Obama’s Latest Disaster

Friday, June 4, 2010
David P. Goldman

It’s not often that a president’s economic policy blows up the same week that his foreign policy blows up and his energy policy blows up, but this morning’s miserable unemployment report gives Obama a trifecta. The BP oil spill just gets worse and Obama looks helpless and feckless. Obama’s main squeeze in the Muslim world, Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan, has turned into an ally of Iran and Hamas; and the much-vaunted economic recovery turned out not to be there.

This morning’s payroll report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 411,000 temporary jobs from the U.S. census, and only 20,000 new jobs in the private sector, that is, barely outside the margin of statistical error. The warning signs have been there for weeks: Consumer spending stopped growing in April, which is not surprising, because Americans should be saving roughly 10 fund of their income to fund the biggest retirement wave in history. With the bounce-back in stock prices last year, more affluent consumers decided to spend some of their gains—but the May stock market crash (which appears to be continuing this morning) should change their minds. the rest

White House is feeling weight of controversies surrounding oil spill, elections