Exactly one week after the Labor Department reported that only 69,000 U.S. jobs were created in May (a drop from the already paltry 77,000 in April), President Obama said this in a press conference last Friday: “The private sector is doing fine.”

Fine? It is true that in this painfully slow recovery, revenue and profits are growing. But the private sector as a whole is not “doing fine.” It continues to struggle. The U.S. economy grew at a rate of only 1.5 percent in 2011, down from 3.1 percent the year before. The unemployment rate remains above 8 percent as those private companies refrain from hiring.

The comment showed a President who is woefully out of touch with his country. It also revealed that he intends to continue using the power of the federal government to shift money from the private to the government sector. After saying the private sector was doing fine, Obama continued:

“Where we’re seeing problems is with state and local government, often with cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help they’re accustomed to from the federal government.”

This was the point he really intended to make. To get the economy moving, we have to “invest” more in government. But we already tried that. We had the stimulus, “shovel-ready jobs,” Solyndra and all that. What the economy needs is not a bigger, more robust, more energetic government sector, but a more robust, more energetic private sector.

The President completely fails to understand that. His only economic plan is to transfer wealth from private-sector job creators to the public-sector and to the unionized and politically favored constituencies of the Democratic Party. Other than that, he’s got nothing. And Americans are starting to realize it.