It hasn’t been a good week in economic news. Earlier this week we learned that the GDP contracted. John Steele Gordon wrote at the time: “The GDP shrank in the last quarter of 2012, declining a small 0.1 percent. While that is minimal, it is the first negative quarter since the second quarter of 2009 and a sharp slowdown from the 3.1 percent growth in the third quarter.” Today he wrote about the disappointing jobs numbers, which showed low growth and a slightly higher unemployment rate.
It’s interesting that this week, in light of all of this economic doom and gloom, that the Obama administration has decided to layoff its long-defunct Jobs Council, which was set to expire this week. Don’t worry about these layoffs, however, as the Council was composed of business and labor leaders–they all have day jobs to fall back on. The Council hasn’t met for over a year and served more as a photo opportunity than an actual working group–while photos were quick to emerge from the meetings, recommendations, reports and accomplishments never quite made it out. One member of the Council, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini, didn’t exactly have much confidence in the president last year, as he publicly endorsed his Republican opponent Mitt Romney.
James Pethokoukis, a leading economics blogger for AEI, discussed the decision to close the Council yesterday, highlighting several charts that showcase why the mission to improve the employment picture is far from accomplished. As Pethokoukis shows, beyond the GDP and jobs numbers, there are a number of indicators that the economy is stagnating at best. What is inexplicable is why the Obama administration has decided to pivot from the precarious economic situation for millions of Americans to instead focus on immigration and gun control.
Do we need to point out that among Obama's base; the young the poor the working poor and minorities their unemployment is 2 or 3 TIMES the broad national average. And yet they cheer on Obama's Victory of Failure Tour. They clearly are working against their own interests.
This merely underlines what has really been obvious from the beginning of the Obama era: the President's campaign to "fundamentally transform" America is deeply ideological, and that a sensible economic policy would cut across his ambitions at too many points for comfort. This explains, for example, the economic zaniness of Obamacare. The damage it causes is, from Obama's point of view, but a small price to pay for a massive increase in the the size and power of government. Probably Obama assumes that the economy will recover on its own at some point. And if it doesn't, well, he can always blame Bush and the GOP.