PRESIDENTIAL FAILURE

Posted 07:08 PM ET from Investors Business Daily

Leadership: If the president meant to calm the markets on Monday, he failed utterly — and no wonder. All he did was make it clear he's completely out of ideas on how to get the economy moving again.

After his televised remarks, the Dow industrial average continued to fall, finishing 5.5% lower. The Nasdaq plummeted 6.9%.

Why should it have been any different? In his brief statement, the only thing President Obama demonstrated was a clueless-ness about the country's current mess — of which the debt downgrade is just the latest example — and an even weaker grasp on how to fix it.

Obama put forward just four "growth" ideas, not one of which will accelerate the snail-paced recovery.

• Raise taxes on the rich. We haven't polled every Keynesian economist alive today, but we're pretty sure few would agree with Obama that raising taxes on the most productive parts of the economy will turbocharge growth. Yet there was Obama once again insisting on it, this time dressed up as "tax reform."

• Spend more on roads. Last year, the White House boasted about the "Summer of Recovery" — saying job growth would accelerate because stimulus-sponsored road projects were kicking into high gear. Didn't happen. In fact, we lost 329,000 jobs between June and September 2010. Why does Obama think a repeat will do any better?

• Extend unemployment benefits. If this were an economy-boosting idea, we'd be in the pink right now, since we've had several extensions over the past two years. Plus, there's the fact that every credible economic study has shown that extending unemployment benefits mainly exacerbates joblessness, encouraging the unemployed to hold off taking that next job.

• Extend the temporary payroll tax cut. The results of this Obama chestnut are in: GDP growth in the first six months was almost flat, despite the alleged economic benefits of the existing temporary payroll tax cut.

It's not as if there aren't solid economy-boosting ideas out there. We've listed several in these pages, among them: cut corporate taxes, rein in the administration's out-of-control regulators, kill ObamaCare, sign the pending free-trade deals, enact tort reform.

The only thing lacking now is a president who is willing to admit that his policies aren't working and who is open to trying something different.