President Obama has been in office for nine months, and the Democrat-led Congress approved his $787 billion economic recovery program eight months ago. In the ensuing months, the president and Congress have spent $1.4 trillion more than the government received in revenues. Two of the nation’s oldest and biggest corporations – General Motors and Chrysler – have been effectively nationalized, as have most of the largest banking institutions. And legislation to put two more major economic sectors – health care and energy – under federal supervision is being moved steadily forward toward passage. Yet unemployment in October reached the highest level since 1983, 10.2 percent, and the total number of jobs lost under Obama and the Democratic Congress now stands at more than 2.7 million. Finally, as The Examiner‘s Irwin Stelzer noted in his Friday column, instead of investing in new jobs, corporations have been hoarding money. The value of their cash reserves has surged past $1 trillion to 11 percent of assets, compared with barely 8 percent a year ago. That is effectively a no-confidence vote by the business community.

The economic policies put in place by Obama and Congress have failed for at least three reasons. First, as the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Riedl argues, the White House claim that the recovery funds spent since February account for significant numbers of jobs “saved or created” is a denial of economic reality: “The White House is telling us that adding $200 billion to one part of the economy created/saved 650,000 jobs, but removing $200 billion from another part of the economy has not cost a single job.”