Now that he is safely re-elected, Barack Obama does not have to pretend to care about the economy and jobs anymore. His jobs council, which met as a whole just four times in two years and not at all during the main of 2012, will disband this week unless Obama reauthorizes it.
Obama created the council via executive order in 2011, and touted it as a way he would work with America’s corporate leaders to craft strategies to create jobs. Among its few recommendations, the Jobs Council advocated reducing government regulations. All the while, the Obama EPA was pushing thousands of regulations that drove energy prices up. The president blocked and continues to block the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would create tens of thousands of jobs. Obama’s signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare, has been blamed by small business leaders for strangling their ability to hire new workers. Rather than rescind that law or rein in the EPA, Obama ramped up advertising for and access to the federal food stamp program. At the end of his first term, the rate of participation in the US labor force is at a historic low, and nearly half of Americans are now dependent on government assistance.
And he was re-elected.
More than 12 million Americans remain unemployed, with millions more underemployed.
Since his re-election, Obama has strongly signaled that his priorities are not to help the economy. He is pushing hard on gun control, and on “comprehensive” immigration reform. The pathway to citizenship that the president supports virtually guarantees that more illegal aliens will cross into the US, depressing wages and competing for scarce jobs here.
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