Someone needs to tell the President: There aren’t green shoots in this economy. They’re just weeds. Everyone with eyes has known that, and today’s jobless report is just the added proof — predicting those figures weeks before the new administration came to town is now an obviously massive failure on the part of President Obama’s economic team, but it seems smaller because they’ve had so many.

The good news is that the global banking system is basically out of trouble, in the sense that the liquidity disruptions of the past 24 months are basically history. Thank unprecedented central-bank intervention for that. LIBOR has traded below 60 bips on some recent days. For Bernanke, the fact that Armageddon has been cancelled has to be considered a “green shoot.”

But consumer demand shows no signs of coming back (although the gorgeous June-sales number from Ford Motor that just came out are a positive sign). When you have a huge collapse in economic output, as we have, then all your future measurements are coming off the much lower base. That’s why everyone from President Obama on down can credibly say that the recession will end this year. Sooner or later the economy will stop shrinking, and when it does, by definition it will be growing again.

Yet everyone needs to understand that just because it will be growing, that doesn’t mean new jobs will be created. And ordinary voters have shown many times that they consider the unemployment picture to be the only economic indicator they care about.

President Obama may soon be in the position of saying that he fixed the economy, while the people will be screaming at him that he’s an out-of-touch elitist who doesn’t see that they still can’t find a job. Strictly as a matter of Schadenfreude, that will be fun to see.

A colleague asks the question: is aggregate demand still falling, or has it bottomed out? If the former, then aren’t we still looking at deflation as the central factor? Frankly, I don’t know how to directly measure aggregate demand (by which I assume you mean consumers plus investment). I guess one proxy would be to subtract the savings rate from national income. On that basis, demand is probably stagnant right now.

Deflation can come in several different ways, and we’re definitely not out of the woods yet in that regard. Watch commodity prices. Metals and similar are back on the rise because the Chinese are stimulating their economy (which has now been growing for four months). It would be the first time in modern history, and a tectonic event, if they lead the world out of recession. (They probably can’t; forgive my indulging in fantasy.)

But when it comes to engendering an immediate economic recovery, the answer is a fairly simple three step process:

• Commit to a zero interest rate policy for at least 2-3 years.
• Enact a 100% tax holiday on business income and capital gains. That’s not a deferral, it’s a full abatement.
• Commit credibly to eliminate new regulations on business.

“Credibly” is a sticky wicket. It would mean throwing cap-trade out the window, ending the deductibility of health-insurance payments, etc. It would also mean getting rid of hundreds of over-regulatory things the Obamans have already done. And it would immediately translate to benefits for small businesses. Big business isn’t suffering from lack of capital. Small business may be suffering very much — although this is hard to measure, and no one seems to be interested in measuring it or publicizing the results.

The economy is weak and will remain weak for years for reasons having nothing to do with government interference, so my three points will only help so much. But they will help, and if President Obama wanted to get serious about weeding, he’d do this. And I think we all know he won’t.

As another friend pointed out today, when you look around the globe at what other countries are doing or not doing (think China and India on cap-n-trade), “it looks sillier and sillier for anyone to put economic activity in the U.S. given the alternatives.”

In a perverse way, that may be not only the underlying goal of the American left, but also sustainable. If we systematically force economic activity other than teaching, lawyering, petty rulemaking, and nursing offshore, then we indeed will be the “kinder, gentler” America that some people think we should be. And as for sustainability, it all depends on whether the people who send us the things we won’t make will keep accepting dollars. The answer to this question is not necessarily no.

Read more at Francis Cianfrocca’s blog.