Just hours after winning the Florida primary, Mitt Romney let loose a potential gaffe that turned what should have been a rallying moment for Republican supporters into an uncomfortable position of having to defend the man that is likely to face Obama in the general election.

If taken out of context, which the media is very adept to doing, Romney’s comment, “I’m not concerned about the very poor” sounds heartless and indefensible. In fact, that is exactly how many conservative commentators reacted.

From a purely political position, the criticism is reasonable. Romney effectively handed Democrats a shiny set of brass-knuckles to use against, not only him, but the Republican Party in general as being out of touch with every day Americans. As NRO’s David Kahane put it, “In the Fight of the Century between the Apologetic Oligarch and the Tribune of the Folks, who do you think the fans will be rooting for?” In other words, Romney unwillingly played into the class-warfare meme that Obama has wrapped himself in.

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Austerity has become a household word. It’s been mentioned and repeated so many times that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary honored the term as its word of the year in 2010 — that’s how many web searches were conducted on the “austerity”.

Fiscal austerity is simply a means by the government to control spending and increase revenue. Presumably, this is done by reducing the amount of money it borrows in order to cut the fiscal deficit, find new and fun ways to raise taxes, while simultaneously cutting government programs. However, this is usually done during tough economic times. Those most affected by unfavorable economic conditions will also be hit the hardest by the newer tax burden and cuts in goods and services.

IBD editorial:

When Republicans took control of the House in January, they pledged to make deep cuts in federal spending, and in April they succeeded in passing a bill advertised as cutting $38 billion from fiscal 2011′s budget. Then in August, they pushed for a deal to cut an additional $2.4 trillion over the next decade. …

But data released by the Treasury Department on Friday show that, so far, there haven’t been any spending cuts at all.

In fact, in the first nine months of this year, federal spending was $120 billion higher than in the same period in 2010, the data show. That’s an increase of almost 5%. And deficits during this time were $23.5 billion higher.

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The theme becoming familiar with all who are interested in the economy (judging by the latest labor statistics, I suspect there are many) is whether a president can actually create jobs. The answer to that question is obviously no; he can’t, at least not in a free enterprise system. However, a president can certainly pollute the environment and kill jobs as a consequence.

To whet your appetites and pique your interest, here is a list of job destroying regulations. Then consider Obama’s own recent retreat on EPA regulations and you see the proof.

1. NLRB’s Boeing Complaint

2. MACT and CSAPR Utility Standards

3. Boiler MACT Rules

4. Cement MACT Requirements

5. ‘Coal Ash’ Regulations

6. Grandfathered Health Plans

7. EPA Ozone Rule

8. EPA Farm-Dust Regulations

9. EPA Greenhouse-Gas Requirements

10.  NLRB ‘Ambush’ Elections Rule

Now Obama and his sycophants are saying his presidency is just as much a victim to the economic circumstances as the American worker and businesses. That’s saying something considering 14 million people unemployed and more than 25 million unable to find full-time work. In fact, President Obama and his government-first Democrat cohorts have actually made the economy worse and prolonged the recession.

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America is holding its breath in anticipation for President Obama’s big post-Labor Day jobs plan. September is when Congress is due back in session. It will be then the president will discuss regulations and their damaging effects on job creation. Wait. What? Are we supposed to forget the fact that President Obama has been our president over the last three years? And out of those three years, he had a super majority in Congress for two of them?

So then, what exactly is the regulation industry looking like these days? Booming is your answer.

If the federal government’s regulatory operation were a business, it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald’s, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.

[snip]

Meanwhile, employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6% (Investor’s Business Daily).

We only need to turn back to last year and move forward to see how comical the president’s new found eagerness is on deregulation.

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Recently it was concluded that the era of recovery under Obama is dead. In fact, it was never really born. President Obama chose more regulation and more spending as means to reverse our declining economy. Businesses are loath to hire, invest, and expand it an unfriendly, insecure environment. To show this is more than just election time rhetoric consider this point. “About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.”

There has been no recovery; in fact, things have gotten worse since Obama has held office.

