While the nation suffers an unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent, Barack Obama spent last week talking about job creation with “civil rights” leaders — despite the fact that President Obama’s last job creation ideas haven’t even been properly analyzed, let alone proven to work.
The New York Times reports that President Obama met with Benjamin T. Jealous of the NAACP, Marc H. Morial of the National Urban League, and Reverend Al Sharpton on Wednesday to discuss “how the economic crisis was affecting all manner of poor people.” According to the article, the vast majority of the meeting was spent discussing “how to get Republican leaders to support Mr. Obama’s jobs proposals.”
This is mildly hilarious, considering that on February 9th, President Obama “gave his strongest signal yet that he is willing to compromise on key priorities,” according to Reuters’ report of his Tuesday solo news conference. Yes, on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he was willing to compromise with Republicans, and on Wednesday, he spent the day trying to figure out how to avoid compromise.
But the most disturbing part of the President’s meeting isn’t merely his lack of desire to truly compromise — the disturbing part is his arrogant assumption that his “jobs proposals” are ready for serious consideration. This is especially true considering the fact that, as the Heritage Foundation’s Dr. J.D. Foster pointed out, President Obama “explicitly” admitted the “failure [of] last year’s $862 billion stimulus program” during this year’s State of the Union address.
As the Heritage Foundation recently reported, there is still no proof that President Obama’s first stimulus bill worked. The study on last year’s stimulus package conducted by the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) “fails basic standards of economic analysis,” according to Heritage expert Dr. Karen Campbell. The Heritage report, titled “Did the Stimulus Create Jobs? White House Economic Report Is Unclear,” clarifies the many logical problems involved with the studies that “prove” that the President’s last proposals worked. As Dr. Campbell said, “the American people deserve to have a true economic analysis done.”
Indeed, President Obama hasn’t even ordered a true economic analysis to be done on the results of his last “proposal”—the expensive economic “stimulus” he argued would create jobs.
Before he bothers focusing on how to gain Republican support to ram through even more expensive legislation, the President might want to take a closer look at the results of his last jobs plan. It would be a travesty if he let his arrogance and the support of “civil rights” leaders take the place of legitimate economic analysis in the quest to find a solution to America’s current economic crisis.
Allie Winegar Duzett currently is a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm
