Quoth Megan McArdle:
What exactly is [President Obama] supposed to do to create all these jobs? Use the book proceeds to buy a Dairy Queen franchise?
I am not a fan of President Obama. I didn’t vote for him, I don’t intend to vote for his reelection, and I oppose most of his major policy proposals. But Megan’s right: blaming him for unemployment levels less than a year into his administration is unfair. Government policies can create a more favorable or less favorable long-term environment for economic growth, but the only jobs that the government can actually create are jobs on the government payroll, paid for with money taken out of the pockets of taxpayers (or borrowed against future tax revenue, or printed at the cost of increased inflation).
So critcize Obama for unwise or unjust policies, for adding trillions of dollars to the national debt, for his ill-advised health care reform proposals, for his unwillingness to let mismanged companies fail. But don’t blame him for failing to create jobs, because that is not within the President’s power.
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I respectfully disagree. He can create negative jobs, by promoting policies that business leaders believe will make hiring new people prohibitively expensive.
Has he done that? That’s a different argument, one where I think there’s room for debate. But the true statement that President Obama cannot create jobs does not itself disprove responsibility for lack of job creation.
It can’t be an enviable position for any President. Even if tomorrow he did all the right things economically, employers might not believe his sincerity, and no jobs would be created right away. It would take persistent right steps to win their confidence. And yet one really dumb move tomorrow could lose their confidence, and reduce employment considerably.
Like Martin, I also respectfully disagree.
Read my “Handy Graph” post below.
Obama added those trillions because he said it needed to be done to keep unemployment below 8%. He cannot spend that money and then say (or you say for him), “The President cannot create jobs!”
Well, then why did we give you trillions of dollars? What was the point? It didn’t create job nor did it save jobs.
I’m pretty sure when the President said, “Give me this money to keep unemployment below 8.2%.” he was implying he could either create or save those jobs. If not, what was he saying?
Obama did claim he could “create or save” jobs in the short term. He was wrong, and the stimulus was a collosal waste of money. But I blame him for wasting a collosal amount of money, not for failing to create jobs.
But it’s entirely possible that the colossal waste of money (along with other economically naive policies) contributed to job losses or retarded job growth.
Usually, a President doesn’t affect the economy very much. But in a recession, if he’s talking about or doing things that drive up costs for small business, and make it far less likely that a small business startup will do well, he’ll hinder small business creation and will prolong and deepen unemployment.
If you’re deciding to start a business, you go through a long “due diligence” period when you’re trying to find out why you _shouldn’t_ start up a business. A bunch of expensive regulations and a hostile political climate adds whole lot of reasons why you should simply keep your cash on the sidelines, or maybe think about starting your biz in “the old country” (as many small biz startups are done by immigrants).
A president can absolutely have a huge impact on the economy, by the policies he promotes and gets passed. BUT, according to my Economics 101 textbook, it takes 12-16 months for the full impact of any change in monetary or fiscal policy to be felt on the economy.
So it’s not Barry’s economy yet, regardless of what his numbskulls projected about the stimulus. Having said that, I have zero confidence his policies will result in any job growth.
BUT, according to my Economics 101 textbook, it takes 12-16 months for the full impact of any change in monetary or fiscal policy to be felt on the economy.
Perhaps. But perhaps 10.2% unemployment is only partial impact. Maybe the full impact will be a lot worse.
I know employers who are saying “We don’t know what’s going to happen, so we’d better not hire.” I know employers who are saying, “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we have to hire regardless.” I don’t personally know any employers who are saying, “Hey, these people have the right ideas. It’s time to start hiring so we can take advantage of the results.” They may be out there, but I don’t see them.
So I see the idea that you can’t blame President Obama for lack of job creation to be unsupported. That doesn’t make it false, but it doesn’t make it true. I see a lot of worry still in the economy, more than I see justified by the numbers. That tells me people aren’t looking at the numbers, but at what they fear the numbers are going to be. I don’t know if those fears are based on the President’s policies, or on media hysteria, or on something else entirely.
Eric, if you say a president cannot save or create jobs, and Obama explicitly claims the he will save or create jobs, I’m not sure if wrong is the right word to describe his lack of results. If I think I can win a checkers game, and I lose, I’m wrong. That’s a bit different from thinking I can jump off my roof and fly to the moon. There’s a certain amount of ignorance or stupidity, beyond just being wrong about something.
I suppose one could claim that Obama didn’t really think he could save or create jobs, and he just said it because it sounded good. But is crass opportunism and pretty much out and out lying somehow better than being pathetically stupid?
Beyond all that, if Obama is going to make the claim that he will create or save jobs, don’t we have every right to hold him accountable for his inability to produce results? Don’t we have even more of a right, if we were telling him all along that his plan couldn’t save or create jobs as he claimed? Can we at least get an “I told you so” out of this deal, since we did, pretty much, tell him so?
Surely we wouldn’t argue that when someone fulfills a promise, he should be praised for doing so, but when someone doesn’t fulfill a promise, he can’t be held accountable because, as it turns out, he just happened to be wrong?
I think Obama’s claim that the stimulus would create jobs is on par with claiming he could jump off the roof and fly to the moon. I don’t blame him for not actually flying to the moon, but it’s certainly fair to blame him for saying he could.
Megan McArdle was responding specifically to someone who was criticizing Obama from the left, for not trying to create more jobs by pushing a second stimulus (well, a third or fourth stimulus if you count Bush’s stimulus bills).
Is there anyone — anyone? — who believes that if the unemployment rate were falling, Obama would not take the credit?
Such a person would be a loon, for he has already taken the “credit” for it not being “a lot worse if we hadn’t acted, believe me.”
Something of a case of hoist on his own petard. When you make claims to “running the economy” as he unquestionably has, especially via Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, you’re going to get blamed for running it poorly when things don’t work out well. It’s a cruel world.
However, I don’t blame President Obama. I blame the Congress for sixty years of bad policies under Democratic Congresses and Republican Congresses that have dug us a hole from which it will be difficult to extricate ourselves.
Support for the January stimulus package was predicated on some unemployment numbers that would occur without the package. Actual numbers are higher than the previosly predicted worst-case. The stimulus package did not work as advertised, and in a free-market environment could be actionable as false advertising.
http://libertyworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/October-UI-rate-chart.gif
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