You read that right. Even the NY Times has noticed that the administration’s high emphasis on jobs & unemployment had the the lifespan of a tsetse fly. One calendar week, to be exact — then back to spend, spend, spend — and, oh yeah, health care.
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Excerpted from NY Times:So Much for Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, March 5, 2010
The job market may be hitting bottom, but it seems likely to remain mired there.
And despite the insistence that their top three priorities are jobs, jobs, jobs, Congress and the Obama administration aren’t doing enough to create them.
With the latest monthly tally, 8.4 million jobs have been lost since the recession began in December 2007. Another 2.7 million jobs needed to absorb new workers were never created, leaving the economy bereft of 11.1 million jobs. [Ken’s note: not counting another 10 million or so who are underemployed.]
To keep up with a growing work force, filling the hole would require more than 400,000 new jobs a month for three years — wildly in excess of even the most optimistic projections.
Employers are unlikely to make new hires until they restore current workers to full time. In the private sector, just restoring hours cut during the recession will be like adding 2.8 million jobs, without a single hire.
Over the next several months, the economy will get a temporary job boost from the census, which will hire some one million temporary workers.
The danger is that with stopgap measures boosting the headline job numbers, Congress and the administration will avoid the heavy lifting that is required to clear away the wreckage of the recession.
Layoffs, while waning in the private sector, will shift to the public sector. [Ken’s translation: bloated government bureaucracies will finally be pared back.]
And as the states tighten, the private sector would be squeezed anew because lower state spending and higher state taxes would mean less consumer spending.
Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/opinion/06sat3.html?ref=todayspaper
The Homa Files 
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