By Robert Romano — Barack Obama has his work cut out for himself getting reelected in 2012.
The most recent bad news for the President comes on the longer-term jobs projections from the nation’s central bank.
The Federal Reserve has once again downgraded its economic outlook on the U.S. economy, forecasting unemployment to remain high for the foreseeable future, staying about 8 percent through 2012, and remaining about 7 percent through to 2014.
That surely must be horrific news for the Obama reelection campaign. Not only has no president since Franklin Roosevelt won reelection with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2 percent, there are 27 million Americans who cannot find full-time work in the Obama economy who may have some time on their hands on Nov. 6.
Adding to Obama’s reelection woes, a prior strength was the youth vote. But under the Obama Administration nearly 1 in 2 college of recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed reports the Associated Press.
Specifically, that’s 1.5 million graduates under the age of 25 who cannot find full-time work to pay off their student loans. That alone probably explains why approximately 27 percent of the nation’s $1 trillion of student loans are 30 days past due — they simply do not have the money to pay.
Come Nov. they may be looking for somebody to blame, too.
But it gets worse for Obama. The Social Security trustees have come back and knocked three years off the life of the program’s trust fund, saying it is now set to be exhausted in 2033. In large part that’s because Obama and Congress foolishly underfunded the program by $95 billion with its election year extension of the so-called payroll tax holiday.
Since all Americans are tied into that program, there are millions more to be upset at Obama, because going bankrupt is not one of the things he promised in 2008 when said he would bring change to Washington.
Overall, the nation has over $15.6 trillion of sovereign debt, larger than the entire economy, but for all of that spending and borrowing, it has not created prosperity. It has created an unsustainable burden for future generations.
That’s perhaps the reason why Obama’s days are numbered. The change he gave us — was not the change we were looking for.
Robert Romano is the Senior Editor of Americans for Limited Government.
