The Tin Eared President
Posted by Michael A. Kamperman on July 3, 2010
Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman has ended the unchallengeable mantra that we have avoided the risks of another Great Depression by claiming in his liberal leaning New York Times column that he believes we have already entered a new depression. He is an expert on global trade and on the Japanese depression of the last two decades. Yet our chronically tin eared President declared after a widely agreed upon disappointing unemployment report by both the right and the left that “make no mistake — we are headed in the right direction.” About the only other thing the left and the right agree upon is that make no mistake-we are NOT heading in the right direction. After that the road forks. President Obama has failed to heed the pleas of those begging for job creation policies and for jobs to become the number one issue on his agenda. Every few months he says jobs is now number one and then jobs quickly move to the back burner. Well the chickens are coming home to roost. Rather than hailing the drop in the unemployment rate from 9.7% to 9.5%, the media is highlighting that this only occurred because 652,000 people dropped out of the work force. The country has soured on smoke and mirrors and wants substance. President Obama praised Senator Robert Byrd as someone with “quintessential American quality, and that is a capacity to change, a capacity to learn, a capacity to listen, a capacity to be made more perfect.” Hopefully President Obama will gain the capacity to listen because we desperately need a change in economic policies.
The President’s tin ear resulted in his being summarily dismissed in his calls for more European stimulus spending and ended up with the G-20 agreeing to halve their budget deficits by 2013. The President has not championed extending stimulus spending at home for 2011 and he plans to raise taxes by letting both the stimulus tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts expire. What he has championed is a bi-partisan deficit cutting commission. Leaders need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. The reason the President is desperate for Europe to continue to spend is his whole plan to restore the U.S. economy depends on exports. Many of his economic advisers believe the U.S. doesn’t need a vibrant housing market, or vibrant consumers. They believe we need to be more like China and focus on manufacturing and exports. Hopefully the President ”listened and learned” that we can’t export our way to prosperity because there are no buyers out there. We need to recreate demand here. To build a home in America one needs to be physically in America.
By spending the last year with a tin ear the President has squandered any chance to push fiscal policies through the Congress that will make a meaningful economic difference. This failure to fight for jobs every day has consequences. For many they will lose their job or their business. For the President, he will lose the large majorities he enjoyed in Congress and he may lose any majority at all. After only one and a half years the President is heading towards long-term lame duck status. This prediction will become a certainty unless the President gains the “quintessential American quality, and that is a capacity to change, a capacity to learn, a capacity to listen, a capacity to be made more perfect.” The reason the deficit is so large is because we have so many people hurting. The President needs to call for a plan that leaves no unemployed person behind. He needs to say that every willing and able person in America that wants a job will get one, preferably from the private sector but also from the public sector if need be. He needs to say the way to cut our deficit is not through austerity, but through growth. He needs to say we need to look to ourselves to solve our problems and not to others. He needs to fund this Jobs for Every-One program with printed money and continue to print money to fund the program until the budget deficit reaches a sustainable target of less than 3%. Working people pay taxes, pay mortgages, and don’t collect unemployment benefits. Can you listen Mr. President? Can you learn Mr. President? Can you change?
