The Obama administration has spent much of the week touting their failed $862 billion stimulus bill, but there’s been little to celebrate in what the White House wanted to call “recovery summer.” The AP reports on the latest disappointing economic news today: “The economy grew at a much slower pace this spring than previously estimated, mostly due to the largest surge in imports in 26 years and a slowdown in companies’ restocking of goods. The nation’s gross domestic product – the broadest measure of the economy’s output – grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the April-to-June period, the Commerce Department said Friday. That’s down from an initial estimate of 2.4 percent last month and much slower than the first quarter’s 3.7 percent pace. The revision follows a week of disappointing economic reports. The housing sector is slumping badly after the expiration of a government homebuyer tax credit. And business spending on big-ticket manufactured items such as machinery and software, an important source of growth earlier this year, is also tapering off. As a result, most analysts expect the economy will grow at a similarly weak pace for the rest of this year.”

Business leaders, too, are getting fed up. The Wall Street Journal editors write today, “American business leaders were remarkably quiescent during the Obama Administration’s first 18 months, but more are now speaking up as the threats to the economic recovery and long-term U.S. prosperity become more serious. The latest is Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who warned a technology forum this week that without a change in U.S. government policy ‘the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here. And wealth will not accrue here.’” Otellini went on to say, “I think this group [the administration] does not understand what it takes to create jobs. And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.”

Even some Democrats in Congress seem to finally understand how badly the economy is performing. The Washington Post reports today, “With the economy rapidly weakening, some senior Democrats are having second thoughts about raising taxes on the nation’s wealthiest families and are pressing party leaders to consider extending the full array of Bush administration tax cuts, at least through next year. . . . “a growing cadre of Democrats – alarmed by evidence that the recovery is losing steam and fearful of wounding conservative Democrats in a tough election year – are advocating a plan that would permanently extend tax cuts benefiting the middle class while renewing breaks for the wealthy through 2011, senior Democratic aides said.”

Business leaders, some Democrats in Congress, and Americans in every corner of the country are seeing how the Obama administration’s economic policies have failed to bring about the recovery Democrats predicted. Certainly, as Rove wrote yesterday, “recovery summer” “will rank as one of the all-time presidential PR disasters.” Unfortunately, as the WSJ editors lament, “Our sense is that President Obama and his advisers believe their own advertising that the stimulus has been a smashing success, that tax rates don’t matter to investment, and that CEOs are merely self-interested rich guys who want to get richer.” It’s long past time for this administration and this Democrat-run Congress to stop punishing job creators, scrap plans for massive tax hikes, and reject more regulations, more government intrusion, and more government spending as the answers to our economic problems.

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