Burdened by a decision on Afghanistan, Obama has apparently sent military planners back to the drawing boards to redesign a strategy in the wake of concerns about the ability of Hamid Karzai’s government to serve as a viable partner. He’s also worried about a jobless economic recovery

So before leaving, the president announced a jobs summit at the White House in December, at which CEOs, union leaders, nonprofits and government officials can figure out how to jump-start the lagging business indicator.

Hot Air has the relevant transcript

Over the past 10 months, we’ve taken a number of bold steps to break the back of this recession (WT-none of which have worked). We’ve worked to stabilize the financial system, revive lending to small businesses and families, and prevent responsible homeowners from losing their homes. And through the Recovery Act, we’ve cut taxes for middle class families, extended and increased unemployment insurance, and created and saved more than a million jobs.

Worked to take over huge segments of the private economy and put them under the control of the Federal government. People are still losing their homes. Small business is still having a tough time getting loans. And taxes? Where? Hey, didn’t he promise us a $500/$1,000 check during the campaign?

As a result, the economy is now growing again for the first time in more than a year — and faster than at any time in the past two years. But even though we’ve slowed the loss of jobs — and today’s report on the continued decline in unemployment claims is a hopeful sign — the economic growth that we’ve seen has not yet led to the job growth that we desperately need. As I’ve said from the start of this crisis, hiring often takes time to catch up to economic growth. And given the magnitude of the economic turmoil that we’ve experienced, employers are reluctant to hire.

Slowed because there aren’t that many jobs left to lose. I’m not blaming him fully for that, recessions happen. But, Los Federales can mitigate and reduce the issue with wise business plans.

We all know that there are limits to what government can and should do, even during such difficult times.  But we have an obligation to consider every additional, responsible step that we can [take] to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country.  And that’s why, in December, we’ll be holding a forum at the White House on jobs and economic growth.  We’ll gather CEOs and small business owners, economists and financial experts, as well as representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups, to talk about how we can work together to create jobs and get this economy moving again.

Oh, good, labor unions and nonprofits. Ed Morrissey is pointing out that labor unions tend to be job killers, and nonprofits? They do not really tend to stimulate much. They can be useful, certainly, but companies looking to make a profit get people back to work. And you do not do that by yammering on and on. You take action.

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Few people have been as vocal about the urgency of global warming and the need to reinvent the way the world produces and consumes energy. And few have put as much money behind their advocacy as Mr. Gore and are as well positioned to profit from this green transformation, if and when it comes.

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

The Goracle responded with the ultimate in socialist chutzpah:

“Do you think there is something wrong with being active in business in this country?” Mr. Gore said. “I am proud of it. I am proud of it.”

But then, that’s how business is done, in a world run by the likes of Al Gore. You convince your government cronies to force people to pay for whatever you have to sell. The “green revolution” extolled by the Slimes will come about when all the green has been transferred from those who produce wealth to those who have friends in Big Government.

Bureaucrats just shoveled over $560 million of our money at Silver Spring Networks, in which Gore’s Kleiner Perkins outfit has invested heavily. He’s also working plenty of other angles:

He is a founder of Generation Investment Management, based in London and run by David Blood, a former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (the firm was quickly dubbed Blood and Gore). Mr. Gore earns a partner’s salary at Kleiner Perkins. He has substantial personal finances invested at both firms, officials of the companies said. …

Mr. Gore’s spokeswoman would not give a figure for his current net worth, but the scale of his wealth is evident in a single investment of $35 million in Capricorn Investment Group, a private equity fund started by his friend Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay. …

He has a stake in the world’s pre-eminent carbon credit trading market and in an array of companies in bio-fuels, sustainable fish farming, electric vehicles and solar power.

Capricorn holds a major stake in Falcon Waterfree Technologies, the world’s leading maker of waterless urinals. Generation has holdings in Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, and Camco, a British firm that develops carbon dioxide emissions reduction projects. Kleiner Perkins has a green ventures fund with nearly $1 billion invested in renewable energy and efficiency concerns.

In short, if it’s economically useless but likely to be subsidized if not imposed by the watermelons running our government, Gore is getting a fat cut from it. He needs the money to pay his gargantuan power bills.

His next big project: a $300 million campaign to ban fossil fuels in electricity production within 10 years. Since windmills and pixie dust just don’t work, and nuclear power is frowned upon by moonbats, where the electricity will come from is something for people to worry about later — like how to pay for all the government subsidies to inefficient ecokook technology.

On a tip from Charles O. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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The Pew report also says that nearly a third of the public has come to believe that a degree is necessary to get a good job, whereas 30 years ago, just under half believed that. As former President Clinton pointed out last week at a press event, the cost of a degree has tripled in recent decades, entirely wiping out the benefits of every government assistance program for college costs.

