By Rick Manning — “The private sector’s doing fine,” said Barack Obama.
People are wondering what planet is the president on? However, the statement is a revelation into the thinking of the president and the left as a whole.
The truth is that this president is concerned that the number of state and local public employees has decreased as these government’s are forced to deal with spending caps, balanced budget amendments and cannot borrow their way out of a fiscal downturn.
However, the insight is that Obama bemoans the loss of these taxpayer funded employees who are a drain on the economy, while viewing the failed private sector job economy as “doing just fine.”
The admission mirrors a statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in October, 2011 memorialized in the video “Harry Reid’s Magical Glasses” where he stated, “It’s very clear that private sector jobs are doing just fine, its public sector jobs where we have lost huge numbers.”
Sound familiar?
Obama’s repeating this often mocked talking point is not a gaffe, as some claim. It is a core belief.
Those who believe that the government is the source of goodness and should be in control of every aspect of our lives, truly believe that economic growth comes through expanding the taxpayer funded public work force, while ignoring the impact that the increased cost of this expanded government places on the private sector that pays for it.
The stunning truth is that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employees comprise 18 percent of the American workforce, almost one in five! There are more government employees draining our economy than all manufacturing, mining and construction employees combined.
Yet, government employees have an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, while those in construction endure a staggering 14.2 percent unemployment rate.
One possible explanation of this politically suicidal obsession with the public employee unemployment rate may be found in the fact that just one government employee union alone spent more than $80 million in 2010 to elect Democrats. When the ranks of the public employee unions are diminished, even by a small amount, there are fewer dollars available for their union to redistribute to their political benefactors like Obama and Reid.
Not shockingly, the main expenditure in Obama’s failed $800 billion stimulus package was to prop up state and local government budgets, sparing, for a year, theses public employees job losses.
Of course, since public employees are net drags on the economy, the stimulus package failed miserably to generate private sector jobs, and actually had the perverse effect of prolonging the economic downturn for a year by delaying those job losses and their short term ramifications.
Obama actually believes that the money spent on government employee salaries are a net win for the economy. And the fact that those government employees are paid, on average, more than their private sector counterparts in wages and benefits doesn’t concern him. The logical conclusion of Obama’s theory that public employees create wealth would be to put every unemployed person on the government payroll in the hopes of stimulating the private sector through their expenditures. Of course, it would be that very private sector that would be crowded out in the credit markets by government borrowing and would be penalized through higher taxes to pay for these new wards of the state. But, if honestly pressed on the issue, Obama could not deny this logical extension of his worry about public sector job cuts.
Obama’s decrying public sector job cuts reveals a president, who in spite of all his election year talk about getting the deficit under control, has no intention of rolling back the size and scope of government by cutting spending. The very federal spending which had never topped $3 trillion before Obama and has never dropped below $3.4 trillion during his presidency is sacrosanct in his worship of the public employee worker.
To anyone who has been paying attention, it should not be surprising that Obama and his Senate minion Reid have a very different view of the world, where a public employee unemployment rate below 5 percent is more problematic than a private sector unemployment rate well in excess of 8 percent.
The truth revealed by Obama’s public admission that he thinks the “private sector is doing just fine” is that this president doesn’t care about our private economy and only views it as a necessary evil to pay for the power he derives from the actions of the public sector employees.
Honesty was the real gaffe by Obama. It was not that he did not mean what he said, but rather that what he said revealed his skewed view of the world where the private sector worker is nothing more than a mark to be fleeced and controlled by the noble bureaucrat.
This pulling back the curtain of progressive/liberal thought and expressing their true underlying belief system is the political gaffe, because now America knows who this president and those who follow him are, and have no excuse if they re-elect him and his cohorts.
Now, all the president’s men have to say in defense of Obama is pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, because when we listen to his heartfelt words, he scares the hell out of us.
Rick Manning is the Director of Communications of Americans for Limited Government.
