Obama hammered on jobs from the left

Interesting take here.

One recent example comes from a new report issued my old colleagues at the liberal-leaning New America Foundation called "Not Out of the Woods: A Report on the Jobless Recovery Underway." It amounts to a blistering, if largely unintentional, critique of the administration's policies, providing a sobering antidote to manufactured euphoria peddled by both presidential spin-meisters and some Wall Streeters.

The report baldly assets that the president's programs are simply not sufficient to make up for a "huge job creation deficit" that is getting worse by the day. It estimates the country needs to generate 125,000 or more new jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth--something few see happening for at least several years.

Even with little immediate hope for such employment gains, the report does cite government and private-sector projections of upward of 10% unemployment well into next year. More worrisome still, the authors assert that the administration's current program is unlikely to create a return to a "normal" level of joblessness--to between 4% and 5%--until after the president's first term.

...

Hindery is no conservative. He was an adviser to John Edwards and, more recently, to the president himself. Yet his prognosis is grimmer than the ones offered by most right-wingers. He calculates that the real unemployment rate in the country last month was not 9.3%, which is the figure that was reported, but rather closer to an alarming 16.8%. By that measure, more than 30 million people are effectively out of work. That's nearly one-fifth of the labor force.

What Obama did to GM and especially Chrysler, while essentially allowing the financial companies to get away scott free (well, except for Lehman) is a big part of this. Indiana has unemployment well above 10%, largely because Chrysler and its suppliers are shedding so many jobs.

The only way to grow out of this recession is to improve the returns to work and investment. Get rid of the top two or three income tax rates, get rid of the corporate tax, etc. etc. Forget the stimulus, it isn't working, it can't work.

We came roaring out of the '83 recession because of all the tax cuts. We can do it again.