The Democrats have two essential problems on the ObamaCare front. First, they are trying to pass something the public intensely dislikes. Second, they are ignoring the real problem (or making it worse by frightening employers and investors): the economy.

As to the economy, Frank Ahrens lists three factors that should alarm us: 1) in “January new-home sales dropped 11.2 percent from December, plunging to their lowest level in nearly 50 years”; 2) “February consumer confidence fell sharply from January, driven down by the survey’s ‘present situation index’ — how confident consumers feel right now — which hit its lowest mark since the 1983 recession”; and 3) “jobless claims filed during the previous week shot up 22,000, which was exactly opposite of what economists predicted.” Ahrens concludes, “We’ve got a long way to go to get out of this economic mess, and we may be actually losing a little ground.”

The administration’s response? A Son of Stimulus plan creeping through Congress, a massive tax-and-spend health-care program with a brand new entitlement mandate that is only budget neutral thanks to a grab bag of accounting tricks and a plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire — thereby raising taxes on, among other things, capital and small business. Even in a robust economy, that would be hard to justify. However, as we can see from the data that Ahrens identifies, we are still at a precarious point:

Any recovery we are experiencing is wobbly, has an uncertain future and will not come about with a burst of new job creation. We know from past recoveries that unemployment has remained high for months — if not quarters — following the official end of each recession. Economists predict that unemployment will hang at between 9 and 10 percent for the remainder of 2010.

It seems, then, that the burden is on the administration to justify each and every policy proposal with a single consideration: does it make the recovery easier or not? And when looked at in that light, virtually nothing on the Obama agenda passes muster. So perhaps not only on health care but also on most everything on the domestic agenda, we should start from scratch.