President Obama has dug himself into an even deeper hole in his attempt to deliver on key campaign promises. Just in February and March alone (two months solely on his watch) he has presided over a record breaking nearly 2 million additional unemployed persons than when he took office. The national unemployment rate now surging well past 8.5% (double that of the majority of Bush’s two terms), Obama's unemployment percentage is the highest in 25 years, and his total of unemployed persons at over 13 million is a gross number that exceeds the 11 million plus of the depression era.

If President Obama inherited the greatest recession since the Great Depression, his policies, lack of action, and wrong headed decisions have now surged the nation passed it.

In pointing this out, a commenter on my blog this past week chided me, "it might take more than 72 days to fix it."

No one doubts that.

But fundamentally I can assert to you that Obama's policies have worsened the matter, and we are still only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of where his Titanic-type view of the economy is leading us.

You only need to understand a single word to be able to grasp the full concept: elasticity.

It is what Obama's policies lack, and without it there will be no foreseeable recovery for the economy for some time. Without it, Obama's trends on unemployment, consumer confidence, and economic recovery will stagnate--and that isn't going to help anyone.

But what do I mean?

Elastic is this fantastic quality found in rubber. Those who use rubber bands for anything as small as bunching things together or as large as bungee jumping from a bridge at several hundred feet understand its value. It is able to stretch, sometimes to the point where other substances would easily break, and as quickly as it had stretched it is able to recoil and return to its original state.

It is precisely the lack of elasticity in America's economy that will continue to give us high unemployment, low production, and poor quality.

But why is that important?

Pay attention here.

Elastic “conditions” (federal tax policies) encourage business owners, patent holders, and idea generators--to engage in risk, set up companies, hire people, and attempt to create, produce, or distribute goods and services. The economic elasticity comes in the form of sacrifice the individual idea generator, patent holder, or business owner is willing to engage in. Sometimes they will mortgage their home, sell off all their goods, and risk everything on the confidence of their idea. Understanding that the onus of their success rests upon their own shoulders they engage in the level of risk or sacrifice that they are comfortable with, in the hopes of producing far more than what they originally put at risk in the first place.

Risk is the currency in an elastic economy. It says to someone who has an idea for a product, "Do you think you can actually pull this thing off?"

Traditionally in economies where America has thrived, we have made it our business as a society to reward those who take the risk. We do this through tax incentives on invention, business development, hiring workers, and increasing production.

Engaging in risk does not benefit everyone who engages in it, and many lessons have been learned by society and the individuals who have failed to become the success their original idea had given them the hope of. Continued...