Conservative Principles Now

While the nation suffers an unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent, Barack Obama spent last week talking about job creation with “civil rights” leaders — despite the fact that President Obama’s last job creation ideas haven’t even been properly analyzed, let alone proven to work.

The New York Times reports that President Obama met with Benjamin T. Jealous of the NAACP, Marc H. Morial of the National Urban League, and Reverend Al Sharpton on Wednesday to discuss “how the economic crisis was affecting all manner of poor people.” According to the article, the vast majority of the meeting was spent discussing “how to get Republican leaders to support Mr. Obama’s jobs proposals.”

This is mildly hilarious, considering that on February 9th, President Obama “gave his strongest signal yet that he is willing to compromise on key priorities,” according to Reuters’ report of his Tuesday solo news conference. Yes, on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he was willing to compromise with Republicans, and on Wednesday, he spent the day trying to figure out how to avoid compromise.

But the most disturbing part of the President’s meeting isn’t merely his lack of desire to truly compromise — the disturbing part is his arrogant assumption that his “jobs proposals” are ready for serious consideration. This is especially true considering the fact that, as the Heritage Foundation’s Dr. J.D. Foster pointed out, President Obama “explicitly” admitted the “failure [of] last year’s $862 billion stimulus program” during this year’s State of the Union address.

As the Heritage Foundation recently reported, there is still no proof that President Obama’s first stimulus bill worked. The study on last year’s stimulus package conducted by the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) “fails basic standards of economic analysis,” according to Heritage expert Dr. Karen Campbell. The Heritage report, titled “Did the Stimulus Create Jobs? White House Economic Report Is Unclear,” clarifies the many logical problems involved with the studies that “prove” that the President’s last proposals worked. As Dr. Campbell said, “the American people deserve to have a true economic analysis done.”

Indeed, President Obama hasn’t even ordered a true economic analysis to be done on the results of his last “proposal”—the expensive economic “stimulus” he argued would create jobs.

Before he bothers focusing on how to gain Republican support to ram through even more expensive legislation, the President might want to take a closer look at the results of his last jobs plan. It would be a travesty if he let his arrogance and the support of “civil rights” leaders take the place of legitimate economic analysis in the quest to find a solution to America’s current economic crisis.

Allie Winegar Duzett currently is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm

It’s a common refrain among progressives when criticizing free-market economic policy – “Conservatives are out of touch”. Conservatives don’t know how to create jobs, the progressive echo chamber booms. What we need to do is to spend our way out of the recession President Obama announces. The only people who think that government stimulus doesn’t work are at Conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation they go on.

In this, as in so many other things, progressive policy analysts are out of touch. In reality, hundreds of experts agree from across the political spectrum that deficit spending by government to stimulate the economy is ineffective as a cure to recessions and may actually cause many more economic problems.

An article in this week’s Barron’s magazine (January 18, 2010) is further evidence of widespread dissatisfaction with current economic policy in Washington. In the magazine’s bi-annual roundtable discussion with star investors, panelists appear to agree on one thing: the way Washington is responding to the economic crisis is contributing to the poor economy.

• Scott Black the Founder and president of Delphi Management in Boston says. ”Much of the job creation in the past 10 or 20 years has been in small businesses. It hasn’t been in big corporations that lay off 10,000 or 12,000 workers at a time. The Obama administration’s health-care proposals could add substantial surcharges for these businesses. Marginal tax rates are going way up, which has created a lot of uncertainty for business. That’s one reason you haven’t seen a lot of new job creation.”

• Mario Gabelli, the Chairman of Gamco Investors injects, “Small businesses have had trouble getting credit, and are uncertain about the added burdens of health-care reform.” The Barron’s host tells Gabelli that he acts as if the decline in jobs started with the introduction of the health-care bill. To which Gabelli says, “We are talking about why small businesses haven’t added workers in the past 12 months. Can I make money with that incremental employee?”

• Meryl Witmer, General Partner at Eagle Capital Partners interjects, “Yeah, what is it going to cost? In the past six months, whenever I have talked to a company I asked the chief executive or chief financial officer what it would take to bring jobs here. They said, ‘You know, the workforce isn’t that good, and there is so much regulation. I’m moving jobs out of the U.S.’ The government needs to cut back on regulation and taxes and open things up for business, or the jobs will continue to leave.”

• Scott Black later adds, “Nonresidential construction should have come back under the stimulus program, but it didn’t. The government budgeted $787 billion, including $40 billion for infrastructure, and yet very little of it has been spent. According to the trade associations more than $2 trillion of roads and bridges need to be built. The [Franklin D.] Roosevelt administration hit the ground running in 1933. It thought jobs were the best social policy. President Obama, instead of pursuing both health-care reform and cap-and-trade legislation, should have been putting American’s back to work.” The fact that infrastructure spending took too long to help mitigate the recession comes as no surprise to readers of this Heritage Foundation report. For more from the Barron’s panel of experts see this video.

Of course, the Roosevelt administration’s jobs programs didn’t work either. What Congress and the Obama administration should do to reduce unemployment is outlined nicely in a Heritage Foundation WebMemo here. They should make sure they are not throwing up barriers to hinder small businesses from hiring workers, or achieving success.