rates along with a massive deregulation of businesses that act as job creators. However these solutions are not likely to happen with Obama in office since they run against his deeply ingrained big government/big spending ideology and his distrust of business. Again, we have been given a reason to vote him out of office.