The Great Obaman Recession

Charles Gasparino explains the mechanics of our jobless economic recovery:

The issue is strikingly similar to what the banks face. As we're all aware, the banks are making big money and waiting to pay out bonuses in the coming days. But the cash isn't coming from lending the money out. Instead, the banks are cutting costs, hoarding cash and investing some of it in low-risk bonds.

Businesses are doing the same even if the economy "grows" according to official statistics. Why risk expanding operations and hiring workers amid a wild boom in government that will lead to massive tax hikes when you can make money simply by doing nothing or laying people off?

All of which translates into a jobless recovery -- the economy appearing to grow while unemployment remains unnaturally high -- unless of course, you work in government.

To be fair to the President, he's not accomplishing suppression of the national economy on his own; the Democrats in Congress are playing a large role, too. There's therefore at least some room for hope that a Republican resurgence in the legislature will be a sufficient signal that the era of hopenchange is over. Or perhaps not; the economic paranoia surely derives, in part, from the memory that the Republicans had drifted far from their Reaganite roots over the past decade, leaving no hope of a solid turnaround.

Of course, whatever the case, Rhode Island exacerbates the problem. All the gimmicks, as I've been calling them, are meaningless without large structural change, including an overhaul of elected officials. Businesses needn't even be all that perceptive to fear that the "targeted incentives" that the local Democrats have increasingly been citing as their economic plan are merely a lure into a trap. The people running our state government want businesses here so that they can take their money and transfer it to friends, unions, and government-dependents, not so that their state can return to economic health and opportunity.