Tim Geithner's excuses for Obama

They can't cover up the president's distaste for private industry

Via-NY POST

Kyle Smith

This week Timothy Geithner got his Tea Party on.

But he forgot to invite the president.

Geithner did everything but put on a Paul Revere costume and wave a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag when he declared, “This president understands deeply that governments don’t create jobs, businesses create jobs. And our job as government is try to make sure we’re creating the conditions that allow businesses to prosper so they can hire people back, get this economy going again.

“We have a recovery led by private demand, private recovery,” he continued. “That is the most important thing we can do right now . . . of course, we recognize that if we’re going to have growth in the future we also need to be — make people confident that we’re going to have the will as a country here in Washington to act to bring those deficits down over time as growth strengthens, recovers.”

Lovely. Geithner also made soothing noises about keeping most of the across-the-board Bush-era tax cuts, the ones Obama spent his campaign denouncing as giveaways to merely “the rich.”

So — just how “deeply” does President Obama understand that “governments don’t create jobs”?

In April, Obama said, (emphasis mine) “Government on its own can’t replace the 8 million jobs that have been lost.” Yet he seemed confident that his stimulus on its own could replace a lot of them, bragging of his “investments in our infrastructure, from interstate highways to broadband networks. That not only creates private sector jobs, but is also creates the platform, a better environment, in which business can prosper.”

Except Obama is to the business environment what BP is to the real one.

Last week, in his radio address, Obama grandly announced that he had handpicked a couple of solar power companies and was lavishing them with nearly $2 billion in loan guarantees. To create jobs.

That money might spur employment. It might also be totally wasted on giddy overconfidence not unlike that which powered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.

In Spain, home to what BusinessWeek dubbed “the solar power bubble,” the government has spent some $24 billion on solar since 2008. The same leadership is now reversing course, arguing that its massive subsidies — solar plant owners are paid roughly 12 times as much per kilowatt as producers of fossil fuels — must be ratcheted downward “to avoid damaging the competitiveness of industry,” Spain’s industry minister told the Spanish parliament.

Spain has a Socialist government, and it is more worried about how solar subsidies distort the marketplace than Obama is.

The day before his solar announcement, Obama announced $800 million in federal loans and grants, which he said will directly create 5,000 jobs and help spur economic development in some of the nation’s hardest-hit communities.

“Once we emerge from the immediate crisis, the long-term economic gains to communities that have been left behind in the digital age will be immeasurable,” Obama said. Maybe. But if there is long-term economic gain to be had, why don’t private investors jump in?

Every time Obama picks this or that company for government largess, he wounds its competitors, makes investors uncertain, steers industry in a new direction and increases the national debt, which in turn puts upward pressure on two more things businesses don’t like — taxes and inflation.

The president is “trying to micromanage industries,” complained the CEO of Verizon. But the president isn’t “trying.” He’s succeeding.

Geithner has been reduced to “working the phones telling business leaders that Obama doesn’t hate them because the administration is feeling the backlash and realizing that bashing corporate America is undermining the recovery,” a senior executive at a major bank told Charles Gasparino of Fox Business News. “But the damage may already be done.”

Even Obama crony and check-writer Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan has blasted Obamanomics. Gasparino reported that Dimon is angry about the cost of the new health-care entitlement.

“The chief business of the American people is business,” Calvin Coolidge said in 1925. The words are as true today as they were then. But Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, was obliged to provide an unfortunate update. The FT reported that he had said that “Business did not like the US president and the president did not like business.”