JOBS, BAILOUTS, RECOVERY - PICK ANY TWO, MR. PRESIDENT?

President Obama travels to Pittsburgh today to boast about nudging the unemployment rate under 10%, a heroic feat given that it was under 8% when he took office. His real reason for the speech: preemptive damage control since Obama is now the biggest job killer in American history according to the authors of a new book Killing Wealth, Freeing Wealth.



Obama now presides over the meanest job market since we began tracking such things in 1948. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that nearly half of the unemployed have been out of work longer than six months. That's twice the level of pain of 1980 when the ruinous policies of Jimmy Carter gave America the last chronic bout of joblessness.



"Government can choose to prop-up failed dinosaur companies and in so doing institutionalize a form of corporate socialism that dries up credit markets, starves smaller businesses, kills off the sources of new jobs, and sends other jobs careening to lower-cost markets overseas," says author Floyd Brown, or the government can choose to actively help build the small businesses of America that create 80% of the new jobs. But they can't have both and also enjoy a genuine economic recovery."



The President has run the national debt up to a staggering $13 trillion in an effort to jumpstart the economy. "But look at how he spent the money," says co-author Lee Troxler, on bailouts for big bankers who didn't need it, and on bailouts for union bosses who don't deserve it. He's following the European bailout model that has left that continent on the verge of bankruptcy."



In their book Killing Wealth, Freeing Wealth, Brown and Troxler investigate a 25-year campaign to subvert free markets and destroy capitalism that began in 1993 and reached a zenith in 2008 with an $8 trillion wealth grab greased-up by George Bush and then baked-in by Barack Obama.





About the Authors:



Floyd Brown studied economics at the University of Washington under the famed economist Paul Heyne, author of The Economic Way of Thinking. Brown forged his political experience on staff for President Reagan and Sen. Bob Dole, producing the famous Willie Horton campaign ad and several more supporting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Currently president of the Western Center for Journalism, he's authored: