He Doesn’t Get It Part 2

Before President Obama took off on a tour of the middle east, he appeared on Sixty Minutes on Sunday.  I couldn’t hear the interview between the president and Steve Kroft, but I was reading the subtitles during the interview.  Kroft, to his credit, asked tough questions.  Obama, to his credit, answered truthfully.

That’s where the problems began for the president.

He proved, once again, that he doesn’t get it.  Kroft asked him about the jobless problem in America.  Why aren’t corporations hiring?  Why aren’t banks loaning?  What can you do to get this trend turned around? 

Obama replied, basically, by saying that he had met with CEO’s of these companies, and that the meetings were contentious at times.  He didn’t give specific ideas to get companies going again, but that he would offer tax incentives to small businesses to get them hiring, that the tax incentives of the past two years will start working.  He’s wrong. 

The reason that companies aren’t hiring right now is that they don’t have the revenue to support growth.  In short, they are looking to cut costs to make their profits grow, not hire more people to make more widgets.  The sale of their widgets is down, you see, because people are keeping what money they have, so companies don’t need to hire more people.  Obama doesn’t get this.  He doesn’t get that if these companies didn’t have to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to make sure that they are in compliance with local and federal regulations and that they are accounting correctly, they might be able to grow their businesses.  He doesn’t get that the reduced sales is the cause of a downturn in hiring.  He doesn’t understand that the uncertainty of the tax laws make businesses wary of making moves in their business because they don’t know how much of their revenue they will have confiscated by the government.   Businesses these days spend a lot of time and money doing forecasts and predictions months and years ahead of time to be able to plan their business activities.  Taxes are big part of that.  Obama doesn’t get it.

Kroft asked the president specifically about this, saying that the tax laws make businesses reluctant to spend.  Obama basically blew this off, again employing the “millionaires and billionaires” phrase in his response.  More class warfare.  Cool.

This president doesn’t seem to understand that government cannot create real growth in the economy.  Sure, government spending may be able to artificially make the economy seem healthier than it is, but once that spending stops, the economy slows again.  Government also cannot provide jobs, nor can it make the private sector create new jobs.  It can implement policies that make the private sector want to expand their business, but the decisions about businesses reside with the people who own and operate them.  The owners of the businesses. 

Temporary tax relief only makes people plan when they will pull out of the economy.  But, they will pull out.  Real tax relief will give people and businesses confidence that they will keep more of their money, and therefore spur them to invest and grow their businesses.  But President Obama doesn’t get this.  It’s okay to run the deficit up spending money of BS projects, but it’s not okay to temporarily increase the deficit to provide long-term deficit reduction.  What a boob. 

President Obama clearly didn’t get his economic education on planet earth.  I guess we could expect this from a man who has never worked in the private sector and has always gotten his job from poor people, except the Harvard thing.  He has never had to be responsible for revenue and spending, profit and loss, production and sales. 

Until now.

He also said in an interview last week that the election wasn’t a referendum on his policies, but that he had done a poor job explaining what he was doing. 

Again, he doesn’t get it.  It’s exactly the opposite.  People  understand EXACTLY what he’s trying to do.  And they don’t like it.  He couldn’t phrase “The government is going to drive the private healthcare providers out of business so that the only place people can come for coverage is the government” in a way to make most people with a working set of neurons in their brain buy the idea that his healthcare bill, written by a socialist group called the Freedom Alliance, is a good idea.  People understand Obama. 

He doesn’t understand people. 

I thought it was kind of cool that he took credit for the 150,000 or so jobs added by the private sector last month, but won’t comment on the 450,000 new jobless claims in the same time period.  He has said that over 2 million jobs have been added since he took office.  He hasn’t said anything about the 7 million or so jobs lost in the same time period.  Sounds to me like he’s 5 million in the hole.  I guess you need a business degree to figure that one out. 

I have some advice for the president.  Repeal Obamacare.  Repeal the financial reform bill.  not only should you extend the Bush tax cuts, you should employ more tax cuts.  You should do away with the income tax, medicare tax, and social security tax and replace them with the fair tax.  Do these things, and the economy will recover, and we’ll actually be able to repay the red Chinese. 

And I don’t have a PhD in business.  Just a group of neurons firing.  On all cylinders. 

Our president doesn’t.   He just doesn’t get it.