Obama Creatively Uses Jobs As Comedy Hour Prop

The number of people employed in the United States dropped by 496,000 in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet somehow, miraculously, the unemployment rate dropped a full basis point from 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent.

That’s because while the White House, the media and economists propagated the things-are-getting-better-for-real line, another 663,000 people dropped out of the workforce.

It’s amazing how discouraged people are during the Greatest Recovery Ever, led by the Greatest Chief Executive since Jon Corzine took over MF Global.

A private sector report released on Tuesday indicated that consumer confidence took a hit, resulting in cynicism among Americans where short-term economic prospects are concerned, Reuters reported. According to the Conference Board, an industry group, consumer attitudes fell to 59.7 from a downwardly revised 68 in February, falling short of economists' expectations of 68.

Basically, economists want us to believe Americans are upset because Washington cut spending. Ha!

"The recent sequester has created uncertainty regarding the economic outlook and, as a result, consumers are less confident," Lynn Franco, director of economic indicators at the Conference Board, said in a statement.

Snort! Ha, ha!

While the financial markets were taking $85 billion a month, courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank, and chasing up stock prices, oil prices, gold prices and the price Americans are paying for Obama & Company’s economic comedy show, employers added an anemic 88,000 jobs -- more than 100,000 jobs worse than consensus forecasts. In the private sector, 95,000 jobs were added, while government shed 7,000.

“We’ve hit a wall when it comes to the job situation,” Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc., in Lexington, Mass., said. “The U.S. labor market had been doing very well, but it’s going back into a soft patch. One worry is that this is an early warning of the impact of the sequester, and businesses may be anticipating its full impact. It’s not going to last forever, but we could see a few months of weak job numbers.”

Ha! See what I mean? Comedy. I hear “soft patch” and immediately whatever I’m drinking comes spewing out of my nose. These bozos wants us to believe that $85 billion in automatic budget cuts by the government, spread over the next two years, are driving job creation down at a time when the federal government is throwing $85 billion a month of fresh money into the economy?

Seriously, this has to be a stand-up comedy routine. Or here’s an idea: Maybe people are getting wise to the fact that the government has absolutely no idea what it is doing.

It could be that rising healthcare costs, which by now were supposed to be going down courtesy of healthcare “reform,” are to blame for the lack of hiring. Or maybe it’s the trillion dollars in tax hikes and 20,000 pages of regulations -- so far, and courtesy of Obamacare -- that are responsible for the lack of consumer confidence. Or maybe it’s the $6.2 trillion Obamcare will add to the deficit.

Or maybe it’s the payroll tax increase, or high gas prices or, here’s another funny one, maybe it’s semi-automatic, high-capacity debt ceiling negotiations that are damping down confidence by consumers, small business owners, and the rest of us who drive on Elizabeth Warren’s government-built Trail of Tears.

Or maybe this is where the jobs are going, via National Review:

“At an aviation conference [in March], the founder and CEO of FedEx suggested that he would not be able to create his delivery company in today’s regulatory climate. Frederick Smith, who started FedEx in Arkansas in 1971, told Fox News’s Bret Baier that his company is ‘a creature of the government getting out of the way of business’ because regulations in the transportation industry were steadily rolled back after he founded it, which allowed his company to grow. ‘I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that it’s much more difficult to start an industrial company today, Smith added. ‘The regulatory environment is very tough today.’”

Nah. It’s much more likely that it’s those awful, evil, terrible Republicans, who insisted the federal government, finally, miraculously, and grudgingly cut the government’s budget by 2 percent are the cause for jobs drying up.

None of that ever happened before these budget cuts, right?

Right? Ha!

John Ransom is finance editor at Townhall.com and the host of Ransom Notes, a nationally syndicated radio show covering the connection between politics and finance.