RUSH: Ezra Klein in the Washington Post. His blog is called Wonkbook. “Something odd is happening in the economy. Jobs are coming back, and relatively quickly. But growth is lagging. Or, at the least, we think it is. Virtually every estimate of GDP growth for the first quarter of 2012 is below two percent — that’s a third lower than it was in the fourth quarter of 2011, when payroll growth was lower … That’s not normal… Typically, payrolls and the economy grow [at the same time]. When that doesn’t happen, it’s usually because the economy is growing and jobs are stuck. That’s the situation the term ‘jobless recovery,’ [means] … But we don’t even have a term for the opposite of a jobless recovery.” We have a “job-full recovery” but no growth?
And then Mr. Klein says: Well, maybe “the preliminary GDP data is wrong,” we hope, we hope! Gee, maybe, maybe, maybe the government’s data isn’t right. (chuckles) Oh, God, they’re so hoping, folks! They’re so hoping that the GDP numbers are wrong, that there really is growth to go along with all of these new jobs. There’s a piece, I’ve got it here in the stack by guy named Joel W. at the Business Insider. It discusses how odd the Obama polling numbers are. These numbers found that while Obama’s approval was sinking over the economy, people were beginning to think the economy was getting better. Now Mr. Klein comes out here with the same meme on the economy.
Something’s odd. Two things are not going together here: The numbers and how the Drive-Bys want ’em to look. On the one hand the Drive-Bys are telling us there’s great growth in employment, but the economy’s not growing, and we need a new word for that. ‘Cause we already have “jobless recovery,” which, by the way, when they advance that, do you realize how ridiculous that was? At the time they tried to tell us two years ago after the stimulus, “Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be a jobless recovery,” that was their excuse for: There ain’t gonna be new jobs ’cause of the stimulus bill. They knew, we knew. They fooled you and everybody into believing that the stimulus was to create jobs.
They knew it wasn’t gonna create jobs. It was to shore up already existing union jobs, primarily in the public sector. So they told us, “It’s gonna be a jobless recovery.” We were all scratched our heads. “How can that be? How can you have a recovery when there aren’t any jobs? Isn’t that the essence of a recovery is people working? New people, new jobs, i.e., growth!” Now, what we’ve got, they claim we have all these new jobs, but no growth. The answer is there aren’t any new jobs. We’re still at 370,000 applications for unemployment insurance every week. We still have unemployment at 8.3%. We’ve got two million fewer jobs today than when Obama took office! There is no job growth, and that’s the answer Mr. Klein to your confusion.
There isn’t any job growth, and there isn’t any economic growth. And how can there be any economic growth with the policies of this administration? They’ve got drilling moratoriums for oil. They’re shutting down the Keystone pipeline, not even allowing it to be built. That’s tens of thousands jobs there. There are two million few years jobs than when Obama took office. It’s quite simple. James Pethokoukis, our buddy at the American Enterprise Institute: “The Entire Obama Presidency, in One Anecdote.” He writes, “One of my favorite moments from the new book: The Escape Artists: How ObamaÂ’s Team Fumbled the Recovery:
“‘Energy was a particular obsession of the president-electÂ’s, and therefore a particular source of frustration. Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers,'” and, of course, there weren’t any!” And the book says Obama said, “I donÂ’t get it. We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” This book claims that Obama sends his economic team out every week and says: Go get me the new numbers on clean energy in that sector.
She comes back, there aren’t any, and he doesn’t understand it.
Well, we’re making all these investments!
Sir, have you ever heard of Solyndra? They’re all going out of business. They’re all going bankrupt. There is no business there!
Folks, until you come up with an alternative fuel that will make a Joe Boeing 747 fly, you’re not talking reality. There’s not a wind farm, there’s not a solar panel, there’s not a $50 light bulb — there is nothing — that will put a 747 in the sky other than oil. Refined to jet fuel, kerosene. Nothing else will do it. Not even gasoline, by the way. So all this is academic. Until you can give me a fuel that’s gonna power giant cargo ships and tankers across the seas, you’re whistling Dixie. There isn’t a windmill, there isn’t a wind farm, there’s not a solar panel that’ll get a ship any appreciable carrying any appreciable cargo a tenth of a mile. Until you come up with something that will get a 747 or a DC-9, any jet in the air, you’re whistling Dixie.
Okay, so, Obama doesn’t get it, the book says, The Escape Artists: How ObamaÂ’s Team Fumbled the Recovery. Obama said, “I donÂ’t get it. We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?” Now, Pethokoukis writes, “Now letÂ’s fast forward to this past September: ‘A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show. The program — designed to jump-start the nationÂ’s clean technology industry by giving energy companies access to low-cost, government-backed loans — has directly created 3,545 new, permanent jobs after giving out almost half the allocated amount, according to Energy Department tallies.'”
So after $19 billion, 3,500 jobs in the energy sector have been created. “So where are the new jobs coming from, at least the good-paying ones?” Are you ready? Folks, are you sitting down? “From the industry Obama wants to replace as much as possible with ‘clean’ energy: oil and gas. A new report from the World Economic Forum,” Davos, where all the libs go to worship. The World Economic Forum. It is the liberal economic Mecca. Every February. The World Economic Forum “estimates the sectors ‘added approximately 150,000 jobs in 2011, 9% of all jobs created in the United States that year.'”
An industry Obama is trying to shut down accounted for 9% of all jobs Obama created, and not a one of those 150,000, is from any stimulus. Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that we are in the midst of a full-blown disaster. We’re in the midst of a full-blown, incompetent, ill-informed, mal-educated administration that has created an utter disaster. We’re living right in the middle of it: A disaster created by an arrogant ignorance by all in the Obama regime. Now, these numbers: 150,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector, while Obama’s trying to shut it down or while Obama’s trying to gin up all these jobs in the green sector? Green: 3500 jobs. Oil and gas: 150,000 jobs. “Those numbers are even more impressive once you realize that some 40% of all new jobs are being added in low-pay sectors such as retailing and leisure. So nearly 20% of new ‘good jobs’ are in oil and gas,” and now I want you to think about the Keystone pipeline and then think about all the lost jobs there due to Obama’s moratorium on drilling in the Gulf.
We elected a disaster, and we are living in the middle of one.
Manmade, pure, unadulterated disaster by the name of “Baraka Obama.”
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, this book that I referenced, “Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery,” is written by a big lib. The guy’s name is Noam Schieber, and he was a senior editor at the New Republic. He writes about politics and the Obama regime’s economic policies. He’s written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine. He’s a lib writing of the utter incompetence of Obama! (Obama impression) “What do you mean there aren’t any green jobs? After all this investment? After all this investment infrastructure, where are the jobs?” Picture this. And I think it’s pretty accurate. We’ve got a man-child in the White House who orders dollars to be spent on a sector, green energy, and that’s it!
That’s the magic. There’s gonna be green jobs. It’s just gonna happen. He doesn’t see Solyndra go bankrupt, or does he not care as long as he gets some of the money back in the form of a campaign contribution? And all the other Solyndras that have gone bankrupt and filed for bankruptcy. All these solar companies, down the hatch. Wind companies, down the hatch. And he’s sitting there in the White House, by a lib’s own mission, befuddled that his ordering dollars spent on green energy hasn’t led to an economic recovery! Command economies do not work. What a shock. Command-and-control economies like Cuba, like the Soviet Union, you name it, they don’t work. They never have.