President Obama has taken much ridicule in recent weeks for making a speech in which he bemoans a national unemployment rate hovering at around 10 percent and announces that he has a jobs plan. The trouble for the President is that he then went off on vacation without bothering to tell us anything about this jobs plan.

It’s as if Capt. Edward Smith had turned to the crew of the Titanic and announced, “I’ve got a solution for what to do with all these people who won’t fit on the lifeboats. But before I tell you about it, I’m just going to pop down to my cabin and have a wee nap.”

Perhaps we could have a bit more confidence in the President’s forthcoming plan if we hadn’t been through all this before.

On August 29, 2010, President Obama told Brian Williams of NBC news that he had a plan for jobs that he’d be announcing when he got back from his summer vacation.

None of the details of the President’s jobs plan have come out, though a White House spokesman did indicate last week that the plan will rely on public-private partnerships.

Whatever plan the President presents, I think people can be forgiven if it fails to inspire confidence.

The President’s bungling of economic policy has some seriously questioning his aptitude (the Wall Street Journal recently ran an op-ed titled “Is Obama smart?” which reaches the ultimate conclusion that he is not) while others are wondering aloud if he isn’t mangling our economy on purpose. The argument runs that Obama is an adherent to the Cloward-Piven Strategy of destroying capitalism by overwhelming it with government bureaucracy and entitlement demands and then rebuilding the foundations of our country.

In one scenario, the President of the United States is a moron and in the other one he is an evil genius.

Regardless whether it is one or the other or neither, Barack Obama is undoubtedly an adherent to the idea that there is little or no limit to the authority of government. Obama, and those who adhere to his policies, believe that through the power of government society’s ills can be solved.

Poor people can be given money by the government; sick people can be given healthcare by the government. The government has the power to make people equal and whole and to create fairness.

This fairness, though, can only be created through a redistribution of wealth. And to convince others of the decency of his schemes to redistribute wealth, the President routinely vilifies some Americans – he calls them Wall Street, he calls them wealthy, he calls them the rich – and his policies seek to drag these people under the thumb of government.

In Barack Obama’s America, there are two kinds of Americans: Those who the government will give to and those who the government will take from.

The man made his way through life prior to becoming an Illinois Senator as a “community organizer.” He’s a rabble rouser who seeks to foment resentment and jealousy in order to bend the authority of government to create his vision of society.

Whether it is by design or incompetence, President Obama’s first term in office has succeeded only in crushing economic freedom in this country.

And now he is set – yet again – to announce a jobs plan upon his return from vacation.

President Obama has recklessly printed money, borrowed money and spent money well in excess of any spending government has done in the past. All this spending is a deadweight loss. Worse, huge sums of money spent by the government went to Obama’s pet projects in the so-called Green Industry – projects that are routinely flopping. Jobs created by Obama’s stimulus spending have gone overseas; Green Industry businesses that took tens of millions in government stimulus money have now gone bankrupt.

President Obama has also dramatically increased the regulatory burdens on businesses through Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and through Executive Orders.

Government has grown and the private sector – where jobs rightfully should be created – has shrunk.

The President needn’t have gone on vacation to come up with a jobs plan, because the answer is simple: Reduce the regulatory burden and cut spending – not just the growth in spending as is so often passed off as spending cuts, but reduce actual spending. He can start by undoing the damage already being caused by Obamacare, repealing Dodd-Frank and President Bush’s Sarbanes-Oxley mess.

These steps are necessary for what the White House calls “recovery.” The way back to a strong economy is through the very thing which President Obama is philosophically opposed: Capitalism.

Unconstrained by the government, people – making decisions for themselves and not within the guidelines of federal regulation – can recover on their own.

Unfortunately, history shows us that government does not voluntarily shrink itself and that new regulations do not easily get repealed. Government grows and that is that.

Times will likely get better, but unless the American people are willing to support candidates who will vote to reduce the size and scope of government, better times will always be short lived and recessions and periods of slow growth will become the norm.

An overspending, overreaching government is the enemy of prosperity, and that is true whether it is through the scheming of an evil genius or the bungling of a moron.

Rob Peecher is editor of The Oconee Leader. He can be reached at 706-310-1104 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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