Jobs Summit will not produce jobs
By C. Edmund Wright
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It is easy to confidently predict that Barack Obama's job summit today will not do anything to create jobs. It's so easy to predict even a climatologist could do it.
The President will hold this "jobs summit" today at the White House -- where a lot of folks who have never created a single job will talk about everything except serious and adult ideas on how to realistically create jobs.
While the complete list of attendees was not available at press time, we do know that the summiteers will include labor union members, environmentalists and liberal economists from the world of academia. The historical entirety of these groups' job creation: zero.
Actually, most of what these particular groups agitate for are causes that generally destroy jobs -- or at least productivity -- so the real figure is no doubt a large negative number.
Meanwhile, members from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) have less chance of getting in to the White House today than the latest reality TV show contestants from some obscure BRAVO network offering. I mean really, why would you invite business groups to a jobs summit after all?
Yes, I know that representatives from Google and other selected high tech and Wall Street types will be at this summit, and they should be. However, large tech companies or investment banks who are closely linked to government and liberal causes should not be the sole representatives of free enterprise at a jobs summit. Especially when an entire nation is in the midst of a jobs recession, if not depression. Quite often, these big players are disconnected from the concerns of small business people such as contractors, shop owners and artisans at best -- or working at cross purposes at worst.
In other words, the real engine of job creation will not even have a seat at the "jobs summit" while many enemies of these people will have numerous seats.
Hopefully, the entire thing will end up being merely a cynical yet benign photo op so that the President can pretend to care about an entire economic system that he spent most of the last twenty years admitting to despising. With his agenda and the attendees known so far, if anything is accomplished it most certainly will be damaging to free markets. That is who these people are. Many have a track record of hurting business interests and are proud of it.
Conversely, the causes of the job situation have been painfully obvious for many months to the entrepreneurial class. Last December, when a devastating job loss of over 530 thousand was reported for November 2008, the handwriting was on the wall for all who dared to see. As written here at that time about our plans to unwind our business of 19 years
Watch the financial news and you will see continued job cuts each month. We are ot alone in our strategy. Far from it. Atlas has shrugged all over the country.
Apparently, I or any other business owner who started shutting down or scaling back the day after the election is overqualified to be a pundit on CNBC or Fox Business.
For some reason, the "Atlas Shrugged" dynamic continues to be missed by almost the entire political and financial pundit class. They continue to be shocked by the jobs numbers each month and continue to predict "the coming recovery" as if nothing has changed in our nation. There is an assumption that the economy will bounce back because -- well -- it always has. Small business owners everywhere wonder what country these people are talking about. We know when we are under attack. And by we, I mean the entire concept of free enterprise and entrepreneurship as well as current business owners.
As written last December:
Like many business owners, we are no longer willing to take all of the financial and legal risks and put up with all of the aggravation of owning and running a business. Not with the prospects of even higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon. Like others we know, we are getting out while the getting is, well, tolerable.
Remember, this was written some four thousand pages (of Obama Care legislation) ago and before the House had passed Cap and Trade legislation. This is not rocket science, nor was this unbelievably astute forecasting. People who have a dream to build a better life by taking risks and starting a business instinctively know when those principles are under attack.
The prediction of "higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon" sounds like we all had advance copies of both Cap and Tax and ObamaCare legislation in our possession a year ago. We did not. But we knew who Obama was and is and we know who Reid, Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, Waxman, Waters et al are.
It does not require a genius -- or even a climatologist -- to figure out what kind of business environment will result when the levers of government are all be controlled by folks who despise business. The passion for taking risks is cooling fast, and you don't need "value added" calculations to figure that one out.
And it is just as easy to predict that the White House jobs summit will do nothing to increase those passions either. Most of the people at this sham event either know nothing about how to promote business -- or they know how and have dedicated their life's work to doing the opposite. Again, this was painfully obvious right after the election:
Liberals seem to be clueless as to where "the money" comes from. They love to tax, regulate and redistribute wealth -- all the while decrying the very profit motive that created it -- something they do not understand.
The lay-offs of November 2008 - which will be part of George W. Bush's statistical record - fall in reality on the Obama election. Business owners understand that the election just gave a lot more power to who think like the Illinois liberal "President elect" who chose another Illinois liberal for his Chief of Staff (and) Michigan liberals for his economic team. Illinois and Michigan are broke!
These thoughts were made fun of across the liberal blogosphere 11 months ago, especially the part about the job losses being the result of Obama's election. Let's see, that would be about six million jobs ago.
As Scott Rasmussen showed on his website, the lay-off mentality did indeed start right as Obama's election became inevitable in October and it surged in November upon the election and has stayed high ever since. As predicted, the lay-offs have indeed continued, as most entrepreneurs knew they would.
And we are predicting that the White House jobs summit will do nothing to help any of this. Nothing from Washington will, unless a lot of congressional jobs are lost in 2010. And that is very, very easy indeed to predict.
12 Comments on "Jobs Summit will not produce jobs"
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We need Obama to crash and burn and fail miserably with ObamaCare and Crap 7 Tax is there is to be any hope that the jobs situation will improve.
