So lately we’ve heard a lot about unemployment figures and we’ve especially heard that they’re the President’s fault. That he has to do more to create jobs. That he has to eat lightening and crap rainbows. Wait…we haven’t heard that last one? Well it’s about as realistic as saying the President can singlehandedly stop companies from downsizing.
President Obama has done everything, and I mean EVERY-THING in his government arsenal to spur economic growth and create jobs. He has bailed out several businesses. He has done the Stimulus Package. He has done cash for clunkers. He has passed a healthcare reform bill that will free up some cash the private sector was paying in healthcare costs. And he has even kept the loathsome Bush tax cuts as the right wing assures us that they will create jobs (what are they waiting on…The Rapture?).
The bottom-line is that the President can’t really create jobs, no, not even black Jesus Barack Obama. He can create government jobs but the right wing–the same people railing against him now–wouldn’t free up the money for that. In fact, the Bush tax cuts–as I pointed out in an earlier piece–actually cost us jobs as we have to lay off government employees or cut their benefits in order to fund the tax cuts to companies that might not even be creating jobs in the US. Teachers get laid off, and McDonald’s creates a job for them that pays 1/5th of what they were making.
The PRIVATE sector has to get off their ass and create jobs. During the recession, they cut their workforce to the bone. They laid off people, and asked the people that were left to start doing two jobs while keeping the salary of one job. Then the CEO was rewarded for “cutting costs” (firing people) and pocketed a quarter of the savings into an annual bonus check. Problem is, they like that extra zero added to their yearly salary so much, they aren’t hiring back any of the jobs they fired, and they aren’t hiring new jobs for new college graduates. [Over twenty percent of America’s youth is unemployed and looking.]
So how can the President bring back all the jobs that went overseas or just went away? He can’t. Corporations have to do it and according to Republican philosophy of “private sector always knows best” it’s their domain anyway. Ironically, the same party that has always criticized Obama as a socialist who meddles too much in the affairs of business is now…asking him to meddle in the affairs of business, creating jobs they know he can’t. But we don’t have to fall for it. As voters we have to take the heat off the President of the United States and put it on the President of Bank of America.