President Obama Has Called For a Jobs Summit

President Obama has called for a jobs summit on December 3. He has invited economists, business owners, executives, labor, academia, non-profits, and government to the summit. It's invitation only. We don't know yet if the Chamber of Commerce is invited. He should invite the Chinese, and forget the rest.

In other words, after almost a year in office, he’s clueless.

He’s acting like a community organizer, getting everyone in a room together to resolve an issue.

America needs a President who will take action. Leaders must lead at a defining point in their Presidencies. The economy is the single most important issue to most Americans. Healthcare Reform, cap and trade, et al, do not create jobs. To paraphrase the old Ford slogan: “Employment is Job One,” or should be.

The President had 11 months to create jobs in this country. The Stimulus Bill was designed to keep employment under 8.6%. It was 8.1% when he assumed office. Unemployment is now 10.2% and rising. The Stimulus Bill is a costly failure.

The few jobs created have been in government. Most of the jobs saved have been in government.

A Detroit Free Press study showed that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to buy thousands of cars from the Detroit manufacturers did not save or create one job. Employment remained static. The newspaper also reported that “fewer than 700 awards had received money, and nearly half of them – 327 – had created one job or less, at a cost per job of $2.7 million.” $2.7 million per job!

The Boston Globe reviewed the claim of 12,374 jobs being created or saved in Massachusetts, and called it “wildly exaggerated.”

Why do we need a summit when the President has a distinguished economic team advising him?

First, we have Timothy Geithner, the tax cheat, as Secretary of Treasury. One of Secretary Geithner’s first acts was to rail against China, the same China who controls our deficit.

Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary in the last two years of the Clinton Administration, is the Director of the National Economic Council. Summers is a brilliant economist, one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of Harvard, and fired as President of Harvard. Harvard is still digging out from some of the decisions he made on the investment policies of the Harvard endowment.

Professor Christina Roemer is the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. As an expert on The Great Depression, she should know better than raising taxes during a recession, but she favors taxing “Cadillac” health plans, which will soon be almost all private health insurance plans. She voiced a scary statement last month in which she said that almost all the job growth that will come from the Stimulus Plan has already occurred.

Not one of the President’s advisors is proposing plans that will promote entrepreneurism and the growth of new jobs in a changing economy. Not one is talking about unleashing the genius of the American people. Instead, they have concentrated on old jobs, such as GM and Chrysler, and public sector union jobs. The Obama Administration is fighting “the old economic war.”

The Democrats in Congress are clueless about economics, but well versed in politics.

President Obama is presently in China, the fastest growing economic power in the world. The Chinese Communists, currently the best capitalists in the world, are trying to educate the community organizer on capitalism and economics. He should listen, before they dump the dollar.