Those college costs are usually financed instead by loans which are currently not eligible for bankruptcy protection. Loan repayment therefore eats up larger percentages of future earnings which have been plummeting for 8 years for those under 55. Bad timing for anyone who’s taken out student loans in recent years in the hopes that the job market would catch up to their education expenditures, and worse luck if their parents’ declining wages reduce the possibility for family assistance.

A third of adults under 27 also lack health coverage, with nearly half of those young adults earning less than $14,000 per year. Since wages for most people have been effectively stagnant, they have not kept pace with health coverage increases, and the lower you go down the economic ladder, the truer that is. Especially because there’s been an ongoing decline in employer-based coverage that has disproportionately affected low-income workers and the small businesses that create the most jobs.

For another worrying indicator, an AARP poll earlier this year indicated that around a quarter of adults 18 and over are living with parents or in-laws. Another 15 percent were worried they might have to do so soon, while one in seven lived with a sibling.

I don’t know about you, but the American Dream I was sold didn’t include worse buying power and relative wealth than my blue-collar, high school-educated parents for myself, my peers and those who came after me.

SOURCE

The Leftist author above can see the problem but goes on to say that the solution is more factory jobs! She seems unable to see that ever more of America’s wealth is being sucked up by a vast, continuously growing and useless bureaucracy that has been foisted on Americans by Democrats at Federal, State and local levels. America’s vast army of paper-shufflers CONSUME wealth. They don’t create it. And, to add insult to injury, they are on average paid far more than private-sector workers

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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A recent report by the Sacramento based California Budget Project shows that two out of five working-age Californians are out of work. The jobless rate has not been this bad since 1977. California’s unemployment rate is one of the worst in the country at 12 percent.

Yet, union membership has grown in California despite the recession. And it’s no wonder when looking at the CBP study. On page three, for instance, we see a notation that reports that unionization in government jobs has grown substantially and is also at a much higher percentage of the total sector workforce in California than it is in the rest of the country.

Unionization rates were consistently higher in the public sector than in the private sector in 2008-2009. As Figure 2 shows, public-sector unionism was especially strong in Los Angeles as well as in California: during 2008-2009, well over half of all workers in the California and Los Angeles public sectors were union members. In the nation as a whole, the unionization rate for public-sector workers was 37.0 percent; much higher than the 7.5 percent rate found in the private sector, but well below the rates for public-sector workers in California (57.4%) or Los Angeles (56%).

So, while regular citizens are losing their jobs by the millions, government workers are in clover, riding the gravy train, on easy street.

During one of the worst economies in generations government is growing.

And can we review what government does for the economy? It drains it, feeds off of it, empties it of cash. Government is a drag on the economy, not a help. Government creates nothing but bills. Yet, in California, they are growing the government in this climate.

Amazingly self destructive, isn’t it?

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U.S. employers cut a fewer-than-expected 216,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate rose to a 26-year high, the government said on Friday in a report showing a still fragile labor market.
The Labor Department said the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent after dipping to 9.4 percent in July and the decline in payrolls was the smallest in a year. The department revised job losses for June and July to show 49,000 more jobs lost than previously reported.

Thanks Obama. That stimulus is really working!

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You see it all the time, Democrats in any particular state or county government proposing to raise sales taxes to raise “much needed” revenues — I say “much needed” because spending cuts are never considered an option for what ails a government budget. But these money-hungry Democrats never once consider the harm they are doing to the businesses in their own jurisdictions especially when surrounding states (or counties) happen to have lower sales taxes than the new, higher level being introduced by Democrat tax hikers. These tax-mongering Democrats simply assume that raising the taxes will raise the revenues and that people will not flee business in their own area and travel to where things might be bought cheaper.

The reality is, though, even as such tax-loving Democrats raise taxes on their fellows and with wide-eyed innocence claim they are doing right by their constituents, businesses lose business to surrounding communities that have lower taxes. Naturally, tax raising Democrats refuse to acknowledge this singular economic fact.

It turns out that we can thank State Rep. Michael Rodrigues of Westport, Massachusetts for giving us one of the most perfect examples of how states lose business due to tax raising Democrats.

Oh, it isn’t because Rodriques was economically astute enough to understand reality. No, it’s because this tax-raising pol proved that even he will flee his high tax state to buy goods in a neighboring state where taxes are lower.

It happens that Representative Rodrigues thought it was a great idea to vote “yes” to raise sales taxes by twenty-five percent in his home state of Massachusetts. That didn’t mean he intended to pay those taxes himself, of course.

This week alert citizens caught the tax-hiker across the border in New Hampshire loading his state vehicle with cheap booze so that he could avoid Massachusetts State sales taxes.