ZERO Every week, every day in the United States now brings fresh evidence of impending economic collapse.

Whether one looks at statistics of housing starts, loan defaults, or even circumstantial bits of data such as the number of Americans who are now living in long-term motels, the conclusion is inescapable: we are mired in an overwhelming recession only referred to as such to avoid the poisonous implications of calling it a depression. Yet it is rare almost 60 years rare to see an economic statistic more damning than this: according to a monthly report released by the US Department of Labor on Friday, the United States added a grand total of zero jobs to the economy in August. Zero. Nothing. Not a one. In a nation of some 309 million souls and a gross domestic product of nearly $15 trillion, the last, greatest superpower on earth could not muster the strength or the entrepreneurship to bring forth a single burger-flipper or floor polisher. Every new job created in August was immediately offset by employee reductions elsewhere in the economy, with the job losses out-pacing the gains. This followed two consecutive previous months of weak job increase, the most anemic being Julys paltry 85,000 total. Back in February, the Obama administration announced with an optimistic gleam in its eye that 2011 would end with a rosy 2.7% growth in the economy. Months later, Obamas economists were embarrassed to revise the number down to a pathetic 1.7%. The actual number at the years halfway point? 0.7%. Zero. That would also be the odds of the employment environment reversing anytime soon. To match the most recent job growth years of 2003 to 2007, the country would have to add at least 176,000 jobs a month, every month, until 2018 before America returns to the full employment benchmark of 5% unemployment. That would be a high jump of 176,000 jobs from a starting point of zero. Even Obamas Council of Economic Advisors concedes that 2011 will end with the unemployment rate still above 8% at best. Zero also seems to be the number of new employment ideas the President will be offering in a much-anticipated th speech he will deliver to Congress on September 8 . Conventional wisdom expects that he will once more plead for federal funds to be dropped into the money pit of green jobs, the emergent and unproven industries of alternative energies and environmental protection. In previous proposals, Obama claimed that green jobs would result in creating 5 million new positions in ten years. The outrage was not that he made such a claim but that he did it with a straight face. The newspapers now bring us regular updates of multi-million boondoggles like that of Solyndra, a solar panel maker in California that was pumped up by the Obama administration to the tune of $535 million and then declared bankruptcy this week, laying off about 1,100 workers. Green jobs have yet to prove they can ever get into the black. His proposals will also include that ol chestnut of Democrat ideas, spending on infrastructure what the President has famously described as shovel-ready jobs. One of the central features of next weeks address will be Obamas plan to create a kind of federal infrastructure bank, injected, of course, with $30 billion of taxpayer funds. This in addition to the $800 billion already dropped on the economy in the 2009 stimulus and which resulted in the drought of job-creation we see today. Infrastructure spending not only fulfills the leftists unbreakable allegiance to Keynesian ideology but also serves as a serendipitous endowment to the public unions that use the shovels and vote en masse for Democrats. America is not a country of zeroes. The current jobs crisis will be best alleviated by key reductions in corporate taxes, the elimination of a suffocating regulatory culture in Washington, and shrinking the astronomical size and cost of federal debt which, when rightly considered, represents the largest future tax increase ever imagined. Only then will the entrepreneurial instincts of the American people be unleashed and the current nightmarish unemployment trends retreat and it will leave the Obama administration with one chance for re-election: zero.