It just ain’t happening, Joe.

Correction: The original post of this piece contained a statement that employer-provided health insurance will be counted as taxable income to employees. That information is incorrect. We regret the error.

Remember this howler from Vice President Joe Biden?

“The recovery package – everybody’s talking about it having – it’s over. The truth is, now, we’re spending more now, this summer, than we, – I’m calling this the recovery – the summer of recovery.”

Stammer away there, Joe. The fact that you can’t spit it out clearly makes me think that you don’t really believe it, which is, in an odd sort of way, a relief. Given a choice, I prefer a vice president who is ridiculously political to one who is completely delusional. Which is what you’d have to be if you thought in late July when Biden said this, or if you think now, that any sort of meaningful economic recovery is underway.

According to a Reuters-Ipsos poll from this week, 72 percent of Americans say they are “very concerned” about jobs. And why not? It’s hard to imagine doing more to kill off economic recovery and job growth than the Obama administration has done since taking office. Let’s just look at a few examples.

Thousand of employees that once worked at profitable auto dealerships across the country lost their jobs when the Obama administration effectively nationalized most of the American auto industry. That’s because under government supervision, GM and Chrysler shuttered hundreds of hitherto profitable dealerships. Meanwhile, commercial lenders were given a cautionary tale when Obama rolled over secured bond holders in order to minimize pain to, and thus curry favor with, union auto workers.

Millions of families that make their mortgage payments on time are watching the values of their homes decline in part because the federal government refuses to quit monkeying around in the home mortgage business. The administration’s Home Affordable Mortgage Program, known as “HAMP”, is an unqualified disaster that isn’t helping delinquent borrowers but is putting off the reckoning that must come in the housing market if values are ever to stabilize and start rising again.

Employers are figuring out that ObamaCare is filled with landmines. We talked about one of them, the tax filing mandate that will have every business owner in America issuing thousands of 1099 forms to essentially every vendor with whom they do business.

Then there’s the 23,000 oil field workers idled in the wake of the BP oil spill because of Obama’s arbitrary moratorium on deepwater drilling.

Space precludes a more thorough listing but you get the point. And yet while this is all happening in plain sight, we all get to hear good old Joe Biden yammering on about jobs that have been “created or saved” and his “Summer of Recovery.”

Some very smart economic historians have said that the Crash of 1929 would not have become a decade-long depression if it hadn’t been for the horrendous interventions of both Hoover and Roosevelt.

Similarly, the miracle that is the American economy will recover and prosper on its own if only those with the power to do so in Washington, will get out of its way.