President Obama is a slow learner. For all his brainpower, he's saddled himself with three ideas about the economy and job creation that aren't working, either substantively or politically. And he appears to be too ideologically rigid or stubborn to consider the evidence and jettison the failed ideas.
Instead, he puts himself in embarrassing situations. On the day the Labor Department announced the unemployment rate was stuck at 10 percent and 85,000 jobs had been lost in December, Obama insisted he continues “to explore every avenue to accelerate the return to hiring.' So what did he propose? Tax credits totaling $2.3 billion to create “green jobs' and a second stimulus package of $150 billion (the first one, enacted 11 months ago, cost $787 billion). This is more of the same.
Cristina Romer, the chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, managed to out-embarrass the president. Last week, she sandwiched her highly improbable claim that the administration's stimulus had created or “saved' 1.5 million to 2 million jobs between an Associated Press finding that $20 billion in stimulus funds for roads and bridges had failed to reduce the unemployment rate anywhere and a Labor Department announcement of a rise in new claims for jobless benefits. |