Out of Touch

In a press conference today, President Obama said that the "private sector is doing fine."  James Pethokoukis, along with the entire private sector, disagrees:

1. Private-sector jobs have increased by an average of just 105,000 over the past three months and by just 89,000 a month during the entire Obama Recovery.

In 1983 and 1984, during the supply-side Reagan Boom, private sector jobs increased by an average of 292,000 a month. Adjusted for population, that number is more like 375,000 private-sector jobs a month

2. If the labor force participation rate for May had just stayed where it was in April, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%. As it is, the U.S. economy is suffering is longest sustained bout of 8% unemployment or higher since the Great Depression.

3. Private-sector GDP rose just 2.6% in the first quarter, after rising a measly 1.2% last year.

By contrast, private-sector GDP rose 3.8% in 1983 and 6.5% in 1984 during the supply-side Reagan Boom.

4. The U.S. stock market is down 7% since early April.

5. Real take-home pay is down over the past year.

6. That first-quarter GDP report also showed that after-tax corporate profits dropped for the first time in three years. Major red flag.

No, Mr. President, the private-sector isn’t doing fine at all. And it certainly isn’t ready to deal with a fiscal cliff of tax hikes or a continued deluge of new regulation.

I wonder if Obama will be pounded by the MSM for being out of touch with regular Americans?   Doesn't look like it:

UPDATE:

President Obama has now backtracked on his previous statement and now says that '[i]t is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine."  What was absolutely not clear earlier today now is crystal clear.

Also, something I did not touch on before in the President's remarks was this aside:

And the most important thing I think we can do is make sure that we continue to have a strong, robust recovery. So the steps that I’ve outlined are the ones that are needed. We’ve got a couple of sectors in our economy that are still weak. Overall, the private sector has been doing a good job creating jobs. We’ve seen record profits in the corporate sector.

This theme has popped up from time to time, but I think the President might actually believe that the private sector is composed solely of CEOs and millionaires.  This surely is a very odd, stereotypical, and sophomoric view of how the economy works.  The private sector is not just filled with fat cats wading in swimming pools filled with money a la Scrooge McDuck.