Mitt Romney picked up on something President Barack Obama said this morning and he’s been running with it — as he should. That’s because the president’s contention that the private sector is keeping up its end of the job-creation bargain bears little resemblance to what the vast majority of Americans are feeling economically.
During a Friday morning press conference, the president tried to take last month’s awful job numbers and spin them to make them look a bit better by blaming the lack of real movement in the economy on Congressional inertia. Just 69,000 jobs were added to the American economy in May, about 82,000 in the private sector with a lost of about 13,000 in the public sector. So, yes, public sector cuts have been a huge drag on our economy.
But 82,000 jobs is not exactly the “solid pace” the president praised. Romney is right to criticize the president on this, though he is offering the wrong prescription for our ailing economy. Tax cuts and cuts in government spending are only going to drive the U.S. economy off a cliff, where it will fall into the same kind of contraction that Great Britain is currently experiencing.
What we need to see is a more robust stimulus plan — more robust than anything the president has envisioned at any point during his presidency. The fact is that many economists in early 2009 were critical of the president’s stimulus, saying it was only about half as large as it should have been and too focused on tax cuts rather than on public works projects, aid to states and municipalities and a massive expansion of the unemployment insurance program. Each of those efforts would created immediate momentum in the economy by a) putting construction workers to work building roads and affordable housing, b) keeping people in the public sector employed, and c) putting money in average people’s pockets, money they then would spend.
Instead, the president wasted the opportunity by offering up a weak plan that was made weaker by Congressional horse-trading.
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