The Bogus Jobs Summit

Evan Newmark brilliantly dissects President Obama's upcoming jobs summit:

Obamanomics — the White House’s jumble of industrial policy, massive deficit spending and tax hikes — isn’t working.

There are now 15.7 million Americans without jobs. And a big White House conference on jobs is nothing more than a soft distraction from those hard facts.

Now, I’ve never been to a White House summit, so I can’t say exactly what will happen on Thursday. But as a past Davos World Economic Forum participant, I’m pretty familiar with these kinds of VIP schmooze and snoozefests.

And here’s how it will likely play out. A senior White House official — perhaps the president — will give a welcome pep talk to the 130 gathered “summiteers.” He’ll ply them with thanks and stirring patriotic words.

But then he’ll urge them to not waste the day in conference fuzzy talk. Instead, the summiteers should turn words into actions and actions into jobs. After all, it is a “jobs” summit.

And then the summiteers will shuffle off to one of six working groups — where of course they’ll end up wasting the day in conference fuzzy talk.

It’s inevitable. Prepared remarks, banal anecdotes and empty debates are the stuff of these mushy forums. ...

Do you think that FedEx CEO Fred Smith and United Steelworkers President Leo Girard will somehow reach agreement that the best way to create jobs is to kill the union-card check?

Do you think that Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, will suddenly serve up innovative ideas for trade unions to assist small businesses?

It seems unlikely.

And so the jobs summit will fail for the same reason Obamanomics is failing: The White House mistakenly believes economic growth and new jobs are created by society’s stakeholders — business, labor and government — cooperatively working together.

But that’s not the way capitalism works. It doesn’t take a village to create a new job. It takes a businessman trying to make another buck. ...

A “real” jobs summit would focus on how American businesses can win globally. A “real” jobs summit would consider why Texas can compete for jobs and California can’t. A “real” jobs summit would look at permanent corporate and payroll tax cuts. And a “real” jobs summit would actually embrace debate, not stifle it.

Comments

[lgm]

"There are now 15.7 million Americans without jobs. And a big White House conference on jobs is nothing more than a soft distraction from those hard facts."

This reads like Obama Derangement Syndrome under which everything he does is demonized in a uniformly thoughtless way. If he wanted to distract attention from unemployment, he would host a basketball game or launch a campaign against teen sex. Instead he put unemployment on the front page, together with the obvious fact that he can't do much about it.

"And so the jobs summit will fail for the same reason Obamanomics is failing:..."

Actually, independent sources confirm that there are in the neighborhood of a million more jobs today than there would be under "Bushinomics".