If the private sector of this country is doing “fine,” as President Barack Obama absurdly put it the other day, we’d hate to see what it might look like if it were distressed.

The private sector, and the economy in general, are doing so poorly that it comes as a shock to most people to learn that we are not still in a deep recession. But as a point of fact, the recession officially ended in June 2009, according to economists. The problem is that the “recovery” has been so feeble that it feels like we are still in a recession. And even though the recession is over, we certainly are not back to where we were before the recession. Not in Cobb County, not in north Georgia, not anywhere in the country, for that matter.

Yet President Obama says the private sector is “doing fine.” It’s not in Georgia, where the unemployment rate of 8.9 percent is even higher than the national average of 8.1 percent. And let’s not forget that neither of those numbers takes into account the millions of Americans who have simply stopped looking for work. Only 69,000 jobs were created nationwide last month, for goodness sake!

And then came word this week that the net worth of median American family has fallen nearly 40 percent since 2007, most of that period obviously coinciding with Obama’s watch.

Yes, the president sees weakness — but in the public sector, not the private one. He thinks government needs to grow, even though the public sector unemployment rate — 4.2 percent — is just half that of the private sector. Obama wants to spend your tax dollars to create more good-paying, bountiful-benefit government jobs. He thinks that will cure unemployment.

Not so, says U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.).

“The private sector is not ‘fine,’” he said. “In my recent travels across Georgia, I’ve talked to many people in the private sector who are not doing well, and they are not doing well because of government overregulation and uncertainty. If we could do anything to empower our economy right now, we should call a regulation timeout. In addition, this administration has tried to eliminate risk. Government’s job is not to eliminate risk, it is to mitigate risk. If you eliminate risk, you take the power of investment away from the private sector and entrepreneurs.”

Obama has proven once again that he has no fundamental understanding of how jobs and wealth are created. In fact, they come from the private sector. And if the private sector does not create them, they are not created at all. Government does not create wealth or income. It merely sucks capital out of the private sector and transfers it to a variety of favored constituencies and sectors — and takes a cut for itself in the process.

The public sector continues to grow in most parts of this country. It’s the private sector that’s barely hanging on — and hoping for change.