Obama '08?

Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed.

The days of spinning illusions in a Greek temple in a football stadium are done. The One is dancing on the edge of one term.

The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant.

The greatest irony of the GOP's advocacy for the rich is that not all of them are "rich." That's called masochist; they want to suffer too with the rest of the country!

Tax reform. Lower rates and eliminate loopholes. Broaden the tax base and increase revenues.

Reform entitlement programs. Means test SS and Medicare. Raise the age eligibility, and allow for the option of a private alternative to SS.

Not only stop the tidal wave of government regulation, push it back. Encourage private enterprise, large and small, to grow.

Palin called for the elimination of the federal corporate income tax, as well as an end to tax loopholes, corporate welfare and bailouts. “This is how we break the back of crony capitalism because it feeds off corporate welfare, which is just socialism for the very rich,” she said. “We can change all of that.”

Companies are not hiring now because in general, they have slack in their productive capacity. More specifically, in July 2011, their capacity utilization — a measure that compares demand for their products to their ability to produce them — stood at 77.5% — short of the long-term average of 80.4%.

For example, imagine a baseball bat factory that can make 100 bats an hour — applying the current U.S. rate of capacity utilization, that factory has orders for only about 78 an hour. Why would it need to hire more workers if it already has more than it needs to meet demand?

In short, the average U.S. company is not hiring because it does not need the extra workers to meet demand. And American companies are making record profits without hiring workers — $1.66 trillion in 2010 with the S&P 500 expected to grow earnings 18% in 2011 and 14% more in 2012.

But these averages mask the companies that are hiring. Here are three examples — two start-ups and one company that just went public:

Hearsay Social. I interviewed this corporate social media management company back in June. Back then it had 30 people and said it was hiring aggressively in its marketing, sales, engineering, and recruiting functions. The reason for the hiring, according to co-founder Steve Garrity, is that “due to customer demand, we can’t answer the phones fast enough.”

Cardlytics provides $100 to $200 in discounts for items that consumers typically buy — inserted into their bank statements. It had 72 people when I spoke with its CEO Scott Grimes last October. He expected to end 2011 with over 100. CEO Scott Grimes explained that Cardlytics was hiring because of its expansion — into mobile devices through its bank customers, social networks, and global markets. According to Grimes, “Tax credits never enter my mind when it comes to hiring.”

Teavana (TEA). I wrote about this company favorably before it went public last month. After reporting 36% growth in the most recent quarter on Friday, Teavana declared that it “intends to more than double its number of U.S. stores by 2015, to 500 retail locations. It announced a franchise agreement to open stores in the Middle East in 2012. And it’s hiring,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Why do companies hire? Because they can’t grow without doing so. If companies are not hiring it’s because their CEOs are choosing not to invest in products or services — possibly related to mobile devices or social networks — and new markets — like China and India — that are growing fast enough to demand those new employees.

Obviously not all industries and companies can do this. But expecting Washington to solve a problem that is the primary job of company CEOs may be good politics — but terrible economics.