CHESSNOID

Our country is undergoing many changes right now.   I don’t like Bush or Obama’s actions to date because it has not helped the majority of Americans.  At first I felt like an anti Bush blog and now I am an anti Obama blog.  All for good reason.

I do notice that I am blogging more about my disapproval about Obama more than Bush.  It is relative to how much he promised and undelivered, as well as the poor decisions of his relentless wasteful spending.  Obama and his administration is hurting our economy more than Bush did.  He is compounding to the misery of the the American economy with bailouts and stimulus packages that simply didn’t work. Now he wants to spend a trillion dollars on healthcare but it doesn’t fix the system.

Even with all these distractions, he is missing the point.  I read this Op-Ed by Bob Herbert and think he makes some good points.

New York Times:

A massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — which would put large numbers of people to work establishing the essential industrial platform for a truly 21st-century American economy — has not seriously been considered. Large-scale public-works programs that would reach deep into the inner cities and out to hard-pressed suburban and rural areas have been dismissed as the residue of an ancient, unsophisticated era.

We seem to be waiting for some mythical rebound to come rolling in, magically equipped with robust job creation, a long-term bull market and paradise regained for consumers.

It ain’t happening.

While the data mavens were talking about green shoots in September, employers in the real world were letting another 263,000 of their workers go, bringing the jobless rate to 9.8 percent, the highest in more than a quarter of a century. It would have been higher still but 571,000 people dropped out of the labor market. They’re jobless but not counted as unemployed. The number of people officially unemployed — 15.1 million — is, as The Wall Street Journal noted, greater than the population of 46 of the 50 states.

The Obama administration seems hamstrung by the unemployment crisis. No big ideas have emerged. No dramatically creative initiatives. While devoting enormous amounts of energy to health care, and trying now to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the president has not even conveyed the sense of urgency that the crisis in employment warrants.

If that does not change, these staggering levels of joblessness have the potential to cripple not just the well-being of millions of American families, but any real prospects for sustained economic recovery and the political prospects of the president as well. An unemployed electorate is an unhappy electorate.

…

When asked how “average working people” or “you and your family” had benefited, very small percentages, in a range of 10 percent to 13 percent, said they had fared well.