No Jobs, No Leadership: Obama's Big Fail

It would be disingenuous to pin the blame for the chronically lean job market on the Obama administration. The blame goes back over more than a quarter-century: to Ronald Reagan, who turned tax-cut pandering into high art, thus making it politically impossible for his successors to tax the wealthy, thereby accelerating the economic inequality that has left so many Americans unable to spend; to Bill Clinton, who helped turn Wall Street into a wild-west casino, laying the ground for the worst financial disaster since the 1930s; to George W. Bush, who continued both of these projects while wasting our treasure on a pair of ill-conceived wars.

We do not live in an autocracy, of course. Obama must contend with another branch of government known as the Congress, where political posturing and stagecraft always seems to trump the actual needs of the regular people. Anyone who thinks Obama could have easily prescribed and administered the proper medicine is in cosmic denial about the extent to which dysfunction grips Washington.