One More Time...Why We Have 10% Unemployment

I am not happy about being right about this (nobody wants a healthy economy more than me).

Our problem isn't the presence, lack of, or size of any stimulus, interest rates, or any such obsessed over aspect of the macro economy.  Our problem, as I've been saying, is fear and uncertainty.  Washington DC and our President are running roughshod over American business like Sherman through the South.  Profit is viewed with hatred.  Businesses are either 1) scared they are going to get taken behind the woodshed like the credit card industry, 2) simply too uncertain about major changes shaping up in Congress, like cap and trade which would raise the cost base of nearly every company in America, or 3) fed up at the attacks and the anti-business rhetoric and standing pat.  American Business is hiding under their desks.  They could be hiring and growing but we elected fools who want to beat them into submission - it is as simple as that.  Enjoy your economy America.

P.S. As a grace note to all this, let me point out that many large companies, Cisco and IBM for example, have announced large increases in their stock buyback programs to the tune of billions of dollars.  This means that there is a higher return to shrinking their capital base than to expanding and hiring.  That is the heart of the structural problem that Washington and Obama have created.  Until that reverses, we won't see any meaningful job creation.

UPDATE:  Here is our President today on the subject.  I'm sad to say he doesn't get it, he is not within 100 miles of getting it.  Finally, this all leads to the irony of ironies - that a President (and his party) who is (are) supposedly the second coming for the working man and the bane of monied interests is pursuing policies that are a disaster for the working man and pretty darned OK for the money class.  By driving businesses and entrepreneurs into the bunker, the DC Dems are choking off job creation in the crib.  Nonetheless, companies have a base level of business and are eager to sell into a global market outside the US that is hungry for growth and economic health, thus earnings are hanging in there and expectations are rising.  This has propelled the stock market.  The working man is SOL but investors are doing OK so far in 2009.  Like I said, irony of ironies.  This a classic manifestation of the maxim (and I will probably butcher it) that it is not that liberals aren't knowledgeable, it's just that what they know is wrong.