This review is of minimal journalistic merit, including as it does numerous, easily-verified falsehoods. President Obama has not “admitted” the stimulus was a mistake, unemployment was ballooning well before the president’s healthcare initiative and there has been no demonstrated link between it and unemployment whatsoever. Further, the idea that the planned regulation of carbon by the EPA is driving unemployment is ludicrous at face value, especially in light of the Wall Street financial crisis and the attendant housing market collapse. As usual, however, this reviewer has done an excellent job of mouthing unsubstantiated talking points.

Dear me, Obama specifically said that it was a mistake that he thought that there were a lot of “shovel-ready” projects for the stimulus to fund. True, the comment was reported by a highly untrustworthy source, the NY Times, and repeated by another Democratic Party operation, CBS News:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20019468-503544.html
but he DID say it. Since the stimulus was ENTIRELY about “shovel-ready” projects, I rest my case.

The EPA rules create uncertainty, just like Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Law, and that directly causes reduced job offers. And Dodd-Frank (weird, isn’t it, that the law should be named after the two worst offenders against honesty in the last Congress!) has caused business loans and consumer credit to dry up due to the uncertainty about how the 2000+ pages will be interpreted by the administration.

I forgot another major issue on which Obama has not shown leadership, ratification of free trade agreements, especially with Columbia and South Korea. These both would increase employment significantly in the U.S. Indeed the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans has pleaded with Obama to get moving on the Columbia pact, since it would dramatically increase U.S. exports shipped through his city.

“Unfortunately the authors [sic] cry for more of what has been dealt over the last three years as a solution to the problem which has yet to be resolved by that which he asks for is juvenile.”
– Paul Krugman and Joseph Stigltz – both Nobel Prize-winning economists – disagree with that assessment.

“The national debt is never addressed and the budget rarely balanced.”
- Bill Clinton presided over a balanced budget just a few presidential terms in the past. Likewise, the national debt as a percentage of GDP – the only worthwhile measure of national debt – has risen and fallen over time. (See here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_debt_chart.html)

Finally, if the private sector is not providing the demand necessary to expand the economy, and suggesting that public sector spending would do so in its place is “juvenile”, what is the “mature” solution? There isn’t anyone else left to spur demand and drive employment. Yes, the world and the economy are different today, but the fundamental laws of supply and demand have not changed one whit.