Presidential Stand-Up Comedy: Okay, My New Plan to Create Jobs is to Throw Sand into the Private Sector's Transmission! Can I Get a Rimshot?

The President continued his war against the private sector today, announcing Phase 72 of his purposefully ineffective plan to "create jobs". Best I can tell, this phase involves carefully listening to small business owners' suggestions, discarding their ideas, and creating bizarre central planning tenets straight out of Nikita Khrushchev's Little Black Book.

• ...we’ll forgive payroll taxes for businesses that hire someone who’s been out of work for at least two months – a tax benefit that will apply to unemployed workers hired between last month and the end of this year... (what??)

• ...provide tax credits to over 4 million small businesses so they don’t have to choose between hiring workers and offering coverage... (eh, what????)

• ...we’ll reform municipal bonds to encourage job-creation by expanding investment in schools and clean energy projects... [Oomph, more government debt?]

• ...Finally,this jobs bill will maintain crucial investments in our roads and bridges as we head into the spring and summer months, when construction jobs are picking up... [because $840 billion in borrowed money isn't quite enough?]

Say, I've got an idea, Mr. President!

Stop throwing sand in the economy's transmission. Business owners are scared senseless, unable to act because of the many forthcoming fees, taxes, regulations, dictates, bureaucracies and mini-Politburos they'll be forced to deal with:

• 2,700 pages of new health care regulations, most of it mandated on businesses large and small

• New (and illegal) EPA regulations that control the deadly toxin CO2, despite the fact that global warming is a proven scam

• The expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which means if you earn over $30K a year, you'll be getting a nice, healthy cut in take-home pay

• And, thanks to the oil drilling shell game that the White House, the EPA and the Department of the Interior are playing, we'll get no new oil supplies for the next ten years -- but plenty of lawsuits by the flat Earth, no growth, enviro-Marxists -- as oil prices skyrocket

By the time businesses figure out how to cope with the avalanche of government intrusion, the economy will be in full Cloward-Piven meltdown mode.

Despite the media's incessant marketing that a recovery is imminent, there's no masking the fact that the real economy continues to bleed.

[In March] were over 158,000 bankruptcy filings in the personal sector in the U.S. (that’s 6,900 per day!) which was a 35% surge over February’s result and up 19% from last year’s elevated levels. This also shows the extent to which fewer people are attempting to save their homes. They realized that their mortgage payments are not affordable and their attitudes towards residential real estate as a viable retirement asset have been altered permanently as many now see their house as nothing more than a debt-laden ball and chain.

Not only did the headline unemployment rate not budge, at 9.7%, but the broader U6 measure actually rose for the second month in a row, to 16.9% (the highest it ever reached in the prior recession/jobless recovery in 2003 was 10.4%, just to show what we are up against this time around). So long as we have this much spare capacity in the labour market — with nearly one in every six unemployed Americans vying for every job opening — deflation pressures can be expected to build...

...the ranks of the unemployed who have been looking for work for at least six months soared 414k in March, or nearly 7%, to 6.5 million. This is double from 3.2 million this time last year when equity investors believed the world was coming to an end. Of course, the world did not end for the equity investor who was bailed out by massive government incursion, but the world for the long-term unemployed has tragically become even darker... Long-term unemployment as a share of the total jobless pool now stands at a record 44% versus 26% and the last time the official unemployment rate was as high as is today was back in the early 1980s. There are three main reasons for this:

* The first has to do with the lack of mobility in a distressed national real estate market.
* The second reflects the permanent job loss that permeated this recession because the jobs in bubble sectors like construction and finance are simply not going to be coming back any time soon.
* Thirdly, large states such as California, Florida, Illinois and New York could always be relied upon in the past to be significant drivers of employment opportunities but they are just too cash-strapped today to play any role at all.

Finally, there are many factors related to the tragedy of rising long-term unemployment that lead us to the conclusion that deflation will prove inevitable, because the longer it takes to find a job — the average duration of unemployment just hit a fresh all-time high of 31.2 weeks from 29.7 in February — the more likely it is that these people will be rehired at a lower wage than they were receiving before they were let go from their previous job.

Welcome to the Obamaconomy! Welcome to the Democrat recovery!

Thanks to the Democrats, the country is heading for a deficit disaster with absolutely no cushion whatsoever.

Consider: we have no spending buffer whatsoever for a military emergency. And that's by design.

But don't worry, peasants. It's not like the suicidal terrorists running Iran are building nukes or anything.