Democrat Zuckerman: Obama’s Economic Policies Have Failed

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Written By:
Bat One

Apr 24, 2012
10:57pm

Jon Lovitz isn’t the only liberal Democrat questioning Obama’s competence and his bid for a second term.

Mort Zuckerman is a liberal, a lifelong Democrat, a highly successful real estate investor and businessman worth an estimated $2.5 to $3 billion, and the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of U.S. News and World Report. He holds 2 undergraduate degrees from McGill University and advanced degrees from Wharton School of Business and Harvard Law School. Mr. Zuckerman appears regularly on MSNBC and PBS’ The Mclaughlin Group and while he was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama, the enthusiasm is gone and Mr. Zuckerman, who was also an associate professor at Harvard School of Business, has concluded that Obama’s policies have been largely failures. From US News:

For the 80 percent of Americans born after World War II, this is their Depression. They have 5.5 million fewer jobs than at the recession’s start in 2008, despite the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in our history. Employment has been below the pre-recession peak for over 50 months. It’s the longest time since the Great Depression that payrolls have not made a new high. The 120,000 new jobs for March make no dent (and adjusted for the peculiarity of warm weather, the number of real net jobs created was 76,000); we need at least 125,000 jobs each month just to provide for new entrants in a rising population.

Obama’s economic “stimulus” has created neither the 4% GDP growth nor the 900,000 plus private sector jobs per 1% of growth that Team Obama promised/ Despite all the spending and despite the Fed’s open-ended accommodation.

The problem now is not that people are being laid off by the millions. When an economy has reached bottom, as it did, it has already shed much of its labor, and layoffs slow. But the anemic recovery has not yielded job vacancies. Hiring today is at about 70 percent of the 2006 level. Given the increase in unemployed totals, job seekers are only about one third as likely to find work as in 2006…

Real, authentic job creation will not come from Washington. It has to come out of the energy and spirits of the private sector. Two thirds of our employment is concentrated in 6 million small and medium-size businesses. We are not going to create jobs until they are in a state of mind to do so. They are not yet, and in part that’s because of policy uncertainty that has depressed or confused them.

Mr. Zuckerman may be a liberal Democrat, but at least he understands how the private sector economy works and how jobs are created and by whom.

According to the Heritage Foundation, private sector hiring through June 2011 was 10 times slower following the passage of President Obama’s healthcare bill compared to the prior 16 months. Economists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago estimated in the fall of 2011 that policy uncertainty has cost more than 2 million jobs since early 2010. These estimates reflect the small business community’s reluctance to make new hires until employers know exactly what the law means in practice. The high level of temporary employment is a reflection of the same uncertainty. Businesses hedge their bets with short-term help.

There is no doubt that the next presidential term will start with a rate of unemployment that is far higher than what President Obama inherited when he took office. The programs that he has put in place have failed. The U.S. economic recovery is like a person who promises much and doesn’t deliver. There are not many months left for Obama to persuade the nation to measure his performance by a different mark.