From Friday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On the unemployment rate remaining at 9.6 percent:
Well, it’s not just that the numbers are bad. It’s that the trend line is flat. The administration had a narrative at the beginning that everything they were going to do — the stimulus, etc. — would keep unemployment at under 8 percent. Of course, that didn’t exactly pan out.
Then the storyline was you simply have to wait and you’ll see a recovery. Well that didn’t happen. Now the line is, which Obama repeats everywhere, is there is improvement and I’m with you in regretting how slow it is. It’s slower than I want but everything is better.
In fact, it’s not. The numbers are flat. Unemployment [has been at] over 9.5 percent for over a year now. And when you look at the growth in the economy, itself, which underlies any increase in employment, it was over 5 percent in the last quarter of last year, then half of that in the first quarter of this year, half of that again in the second quarter of this year. Essentially there’s no growth.
And in part the reason that unemployment stays so high is because of acts of omission and commission by this administration. One example: Business, which has $2 trillion on the sidelines, has no idea what its health-care costs are going to be as a result of Obamacare, and it has no idea what the regulatory atmosphere is going to be as a result of the financial regulation, and no idea what its rates of taxation are going to be.
All of that is keeping money inside, unspent, un-invested, and not used for hiring. And that’s a result of the actual actions of this administration.
On the movement to repeal Obamacare:
At the time it was passed many Democratic leaders said as people learn about it, they will like it. In fact, as they learn about it, they dislike it.
Two things are happening — their own rates are rising, their employees’ rates are rising in part as a result of Obamacare. And secondly, as with McDonald’s, a lot of employers are now thinking of dropping insurance that the workers have today as a result of some of the arbitrary provisions in the law. And that’s already hitting home.