PrintDecember 3, 2009
Jobs Summit Will Not Produce Jobs
It is easy to confidently predict that Barack Obama's job summit today will do nothing to create jobs. It's so easy that 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 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 anyway?
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 and investment banks who are closely linked to government and liberal causes should not be the sole representatives of free enterprise at a jobs summit. This is especially true when an entire nation is in the midst of a jobs recession, if not a depression. Quite often, these big players are disconnected from the concerns of small businesspeople -- such as contractors, shop owners, and artisans -- in the best of cases. In the worst cases, they're working at cross-purposes.
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 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 admittedly 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 to the entrepreneurial class for many months. Last December, when a devastating job loss of over 530,000 was reported for November 2008, the writing was on the wall for any who dared to see. As written here at that time about our plans to unwind our business of nineteen years,
Watch the financial news and you will see continued job cuts each month. We are not alone in our strategy. Far from it. Atlas has shrugged all over the country. [Emphasis added.]
Apparently I, or any other business-owner who started shutting down or scaling back the day after the election, am 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. The job numbers each month continue to shock them, and they continue to predict "the coming recovery" as if nothing in our nation has changed. 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 ObamaCare legislation) ago and before the House had passed cap-and-trade. This is not rocket science, nor was it 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 to 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!
The liberal blogosphere widely lampooned thoughts like these eleven 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 layoff mentality did indeed start right as Obama's election became inevitable in October. Then it surged in November upon the election itself, and it has stayed high ever since. As predicted, the layoffs have indeed continued, as most entrepreneurs knew they would.
And as previously stated, 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 the certainty of that is very, very easy indeed to predict.
