Obama's speeches are starting to resemble Aesop's Fables

More than 30 months after the official start of the recession, the economy is still losing jobs, with non-farm payroll employment declining by 125,000 jobs in June. A total of 652,000 workers fled the workforce in June, and therefore were no longer counted as unemployed, which is why the unemployment rate fell from 9.7% to 9.5%. That follows 322,000 who dropped out of the workforce in May, for a total of nearly a million workers dropping out of the labor force in the last two months alone. If those million workers had remained in the workforce looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 10.1%.

Moreover, average hours worked per week dropped for all workers, as did average hourly earnings.

But there was President Obama in a highly revealing speech on June 30 in Racine, Wisconsin, congratulating himself for having saved America from another Great Depression. He said, "Now every economist who has looked at it has said that the Recovery Act [stimulus bill] did its job," starting a passage that will soon be memorialized as another chapter in Aesop's Fables. As Obama said those words, on the very same day in the Wall Street Journal was a commentary by Allan Meltzer, Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University, entitled, "Why Obamanomics Has Failed." Maybe Obama just hadn't read the Journal yet that day.

But Obama continued in Racine, "[The stimulus bill] put a brake on the collapse of the economy. We avoided a Great Depression. We are now growing again." (Emphasis added.)

Instead of avoiding a Great Depression, however, President Obama is leading us into one.