Opinion: The Obama Recession Is Worse Than You Think

The Obama Recession has now earned the right of being compared to the Great Depression.

From the instant that President Barack Hussein Obama, D-Kenya, came into office, there have been absolutely no net gains in full-time jobs

This is contrary to what had happened in all our prior recessions. Employers are not recalling the workers they laid off from full-time employment.


The Obama policies have created permanent job losses.

Despite trillions spent on "stimulus" and the continuous devaluation of our currency, we have experienced the loss of over 7 million jobs, wiping out every job gained since the year 2000.

The real job losses are far greater than the government estimate of 7.5 million. They are much closer to 10.5 million, as 3 million people have stopped looking for work.

The Obama Administration routinely under reports our real rate of unemployment. So they can pretend there is some kind of "recovery" going on, despite more people being unemployed.

Equally troublesome is the lower labor participation rate; some 5 million jobs have vanished from manufacturing, long America's greatest strength.

We have 131 million employed, but this is lower than it was at the beginning of the year 2000, even though our population has grown by nearly 30 million.

We currently have had nine straight weeks where new unemployment claims are over 400,000. If this is a "recovery" then it certainly is an odd one. A recovery in which you keep losing more jobs!

Today, over 14 million people are unemployed. 

We now have more idle men and women than at any time since the Great Depression. Nearly seven people in the labor pool compete for every job opening. The most startling statistic is that one fifth of all men of prime working age are not getting up and going to work. You read that correctly.. One in five men wake up each morning and have no job to go to.

Don't pay too much attention to the headline unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. It is scary enough, but it is a gloss on the reality.

These numbers do not include the millions who have stopped looking for a job or who are working part time but would work full time if a position were available.

And they count only those people who have actively applied for a job within the last four weeks.

Include those others and the real number is a nasty 16 percent. The 16 percent includes 8.5 million part-timers who want to work full time (which is double the historical norm) and those who have applied for a job within the last six months, including many of the long-term unemployed. And this 16 percent does not take into account the discouraged workers who have left the labor force.

We have an economic crisis, and the President vacations.

In past recessions, the economy recovered lost jobs within 13 months, on average, after the trough.

Twenty-three months into a recovery, employment typically increases by around 174,000 jobs monthly, compared to 54,000 this time around. In a typical recovery, we would have had several hundred thousand more hires per month than we are seeing now. Businesses do not seem to have the confidence or the incentive to add staff but prefer to continue the deep cost-cutting they undertook from the onset of the recession.

How is the President responding to this? Well, he doesn't seem to notice it.

He goes on vacations, he plays golf, and he throws lavish fund raisers at the White House as he courts more corporate sponsors for his reelection war chest.

But even worse, he demonizes anyone who dares to suggest that we need to get back on track with sound fiscal policies.

And he gets help from the left leaning media, who shameless shill for him and who spin all bad economic news into signs that "the recovery is going well."

Make no mistake about it. While a large portion of our population is suffering, a small group is benefiting greatly from these Obama economic policies. Namely.... the banks, Wall Street, the money traders, and mostly those huge global corporations who donate generously to President Obama and his party (GE, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Google, JPMorgan, Microsoft, etc).

Last year, when most people either lost money or made small gains on their investments, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, made a 62% profit on her investments. No one on Capital Hill is suffering, even though most of the rest of us are.

Our political leadership in both Congress and the White House will pay a very high price for their failure to deal with our economic problems effectively. Borrowing more money and throwing it into the stimulus pit isn't working. The voters just might hold them accountable in next year's election.