AP's Reporting: "It's Starting To Feel Like Another Recession"

Karl Rove writes in his Wall Street Journal column today, “In what will rank as one of the all-time presidential PR disasters, we’re now well over half way through what the White House called ‘the summer of recovery.’ And what a recovery it’s been.” Indeed, an AP story from last night declared, “It’s starting to feel like another recession. Businesses are ordering fewer goods. Home sales are the slowest in decades. Jobs are scarce, and unemployment claims are rising. Perhaps most worrisome, manufacturing activity, which had been one of the economy’s few bright spots, is faltering.” Even Democrats’ favorite economist, Mark Zandi, had little positive to say, telling the AP, “The odds of a double-dip are rising and uncomfortably high . . . . Nothing else can go wrong. There is no cushion left.”

Rove listed some of the gloomy statistics: “Earlier this month, first-time claims for unemployment hit a nine-month high. The unemployment rate remains at 9.5% and 18.4% of workers are out of a job, can only get part-time work, or have given up looking for a job altogether. Sales of existing homes dropped 27% from June to July, hitting the lowest point since data were first collected in 1999.”

In just the last few weeks since Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner proclaimed, “Welcome to the Recovery,” we’ve seen 131,000 more jobs lost, unemployment claims hit a nine-month high, and home sales plummet to a low that hasn’t been seen in more than a decade.

As Rove explains, “All of this has helped shatter public confidence in the president. . . . Mr. Obama’s credibility is crumbling, and for good reason: He and his people are saying things people don’t believe. At the start of his summer of recovery road show, the president flatly asserted that last year’s massive stimulus package had ‘worked.’ Vice President Joe Biden, not to be outdone, promised monthly job gains of up to 500,000 and insisted that the recovery’s pace ‘continues to increase, not decrease’ as stimulus spending was ‘moving into its highest gear.’”

Clearly Americans are not seeing the administration’s rosy predictions play out. According to CBS News, “Americans are more pessimistic about the country’s economy than they were last month, a new CBS News poll reveals. Thirty-four percent now say the economy is getting worse, up from 26 percent last month. Only 20 percent now say the economy is getting better, according to the poll, conducted Aug. 20 - 24.”

For most Americans, this is anything but a “recovery summer,” and the grim economic numbers bear that out. Yet the Obama administration persists in claiming that the $862 billion stimulus bill was a success and that job-killing bills like the health care law and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation will improve the economy. We’ve already seen how costly both bills are to small businesses, let alone the rest of the economy. No wonder Americans are so fed up with the White House’s agenda of “[j]ob-stifling taxes, regulations, government intrusion,” as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell described it recently.

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