Happy days are here again:
Without mentioning the Labor Department’s May jobs report that showed the unemployment rate increasing from 9 percent to 9.1 percent, Obama said the economy has faced “headwinds” in recent months, including rising gas prices, the earthquake in Japan and instability in the Middle East.
“We’re going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a tough time with,” Obama said, in reference to the Jeep truck produced at the Toledo plant. The quip was met with boos from the otherwise supportive employees in the audience.
The ’01-’02 recession featured terrorists knocking a trillion-dollar hole in the heart of New York City, a massive tornado outbreak from Missouri to Maryland, major wildfires in the West so bad they blotted out the sun, a crippling drought leading to said wildfires, 50,000 home lost to Texas flooding, four million barrels of oil off the coast of Spain, and blizzards and power outages across the Northeast.
The eventual recovery featured a couple wars and a hurricane so fierce that it knocked out tons of our oil refining capacity, gave us $4 gasoline, and virtually wiped one of the world’s great cities off the map.
Nevertheless, before the Great Recession, average unemployment in the Naughts was slightly better than the average during the go-go Nineties.
Why are things so much worse now? Policy.
The President can tour all the crony-capitalist semi-nationalized auto plants he wants. But until he takes the regulatory boot off our throats and gets serious about fixing the budget mess he created, the jobs are not coming back.
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