Obama Sees His Shadow: 4 More Years of Gloom

President Obama emerged from the White House this morning and after sniffing the air and pawing at the ground, he gave us the bad news: he definitely sees his shadow which means 4 more years of economic gloom and doom:

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Despite these “big” gains, unemployment climbed to 7.9% — higher than when Obama took office amid the “worst recession since the Great Depression.”

That 7.9% is deceptively low: It fails to account for the exodus of 8.5 million from the labor force under Obama.

As a result, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ broader measure of unemployment remains stuck at a depressing 14.4% — also higher than when Obama took office.

In addition, there are still 4.7 million long-term unemployed — nearly twice as many as when Obama was first sworn in. And at 35 weeks, the average length of unemployment is far higher than any time between World War II and the Obama era.

But the worst news of all is that we remain 3.2 million jobs shy of the previous employment peak of five years ago. To get a sense of how dismal this is, consider this:

It took an average of just 24 months to regain all the jobs lost in the previous nine recessions. But at the current Obama job-creation pace, it will take about 80 months to regain those lost jobs.

And this doesn’t factor in the growth in the number of job seekers over the past five years, which makes the real jobs gap more like 9 million.

This isn’t because the economic hole was so deep, as Obama endlessly insists, but because his policies have produced the slowest recovery in modern times. If Obama’s recovery had merely been average, there’d be 7.5 million more with jobs today.

At least Obama’s top economic adviser, Alan Krueger, had some sound advice. “Today’s report is a reminder of the importance of the need,” he wrote, “to avoid self-inflicted wounds to the economy.” Too bad Obama didn’t heed that before he imposed ObamaCare, unleashed his army of regulators, added more than $1 trillion in new taxes, and piled on $5 trillion in added debt.

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It was hoped that the annual February 2 event at the White House — watched closely by economists and low-born alike — might give us all hope for an early end to our misery. But, alas, our Rodent-in-Chief couldn’t make the magic work. After cleaning himself fastidiously, the president did an about face and marched back into the White House.

In other news, Punxutawney Phil failed to see his shadow, thus guaranteeing an early spring. Just one February 2, wouldn’t it possible for Phil to change places with Obama? He couldn’t do much worse.

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