COMMENTARY | Just in time for the Labor Day holiday, the U.S. government issued its latest jobs report. The results are as depressing as they can be. The unemployment rate remains at 9.1 percent, but the takeaway number is the number of jobs created.
That number is a nice round one. The net number of jobs created in the month of August is zero, for the first time since 1945, according to The Associated Press. This news puts a bit of pressure on President Obama to perform well during his jobs speech before a joint session of Congress next Thursday. Therein lies the problem.
Obama has been trying to jump-start the economy using all of the traditional tools of liberal, Keynesian economics, spending $900 billion in stimulus money, to no apparent effect. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke has tried a number of rounds of quantitative easing, essentially printing money and buying government debt with it, also to no effect.
In other words, Obama has tried everything that is within his political comfort zone. There is literally nothing else he can do which is within that zone, except more of the same.
Of course, Obama could move away from his comfort zone and propose things that he has hitherto not only not contemplated but has actually attacked as being harmful for working families and unfair to the middle class. Former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has proposed a package that involves tax reform, trade deals, and energy production that has won praise in conservative circles. Obama could shock the world and his own liberal base by embracing something similar.
Of course, Obama could no more embrace what is in effect the Reagan approach to economic growth than an Iranian mullah could convert to Christianity. Such a change of position is beyond his level of comprehension.
The jobs speech is likely to be a mixture of more demands for stimulus and more attacks on Republicans for blocking those demands. Thus, what Obama has to say will be irrelevant, a waste of breath. Even worse, it will mean the current economic malaise will likely continue until January 2013, when presumably a new president will be in office to try a new approach at economic policy.
Source: Employers add no net jobs in Aug.; rate unchanged, Paul Wiseman and Christopher S. Rugaber, AP, Seprember 2, 2011