LA Times "President Urges Public Patience on Recovery

On July 11, 2009, President Obama said, "As a result of the swift and aggressive action we took in the first few months of this year, we've been able to pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink". That's crap!! The only substantial thing this administration has accomplished is to finish the task begun by the Bush administration, and that is to transfer obscene amounts (Billions) of our money to a few Wall Street banks. Almost nothing has reached places or people where it could really do some good.

He now says that his plan was intended to work not in a few months, but over two years. This is absolute evidence that his administration has no idea what they are doing!!

The first sign of a contracting economy (a recession) is job losses. Accordingly, the first government actions should be to deal with this fact. That begins with enemployment insurance and extended medical insurance. The government has made some minor efforts in this direction.

The second task should be to create jobs for those who have become recently unemployed. We have a huge infrastructure repair job that could produce millions of useful jobs immediately, but for all practical purposes, the government has ignored this task. first, they have dedicated too little money to the purpose and second, they have given it to state governors to allocate. That made the use of the money immediately political. They should have given the money to mayors who know what their cities need and know how to get it done fast.

While job losses are tragic from the perspective of the newly unemployed, it is monumentally tragic for the whole economy. With 14.5 million people unemployed now, that means that 580 man/woman hours of valuable work are lost to the economy every WEEK!

There is nothing wrong with creating green jobs, or improving mass transit, or digitizing medical records, or finding alternitive energy sources, or any of the admirable projects that the Presidentis touting. What is dreadfully wrong is confusing the need for those long term projects with the immediate need to put people back to work. This government is frightening in its lackof understanding of basic human and economic behavior. What is equally frightening is all of the economic advisors with direct connections to Goldman Sachs!