In examining the case of the never declining unemployment rate, the New York Times features an article entitled “Mystery for the White House: Where Did the Jobs Go?” In this mystery, the Times searches for the answer as to why the Obama recession has not ended, and why the unemployment rate, which Obama promised would not exceed 8% if his plans were implemented, has remained stagnant, around 10% throughout his reign.
R. Glenn Hubbard (no mention if he is related to L. Ron Hubbard), the dean of Columbia’s Business School, said, “I don’t blame the administration for being off in these forecasts…[the cause of the rise in unemployment is] a mystery.” Christina Romer, the leader of the President’s economic council chimed in with “we’ve done a lot of things to look at possible explanations.” This is not the making of an Agatha Christie novel.
Unraveling the ‘mystery’, the Obama administration has found the antidote. According to the Times, Obama’s plan is to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. This move constitutes an enormous tax hike for small businesses, the largest employers in the United States. In addition, in order to get people back to work, Obama intends to extend welfare payments for the unemployed. What better incentive to find a job than the promise of more ‘free’ government money? Finally, the White House is in favor of a government-run fund to make loans to businesses. That makes sense – the government did work wonders in the housing market. Perhaps it can be as successful in the rest of the economy.
Some Democrats want to send the United States even farther down the socialist rat hole. According to Alan Blinder, a former Clinton hack, the only solution is… New-Deal style agencies. Blinder contends that the only way to battle unemployment is to put workers onto the public payroll. What could be better than rebuilding the Civilian Conservation Corps and other alphabet agencies? By Albert Einstein’s reasoning, you could say Democrats are insane.
As for the ‘mystery’ of unemployment, there’s no need to summon Sherlock Holmes. In this ‘whodunit’ there is an obvious perpetrator: the Democratic Party. Their big spending, government increasing policies have removed all confidence in the marketplace. It has come to the point where Las Vegas real estate mogul Steve Wynn said that he prefers to do business in China because the Communist Chinese government is more predictable than their American counterpart. In other words, Obama is following in FDR’s footsteps. With Roosevelt’s ever changing ‘experiments,’ there was never any certainty in the market. As a result, businesses did not expand, and thus, unemployment never went down. This only changed when the War broke out. After the United States entered the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration realized that they needed businesses to lead industrialization effort to equip the military. To do this, Roosevelt stopped his socialist experiments’ and got out of the way. Today, with bailouts, changing regulations that no one understands, a draconian tax code, enormous tax hikes only months away, non-stop anti-business rhetoric from Washington, and ever increasing government spending the climate in the capital is highly volatile. With such great uncertainty, businesses will not expand, new businesses will not be created, and Americans will remain unemployed. Mystery solved.