As a result, he has lost the bin Laden “bounce“. An accomplishment that he should have been able to hang his hat on. However, perspective and priorities are what a president must contend. A bad economy his foremost in people’s mind. After all, the daily lives of millions hinge on opportunity and financial security. The awesome action in taking out bin Laden was a blip on the radar when it comes to what really matters. It doesn’t put people back to work, raise wages, or keep people in their homes. Obama owns this economic mess and now he and his fellow Democrats are prepared to trademark it.

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The cry for America to wean itself off foreign oil is well founded. After all, we get our oil from a backward region of the world where anti-Americanism is institutional and academic. Since America possesses an abundance of natural resources, with real potential for a boom in energy production, those cries strongly resonate. A current estimate of natural gas in America is 2,047 trillion cubic feet. That is enough to power our nation for the next 100 years.

A study by the Congressional Research Service claimed that America’s supply of recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal is the largest on the planet. Furthermore, we have the ability to tap into an estimated 165 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Even with the current rate of consumption, our supply of oil is enough to fuel the country for at least the next 75 years. Even if we currently lack the infrastructure, the potential exists. And with the injection of revenue and capital investments from a nation as rich as ours, industry technology and innovation would increase likely lowering prices on extraction and production.

The powers that be, however, have a different view of these potentials. It is not a misunderstanding or differing arithmetic. Rather, it is ideologically and politically motivated. Democrats continuously marginalize America’s potential for domestic energy production. Their law makers, with the help of Obama’s pen and rhetoric, have declared war on energy. They chose to tax “Big Oil”, limit oil production and exploration, revoke leases for inland production and financially backbreaking businesses to drill on federally owned land. Democrats decry record profits made by the oil industries as evil and mislead the country to believe they are only leveling the playing field between consumer and producer. In actuality, the Earth-Democrats are engineering a sinister plan for blowback. A person who possesses even an elementary understanding of macroeconomics would know these added costs will simply be passed on to the consumer. Since the days of horse and carriage are long gone, and Americans still rely on oil and gas to commute and move produce across a country roughly the size of Europe, the market will survive out of necessity. That is until taxes on gas and mileage go up. The word is sabotage.

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Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and former Dean of the Stanford Business School, has just published a rigorous economic analysis called: “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge.” The report illuminates how the unbridled growth of government consumption spending has destroyed America’s productivity leadership, driven entrepreneurs to off-shore production, and destroyed middle class wage rates.

Adam Smith, 18th Century English economist, pioneered the concept of the “invisible hand” to describe how capitalism through self-interest, competition, and supply and demand, more effectively allocated resources than the “dead hand” of the state; it levied punitive taxes, adopted restrictive regulations, and enforced monopolies to favor their crony allies. Smith described how English entrepreneurs flourished after their King’s feudal dominance of the economy was liberated by adopting the laissez-faire economics that allowed transactions between private parties to be free from the state’s coercion. Smith described how new wealth was rapidly created and compounded over time form the productivity gains of the Industrial Revolution that leveraged the value of workers and led to higher wages.

The Spence report illuminates that from 1988 to 2008, America’s productivity dominance collapsed by 70%; shrinking from 2.5% gain per year to only .7% per year. This crash in American leadership was the result of 98% of the 27.3 million new jobs created during the period coming from the lower productivity, and thus lower wage, “consumption” sector of the economy. Higher productivity, and thus higher wage, “goods-producing” sector grew by only 620,000 jobs. The root cause of this substitution for lower productivity jobs was a 23% growth in government, to 22.5 million workers, and a 63% growth in government dominated healthcare, to 16.3 million workers. Productivity for the American goods-producing sector continued to grow by a healthy 2.3% per year, but productivity of government workers sunk by 4% and productivity of healthcare workers plummeted by 9%.

In 1988 the average value added for American workers was $75,000. Over the last twenty years, America’s revolution in information-technologies helped drive up the valued added of a goods-producing American worker to $115,200 per year. But the productivity value of government and healthcare worker tumbled to $72,000 per worker; dragging down the average value added of American workers to only $90,750. That $24,450 loss of productivity explains allot about why the American middle class wages have been shrinking in the United States.

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