'Laser' Focus On Jobs?

President Obama promised to have a "laser focus" on jobs?  Well, here comes news that his highly publicized Council on Jobs hasn't met in over a year.  It doesn't matter, he doesn't REALLY listen to business leaders or economists anyway.  In fact, he's proven to be incapable of both learning and changing.

He's been too busy trying to kill off any nascent recovery in the economy by increasing taxes. The rise in dividend, capital gains and income taxes together with new ObamaCare taxes, by most estimates amounts to something like $62 billion in tax increases and will trim up to 1% off of growth this year.  Worse, in a 1 1/2 to 2% economic growth environment, shaving 1% off of growth is relatively large effect.

I'm all in favor of starting to reduce the deficit, but it's generally agreed by economists that spending cuts are less detrimental than tax increases.  Budget austerity by reliance on tax increases is the European way; see Socialist Presidents Come From the Same Mold--and it's not working well.  Europe is in recession and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

With this President and Congress, you can expect spending to rise even faster than the tax increases.  In fact, in the first two weeks of this year, right after the tax increases were passed, $60 billion was spent on Sandy relief and associated pork in that law.  So, it took just two weeks to spend the entire annual increase in revenues!!

As I keep stressing, Pro-growth policies are the only way out and the President rejects these.  A new national agenda for next term would have been great, but it's not going to happen now.

America, you've got what you deserve.  People will get the government they deserve.