Now that there’s no reason for Barack Obama to pretend he gives a fig about “job creation” or economic growth, it’s time to re-purpose some of that wasted office space. The Associated Press reports on the sad end to the mighty Presidential Council on Jobs and Competitiveness:
President Barack Obama will let his jobs council expire this week without renewing its charter, winding down one source of input from the business community even as unemployment remains stubbornly high.
When Obama in January 2011 formed his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, unemployment was hovering above 9 percent. Two years president later, more than 12 million people in the U.S. are out of work. The unemployment rate has improved to 7.8 percent, but both parties agree that’s still too high.
A provision in Obama’s executive order establishing the council says it sunsets on Thursday. A White House official said the president does not plan to extend it.
The unemployment rate has not “improved to 7.8 percent.” It’s almost exactly the same as it was when Obama took office. The only difference is that the workforce is vastly smaller. If Obama had retained all of George Bush’s workforce, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent.
So even though the White House was babbling about how very, very important its Jobs Council remained just a couple of weeks ago, when people starting noticing that the Council hadn’t met in over a year, it turns out Obama’s just going to let it fade away. What happened to all the “listening and action events” and “private conference calls” where the Council would “hear reports and interact with senior Obama Administration officials?”
It looks like there’s no point in having a “Presidential Council on Jobs and Competitiveness” in the Obama New Normal, where the President has vowed to make America as uncompetitive as possible (gotta stop that “climate change,” don’t you know!), the stagnant labor market is about to get rocked with millions of formerly illegal aliens, the economy is actually contracting, and the only thing people “compete” over is government handouts… where, at least, the competition can become quite spirited.
