My favorite image from last week’s gubernatorial inauguration was a protester who held up sign that read: Where are the jobs Mr. Walker?
The man had barely taken the oath of office, but no matter, those 250,000 new jobs had not yet materialized. Only in Madison.
Still, Walker has set a fairly easy line of demarcation to assess his success or failure in creating more favorable economic conditions. I believe Walker will have a tough time reaching that goal in the next four years, not because his policies are Ill-considered but because the Obama administration will undermine job-creating progress by administrative fiat.
Walker probably thought 250,000 was a safe number because it has some historical precedent. That’s roughly how many new jobs were created during Tommy Thompson’s first four-year term, with many of the same policy approaches that Walker is now pursuing. There is one huge difference, of course, and that is Thompson had a pro-business President named Ronald Reagan to partner with, while Walker and Wisconsin will have to overcome the mixed bag represented by Barack Obama.
I’ll admit to having ambivalent feelings about President Obama’s economic policies. I applaud his decision to maintain the current (lower) federal tax rates, his desire to boost exports, the recent addition of people with business acumen (William Daley and Gene Sperling) to the administration, and while claims that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit should be accompanied by a laugh track, the law could help smaller businesses provide insurance benefits more affordably.
But I can’t help but think Obama’s bureaucrats, especially the apparatchiks in the Environment Protection Agency and the Federal Communications Commission, will continue to put up job-killing roadblocks. I say apparatchiks because administrators in these agencies have taken certain regulatory thrusts upon themselves when Congress has not given them the authority to do so — the EPA in the area of reducing atmospheric carbon emissions and the FCC in the realm of Internet neutrality.
At the moment, I’m more concerned with the EPA at the moment because its “dictats,” based on the increasingly questionable belief that human activities are causing climate change, are putting the kibosh on economic development projects, especially those related to domestic energy production. That’s not going to look good if gas prices get any higher.
These bureaucratic power grabs are quite a development for a President who complained, justifiably in some cases, about his predecessor’s “Imperial Presidency.” Yet they are not totally surprising because every President seeks to expand the limits of executive branch power; in Obama’s case, it could result in fewer jobs being created than otherwise would be the case.
When you’re already operating in a slow job growth economy, this tends to have a compounding affect. Following the disappointing jobs report for December of 2010, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke predicted it would take four to five years before unemployment gets back to normal levels. By that, he means a 4% unemployment rate, which is considered full employment.
We’ve been over 9% unemployment for a record 20 consecutive months, and that’s the official (U-3) unemployment figure. The U-6 figure, which includes people who have stopped looking for work and those still looking but cannot find full-time employment, is still dismayingly high at 15.2% for those who have been in this classification for between 15 to 26 weeks. Many blame the uncertainty caused by the federal legislation enacted under Obama, and the ensuing rules and regulations that slowly drip out like an exercise in water torture.
Walker isn’t unaware that federal policies could undermine his own. Last spring, I posed this question to candidate Walker, who acknowledged that federal policies are a concern, but he did not budge off that 250,000 figure during his campaign for governor. Perhaps he’s counting on the majority of those new jobs coming in his last two years, when a more business-friendly President could be in charge.
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