The Cure

In August of 2006 I was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in my throat.  I began treatment for that tumor in October 2006 and completed radiation and chemotherapy by December 2006.  While the tumor had been eradicated and there were no further signs of cancer, at the end of my treatment in November 2006 I was not cured.  In fact, it took until November 2011 for my doctors to pronounce me cured and the other reality is that I will live with side effects of the treatments for the rest of my life and will never be the way I was before the tumor was diagnosed.  I mention this because our economy is not unlike my cancer.  In January 2009, when President Obama was inaugurated, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month.  The administration of President Bush had the worst record of creating jobs of any administration since World War II and when he left office, the country was in recession.  Over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, over 4.5 million private sector jobs have been created but that is not enough to replace the 8 million jobs lost due to the recession. To make matters worse, state and local governments under Republican control have shed almost 1 million public sector jobs and in spite of the growth of private sector jobs, continue to cut employment in state and local government.  The expectation the economy can heal any faster from the “economic cancer” than my body healed from the biological cancer is an unrealistic expectation.  The delay in economic healing is made worse by the reluctance of the Republicans in the US Senate to allow any legislation to come to a vote that might create jobs.  At the same time there have been record Republican filibusters, the Republicans criticize the Obama economic policies which, in reality, with very few exceptions are policies carried over from the Bush administration.  The massive deficit was the result, for the most part, of the combination of Bush policies and the recession caused by Bush policies.  At no time in the economic history of the country has the solution to recession been economic austerity on the part of government, but that is the solution the Republicans seek.  Both economic cancer and biological cancer take time to heal and it is unreasonable to expect the country to recover faster than the human body from such an event.