Politics: The head of the Democratic National Committee says the administration has turned the economy around. So let us give discredit where discredit is due.
Joe Biden should sue DNC chief and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for copyright infringement based on her statement at a Politico breakfast. We thought the vice president had a monopoly on statements completely detached from reality.
"We own the economy," Schultz said. "We own the beginning of the turnaround, and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place."
That's right, Debbie, you guys own the economy, though you might explain President Obama's chuckle about those shovel-ready jobs not being as shovel-ready as he thought. Does your "pace of recovery" include an official rate of unemployment of 9.1% after a failed trillion-dollar stimulus was supposed to cap it at 8% and force it downward?
That official rate, based on a monthly survey of sample households, counts only people who reported looking for work in the past four weeks. It doesn't account for part-time workers who want to work more hours but can't, given the tight job market. And it doesn't include those who have given up trying to find work.
When the discouraged and underemployed are added to the mix, that figure is closer to 16.6%.
Our IBD/TIPP Poll consistently shows 20% of households have at least one member looking for full-time employment. This translates into 30 million people.
Actually, Schultz's statement is only slightly more delusional than the one Obama made recently to employees at a North Carolina company that manufactures LED lights, while plants making Thomas Edison's incandescent bulb are outlawed and forced to close to save the planet.
"We stabilized the economy, we prevented a financial meltdown, an economy that was shrinking is now growing," the president said.
He must have been talking about federal jobs, virtually our only growth sector.
A plane that has crashed into the ground cannot be said to have leveled off.
We note that Obama did not speak at the new Boeing plant in South Carolina that his National Labor Relations Board has placed under siege because Boeing wants to create jobs in a state where people aren't forced to join a union as a condition of employment. Jobs are good only if they are union jobs.
Picking winners and losers rather than letting the free market decide is just one of the administration policies that have killed jobs and economic growth. It supports "green" jobs while unleashing the Environmental Protection Agency to make war on coal.
The Energy and Interior departments block new sources of domestic energy production such as offshore oil and place onshore shale off-limits while they seek to protect three-inch lizards. This causes energy and the price of everything we make, buy or transport to "necessarily skyrocket," as the president once promised.
As the fact gatherers at the Republican National Committee point out in a video, Schultz is taking credit for more than 6 million foreclosures in an imploding housing market, 1 million lost construction jobs, 865,000 lost manufacturing jobs, three straight record-high deficits and $3.7 trillion added to the national debt.
Obama's stunning gaffe that ATM machines put bank tellers out of work shows that this former college professor, community organizer and absentee Illinois state senator with no business experience does not understand something called job-creating innovation. Nor does he understand how his administration stifles it through regulation, taxation and intervention in the free market.
As Schultz admits, President Obama broke the economy, and now his party owns it.
