Fox's Maria Bartiromo and former Bush Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao conveniently forgot to mention Chao's husband, Mitch McConnell when talking about the slow economic recovery we've had since her former boss almost put us into another Great Depression.
Here's how she responded during a discussion on the stock market and the damage we've seen from China in recent weeks when asked what she thought about the economic recovery we've seen since President Obama took office.
CHAO: What we are seeing right now is a lack of growth in wages, and frankly it's been very puzzling. This has been one of the most slow, the slowest recovery that we have ever seen. You know, we've been in a very deep recession, and so the bounce back should be much quicker than what is now, and the wage growth as well.
Puzzling huh. It's not puzzling at all. The stimulus should have been bigger and we desperately need spending on infrastructure and trade policies that get Americans back to work, instead of protecting multi-nationals and giant corporations and their race to the bottom on wages. We need more labor unions out there looking out for the interest of workers rather than more right-to-work (a.k.a. the right to bankrupt a union financially) laws and an increase in the minimum wage.
And we need some cooperation from people like her husband, the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Of course the fact that her husband has done everything in his power to stifle economic growth since President Obama was elected never came up.
Instead Chao blamed the slow economic growth on... you guessed it, too many government regulations and the "confidence fairy" keeping all of these good "job creators" on the fence and forcing them to hoard their money rather than hire people.
BARTIROMO: To what do you attribute the malaise in the U.S. economy? As you said a moment ago, we should be a lot farther along in this recovery. It's not just China. What is the reason that we're seeing these tough numbers?
CHAO: Well, what's not being talked about as much, and it should be, you know, is the overhang of federal regulations. Federal regulations have been as an avalanche and they've been holding back the growth of this economy, in all ways big and small.
They include of course the Affordable Health Care Act, the actions of the EPA, the actions of the Labor Department in overtime regulations and all sorts of other regulations, that by themselves may seem alright, but the avalanche and the pile-on effect just seems to hamper economic growth and drag down the employer's confidence in creating new jobs and um... and going out and again, creating new jobs.
A lot of employers are husbanding resources because they are concerned about the cost of compliance and they are husbanding their resources in order to be able to comply with federal regulations which are after all, very costly.
BARTIROMO: Right, and not to mention Dodd-Frank, which is another one, financial services... keeping executives sitting on cash.
Boy, you'd think she was reading straight from a script given to her by her husband.
