May 4, 2012 Addendum.  The April jobs report confirmed my worst fears.  The U.S. economy added just 115,000 jobs and yet the unemployment rate is down another tenth of a percent to 8.1%.  In other words more people have given up the search.  This is another great day for Mitt  Romney.  Everything I wrote on April 28 remains valid.  The difference  is it has just been reinforced.    

Is the recession over? Not if you are unemployed. Over 12 million Americans are in that status. Most of those people have families that have been impacted. The impact is more likely on three to four times that number. Worse is that the number is not the real number because many more people are no longer counted as unemployed. Most economists add about 50% to the official numbers to reach that real number.

The Obama administration failed to address the primary issue facing the nation. That is the condition of our economy.

Where is the plan to change our course of outsourced jobs? It does not exist.

The latest pieces of economic data support the feeling that the economy is struggling to recover from the Great Recession. New claims for unemployment benefits dropped to 351,000 in the week ending February 11 of this year but have been increasing every week since then with one exception. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the first quarter of 2012 grew 2.2% versus a growth of 3% in the last quarter of 2011. The president can’t be held responsible for everything in our economy but there is little he has done or proposed to improve the situation.

 The problem is that Mitt Romney has not enunciated any actions he would take that would change our desperate employment situation. The number of unemployed reached over 14 million people and has now dropped to under 13 million. However the number of long term unemployed has not been significantly reduced and still remains over 5 million people. Obama’s policies did save the country’s auto manufacturers but too many products and services are now provided in other countries.

Americans are the employer of the president. We have the right to expect results. Barack Obama’s four year contract is almost up. Unfortunately the alternate candidate for the job has not told us what he would do to change our economic situation.