Jobs not created or saved: Bankrupt Solyndra is the poster child for the stimulus’ failure — but Obama also can’t point to any green-jobs success. (AP)
People who know David Axelrod say he’s in a state of panic, and it’s only partly over President Obama’s dismal debate performance against Mitt Romney last week. The bigger worry for the president’s top political guru is the economy, and Obama’s utter inability to spin a positive tale about it.
You saw the same concern in the cheering on the left over last week’s unemployment number — finally dipping below 8 percent for the first time in almost four years. The problem is, people vote on the evidence of what they see around them, not on numbers from Washington — and the federal jobs figures are always a weak reflection of reality.
Worse, for Obama and the nation, better indicators of the economy’s health suggest things are headed down, not up. In other words, nearly four years of Obamanomics is pushing us back into the ditch.
First off, the jobless stats: The fact is, the government doesn’t have data good enough to authoritatively tell us how many people were looking for work last month; these numbers are always revised in later reports.
Anyway, they don’t count folks who’ve given up looking for work — and the broader measure that does (known as the long-term “U-6” unemployment rate) is still stuck around 15 percent.
More important, some other fairly reliable statistics are ominous. One is the rate of growth in corporate profits, where a building consensus is that earnings from major companies are heading back to levels not seen since 2009, when the country was just coming out of the Great Recession.
A recent report from Factset, a well-regarded company that tracks corporate earnings, estimates that the earnings growth rate for the third quarter is a negative 2.7 percent. If so, that would put an end to 11 straight quarters of earnings growth for major corporations.
Again, it’s just an estimate (Alcoa came out yesterday with better-than-expected earnings), but earnings growth is one of the best indicators of where the economy’s headed, so if the Factset number holds up, the country’s in great danger of heading back into recession — an Obama double-dip.
Other reason for gloom includes the Business Roundtable’s survey of top CEOs, an index that looks at sales, capital spending and hiring expectations — all the things that contribute to a vibrant economy: That also fell in the third quarter, and also back to 2009 levels.
Obama, meanwhile, will tell you that we have achieved much in his first four years: He inherited the worst recession in a generation and at least he stopped the job losses; we’ve even got some economic growth.
The problem is, as Romney noted in the debate, this year’s growth is slower than last year’s — and last year was worse than the year before.
That’s just not what we should see coming out of a recession — especially a bad one. Historically, a bad hit is always followed by a big bounce.
The fear in the business community is that what little bounce we have had is mostly the work of Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke, who’s taken the unprecedented step of printing money not once but three times to prevent the economy from going negative again.
Obama talks about needing another term to finish the job, but look at how he started it: with his $800-billion stimulus, which was supposed to bring unemployment down to around 5 percent by now. Forget about the hundreds of billions that went to keep state and local government payrolls lush, even as the private sector was shrinking; look at his No. 1 big idea — green jobs.
Or try looking for them. It’s not just the bankrupt failures like Solyndra — it’s the lack of any success stories. If any of Obama’s green-jobs initiatives had paid off by now, you can be certain you’d be hearing about it.
And after the stimulus, all the president gave the economy was ObamaCare — something every business leader I speak to (even those who support the president) believes is the largest threat to economic growth this country has seen in a generation.
Yet “finishing the job” seems to mean that a second Obama term would unleash more of the same stuff we got in four years for another four — which should have not just the business community, but the whole nation, feeling very grim indeed.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.