The president tries to backpedal as Republicans turn the tables and cast him as the one who’s out of touch with economic reality.
See stories by Michael A. Memoli of the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times on June 8 2012, Robert Sobel in the Orlando Liberal Examiner, Elise Foley and Luke Johnson in the Huffington Post, Joe Weisenthal in Business Insider, Fox News’ Real Clear Politics, David Nakamura in the Washington Post, Andrew Malcolm on Investors.com, and Paul Krugman via Luke John on the Huffington Post.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-news-conference-economy-20120608,0,3561976.story
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-private-jobs-20120609,0,3802255.story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/obama-private-sector-doing-fine_n_1581419.html?ref=politics
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-private-sector-and-the-public-sector-under-obama-2012-6?op=1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/paul-krugman-obama-doing-fine_n_1586378.html
In a rare rhetorical slip-up of his own on Friday during a press conference President Obama threatened to undermine his effort to win reelection. In a White House news conference focused on the threat the worsening Eurozone crisis poses to the U.S. economy, Obama said Congress needed to act on his jobs plan to boost hiring in state and local governments. “The private sector is doing just fine,” he argued.
“The truth of the matter is that … we’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone … The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government, which isn’t getting the support it needsfrom Washington.”
His larger point — that layoffs by state and local governments continued to be a weak spot as the private sector added jobs — is backed up by the data. The most recent jobs report found that while the economy overall added 69,000 jobs, the private sector alone added 82,000.
But presidential hopeful Mitt Romney had his own statistics: 23 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or have dropped out of the labor force; the economy growing at a meager 1.9 percent in the first quarter; median income dropping by 10 percent over the last four years; and record home foreclosures.
After saying President Barack Obama does not care about the private sector, Mitt Romney on Friday dismissed unemployment in the public sector, saying the country does not need more firemen, policemen or teachers.
“He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers,” Romney said at a press conference. “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Given that unemployment is over 8 percent, and Q2 GDP is tracking at less than 2 percent, President Obama saying that any part of the economy is “fine” looks wildly out of touch, and Republicans are lambasting him for it, as they should. What Obama should have directed his comments at is the widening inequality represented by the 1 percent capital ownership class reaping record profits yet paying less taxes, and the vast majority including small business owners who are undercapitalized and experiencing decreasing consumer demand, and the working and middle class people dependent on a job who are non- or under-capitalized or propertyless, who hurt will continue as they cannot through a job compete with the non-stopable third industrial revolution embodied in productive capital assets represented by machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. See the charts below.
Corporate profits after tax are historically parabolically high.
But are corporations investing?
Productive capital equipment and software investment at all-time highs.
Private sector employment is well off past historical highs.
Private sector job creation has steadily increased since the end of Obama’s first year, and there are more private sector jobs than there were before Obama took office.
