OPINION:
Christmastime is the season of hope, optimism and goodwill, and there are good reasons for Americans to believe we will emerge eventually from the Great Recession stronger and more prosperous than ever.
We are a resilient, hardworking and persistent people who have endured many hard times over the course of our history, but we’ve always overcome them and climbed up to higher ground. I have no doubt we’ll do that again in the dismal economic circumstances that have engulfed our country over the past three years.
Two years into the Obama presidency, after the expenditure of trillions of tax dollars for “stimulus” spending that has driven our country deeper into debt, those problems are still with us.
The White House has maintained that we are moving in the right direction, that the recession is over, the economy is growing and we are in recovery. But the recovery remains tepid by every measurement, and for many millions of Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, in foreclosure or just struggling to make ends meet, it still feels like a recession.
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve Board held its final meeting of the year and pronounced the Obama recovery “disappointingly slow.” Indeed, it is too slow to make a dent in the nearly 10 percent jobless rate. The government released economic numbers last week that reinforced the Fed’s characterization of the troubled health of the Obama economy.
It grew at a painfully anemic 2.6 percent annual rate in the July-through-September third quarter, the Commerce Department said Wednesday in a revised estimate that was little changed from the 2.5 percent reported a month ago.
Forecasters previously were predicting the economy would grow by closer to 3 percent, but the reality is that the growth rate remained weak and there will be little improvement in the national jobless rate.
Forecasters also predicted that the monthly employment rate would jump by nearly 200,000 jobs in November. In fact, the private sector produced just 39,000 jobs. Discounting the number of jobs created in health and social-service sectors, the private sector created virtually no new jobs last month.
The third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) was up slightly from the feeble 1.7 percent growth rate in the April-to-June quarter, but that was only further evidence of the economy’s shallow growth under Mr. Obama’s impotent spending policies. Still, the compliant press was trying to put the best spin on the dismal numbers, even describing the 2.6 percent GDP rate as growing at “a moderate pace” while the Fed sees it as “disappointingly slow.”
Many economists say the economy will need to grow by 4 percent to 5 percent to bring unemployment down by 1 percent and that kind of growth isn’t in the cards for the remaining two years in Mr. Obama’s term under his anti-growth policies.
The Associated Press reports that economic growth is expected to come in at a “3.5 percent pace or better” in the fourth quarter on the basis of higher retail sales, but “job insecurity remains a problem.” A problem? The underemployment rate, which has hit 17 percent, is a crisis.
The tax-cut extension package Congress passed, extending the Bush tax reductions on incomes, capital gains and business write-offs for two more years, will help. So will the one-year, 2 percent payroll tax cut for workers. But these remain temporary, creating the same uncertainty that kept businesses from making long-term investments in the past two years.
It will be up to the new Congress to build upon this stopgap tax bill with broader, permanent tax-cut incentives for entrepreneurial investment that can create new businesses and jobs.
Mr. Obama did a lot of bragging Wednesday, even for him, about the thousands of pages of new laws the lame-duck Democrats passed in recent weeks. But he had little to say about the poor state of the economy.
Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist.
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