The proposed "Jobs Summit" is nothing more than political grandstanding, and will end up as a Dog and Pony show, with no results.  

Just last week, with the official unemployment rate at 10.2 percent and the unofficial anywhere from 16 to 22 percent, Barack Obama proposed one of his meaningless remedies – a "jobs summit" in Washington DC. This gathering of purported experts from government, from business, academia, and of course, labor unions, is supposed to figure out how to get millions of unemployed Americans back to work. How they will do it is anybody's guess, considering that the people who will undoubtedly attend will not be those who can make a difference. Instead, they will make a lot of vague pronouncements; many will probably blame the free market and greedy business owners along with the Bush administration, and then return from whence they came with nothing to show for their efforts except a lot of empty meetings and, of course, major speeches.

Meanwhile, one can expect that this event will be an expensive one, and everyone can be sure that in the end, it will turn out to be a total sham. Expenses will be high, cost recovery all but non-existent, and the all-important results essentially nil.

Barack Obama's repeated declarations that "Over the past 10 months, we've taken a number of bold steps to break the back of this recession," along with claims that the massive stimulus bill created more than 1 million jobs have, so far, fallen flat. How that there was any significant impact nationally is impossible to say, and, of course, the saved jobs numbers are usually cooked up out of thin air. On November 17 reports surfaced that many of the "created jobs" were in non-existent congressional districts. An earlier accounting of stimulus effects was fraught with other inaccuracies. It is plain that the bean counting process cannot be trusted.

The same goes for claims that the economy is now growing. Certainly, if one considers growth to be a measure of government spending, but government spending is a meaningless statistic to someone who is out of work and sees a dead end in front of them. And government does not produce wealth; it consumes it. What the administration will not recognize is that there is no such thing as a "jobless recovery." The truth is that a real recovery will not occur until there is job growth.

Obama states "We all know there are limits to what government can and should do…But we have an obligation to consider every additional, responsible step we can." Too bad that to him responsible steps consist only of more spending, more intervention and the creation of future uncertainty, which makes it less likely that potential employers will risk of hiring new people. "Hiring often takes time to catch up to economic growth," Obama said. "Given the magnitude of the economic turmoil we've experienced, employers are reluctant to hire." Or, they are reluctant to hire because of the turmoil they expect if the proposed massive taxes and regulatory burdens are imposed on them. It is likely that an economy post nationalized health care and carbon taxes would make our current situation look extremely rosy. If the legislative left gets its way, look for massive business closures, 20 % official unemployment rates, and more blame heaped on President Bush. Meanwhile a number of pundits are expecting another collapse next year when the commercial real estate market goes the way that the residential market did in 2007-2008.

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor told Politico.com that the White House has not listened to Republicans on job creation.  Of course, Obama says he's looking for good ideas, regardless of their origin: "We are open to any demonstrably good idea to supplement the steps we've already taken to put America back to work," The operative wording here is "demonstrably good" which automatically disqualifies anything that would be effective because it has already been labeled as one of the "failed policies of the past."

The fundamental issue behind this current continuing recession is that for the economy return to prosperity the government must take John Galt's advice and "Get the hell out of my way." The likely best medicine that could be applied is for legislature to put the brakes on health care legislation, repudiate global warming and then reduce government bureaucracy and regulatory enforcement. This will never happen on the present watch. Without it the possibility of a true recovery any time soon is infinitesimal.

On November 13, 2009 Rush Limbaugh announced that in the next State of the Union speech a war on deficits will be announced. The jobs summit announcement, on the eve of Obama's visit to the People's Republic of China looks like a political dog and pony show. Cutting deficits during the current financial state of affairs, and even under a resurgent economy would only be possible if government were downsized considerably. Eliminating proposed government expansion and increased taxes would be a good place to start.

The Obama Reid Pelosi triumvirate has shown an established opinion that there is no such thing as too much government and the more government spends, the better. Of course, if they want to cut deficits, the only possibility they consider is increased taxation, which will mean lower revenues and concurrent increased deficits. These folks have no concept of what anything positive that does not come from government.

What will we see at the jobs summit? A lot of demands for hiring that won't happen. Perhaps Pelosi will propose jail terms for business owners and managers who fail to hire enough new people. Will the business professionals propose getting government out of the way? Probably not, as the ones attending will be connected too closely to the beltway insiders, and will not propose anything of value. And in any event, if they did, it would go nowhere.

Why the fanfare? Because Obama needs to make the right noises in front of his Chinese hosts. He is also likely aware that the tide of public opinion has turned against him and against the legislature because of the plans to spend the nation into oblivion. He won't change those plans, but he will try to convince everyone that he has to increase possibilities of Democrat success in 2010 and 2012. Here's hoping that the public knows a snow job when it sees one.