The American ^ | June 8,2012 | James Pethokoukis
“The private sector is doing fine” – Barack Obama, June 8, 2012.
There’s a deeper issue here than just Obama being thoughtlessly glib about the slow-growth nature of the U.S. economic recovery. (In an earlier post, by the way, I highlighted some of the ways in which the private sector is most certainly not “doing fine.”)
No wonder there’s been so little sense of urgency by the Obama White House to cut the sky-high corporate tax rate or so little consideration given to the impact on small business of letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The private sector is “doing fine,” after all. Unintended consequences? What are those?
Approve the Keystone pipeline? Why? The environment comes first, especially at a time when the private sector is “doing fine.”
Indeed, it seems that Obama thinks the only big flaw in the Obama recovery is that government isn’t hiring enough public union members. Everybody else is “doing fine.”
You know who really is doing fine? Washington. Federal spending is at record levels. Of course, it’s easy to be “doing fine” when you can just keep taxing the private sector. As Ben Bernanke joked yesterday, “A trillion here, a trillion there …”
But the real economy? It’s not doing fine at all.
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