Or maybe we're just running out of people to fire.
But "improve" is such a relative term. The US is still losing jobs and the fact that it slowed down is about as useful as the Titanic sinking a bit slower; the end result is the same.
Now, contrast this number with the Obama promise to create 95,000 (probably useless paper-shuffling) jobs each month and the word "ineffective" comes to mind.
You want to save the economy Barack? Here is how to do it.
1. STOP THE WARS. You promised you would do it. The longer you wait the worse you and your party look, and nobody falls for that "hide the mess you have made of this country by creating messes in everyone else's country" stuff any more. That kind of propaganda trick is sooooooo last century anyway. I would be careful touting the glories of war right now; you are dangerously close to having one show up at your front door.
2. Shut down the Department of Defense. We don't need "defending" by constant invasions and garrisons in every nation and continent on the planet. The US has the world's largest nuclear arsenal (we are still making the payments on). Anyone attacks us, they vanish in a blinding flash of light. They know it. The only one attacking us, from USS Liberty to USS Cole to 9-11, is Israel, trying to trick us into killing Israel's enemies. Which is making them our enemies for no good reason at all.
Shutting down the department of defense would allow you to cut federal taxes by 50% across the board. You don't need an economics degree to know what a sudden lowering of taxes would do to this nation's economy.
3. Speaking of Israel, stop pouring our hard-earned money all over Israel's self-made problems. For one thing, the United States is not responsible for the Holocaust, whatever it actually was. It happened before most of us were born and if history serves me right the US sacrificed much blood and treasure to STOP Hitler from completing whatever his plans were. Israel should be sending money to the families who lost fathers and mothers in WW2, not the other way around. They do not act like they are grateful. Let's stop being schmucks. Israel does not act like they are grateful for our assistance for the last 60 years; next time we should stay at home.
Israel wants to be an independent nation? Independent means standing on their own two feet, learning how to get along with their neighbors, and paying their own damned bills.
Second, all that money the US sends to Israel is a CRIME AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Israel, a nuclear power with a not-so-clandestine weapons factory underneath Dimona, has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty despite requests to do so from both the US and UN. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 was amended by the Symington Amendment (Section 669 of the FAA) in 1976. It bans U.S. economic, and military assistance, and export credits to countries that deliver or receive, acquire or transfer nuclear enrichment technology when they do not comply with IAEA regulations and inspections. This provision, as amended, is now also contained in Section 101 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA).
The Glenn Amendment (Section 670) was later adopted in 1977, and provided the same sanctions against countries that acquire or transfer nuclear reprocessing technology or explode or transfer a nuclear device. This provision, as amended, is now contained in Section 102 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA).
STOP STEALING FROM THE AMERICAN people! Those who rob Peter to pay Paul will always have the support of Paul, but Peter has had @#$%ing enough of this crap!
Okay, that's the cost control part.
4. Make it a criminal offence to export American jobs. The CEO's of corporations like to pretend they are the best and brightest. Well, considering the state of our manufacturing they come across as a generation of spoiled brats born into privilege, whose access to the corporate suites is based on memberships in the right country clubs and degrees from the right schools that daddy got them into. Your predecessor is a good example, a man who ran how many companies into the ground before inheriting his daddy's job at the White House?
So let's see how smart our best and brightest really are. Let's hurl down the gauntlet and see if they can restart the manufacturing they so glibly tossed away. Frankly, I don't think they can do it. After a generation of MBA's educated to have little respect for the products they were manufacturing and seeing business activity as centered on that giant open-air casino called Wall Street, I think they are functionally idiots. Ruthless and greedy idiots, but still idiots when it comes to actually making products that last (and as a side note, my Zenith TV set died last night and nobody knows where to even find parts for the thing).
This leads me to my next point.
5. We need a national non-military technology incubator. The US will recapture its technological lead and manufacturing might only with new technologies that leapfrog us ahead of other nations. That means creating a space where the creative innovators (not the country-club dunsels) can create the next generation technologies on which to base new products and new jobs. We need real solutions to real world need, not a lot of snake-oil for made-up crisis like human-caused global warming. If we spent 1/10th on R&D what we spend on killing brown people around the world, we wouldn't need to steal their oil any more.
Off the top of my head I can think of some real projects that need doing, like hot fusion, cold fusion, cheap bulk desalinization, photonics, cheap Earth-to-orbit transportation (leading to cost-effective garbage collection of all those pieces from collided satellites), and maybe it is time to seriously look at developing commercial spaceflight around the solar system to find new sources for the raw materials we have so recklessly squandered here on Earth to date. Our whole economy seems geared to digging up minerals, fashioning them into this year's fashion statement thingamajig, then 6 months from now tossing it back into a landfill and starting the process all over again.
Maybe instead of building robots to hunt down and kill people we could build robots that sort through the trash before it gets to the landfill and bring recycling to a realistic level.
NASA used to serve the function of technology incubator well. Indeed the tech boom of the 1970s and 1980s all traces back to the innovations created during the race to the Moon. But NASA's budgets have been crushed, NASA itself compromised and corrupted by Climategate, and being from the old NASA I can tell you that the "New" NASA management (Yes, they too were MBAs) was a serious impediment to innovation.
6. You need to realize that an economic system is a system and that money has to flow through all levels of society. Looting the people and piling the cash up in the banks and investment houses may get you some tasty campaign donations, but the country is dying out here and from where we sit nobody in the government has a clue what to do about it or maybe they just don't give a flying ... you know. Maybe we need to go back to having a government that is representative of the people, and dump all these lawyers and millionaires for some teachers, engineers, farmers and a few more doctors in Congress; people who actually KNOW how to make a nation operate and prosper.
7. Finally, the United States has had three central banks. All three have brought the nation to the edge of collapse. Insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting a different outcome. Ergo, we must conclude that the US Government is insane and incompetent, and needs to be sent en masses to the Happy Vale Home for the terminally befuddled.
Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all had the wisdom and courage to do what was best for the people of the United States.
Are you ready to admit that you are not even close to being the equal of those men?
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