With unemployment stalled near 8 percent, it’s tempting to skewer President Obama over the embarrassing news that his Jobs Council hasn’t met for a solid year — 369 days, to be exact. And its future seems to be in limbo.
That’s just as well. Jobs councils don’t create jobs, businesses do. The most lethal jobs-killer today is the uncertainty coming out of the White House.
One-fifth of small-business owners expect to lay off workers this year, according to a recent index taken by Gallup. In fact, their overall outlook on hiring and firing is worse now than at any time since the depths of the recession.
For good reason.
For the past four years, President Obama has blamed everybody but himself for the stubbornly high unemployment that has accompanied his time in office.
So if you own a business, what would you see ahead? New taxes and regulations from ObamaCare; quarterly scares over the national debt ceiling; a military sequester that will slow down the defense industry, and an energy and environmental policy that is strangling the very industries that hold the most promise for new jobs, such as oil and gas exploration.
At times the Obama camp has even intimated that companies are holding back on hiring and spending as a way of getting back at the president. The truth is that businesses are afraid to commit to spend and hire because they don’t know what the president has in store for them.
Apparently, the president’s Jobs Council has the same uncertainty about its own future.