SALENA ZITO: Obama Sired America’s Discontent.

In the Obama economy, wages have not improved; in fact, they have created great unease and not inspired the confidence Americans once had in work — which is why the president has responded by pushing higher wages for service jobs once meant to be temporary bridges from high school and college to adult life.

He needed a straw man for his climate-change regulations that closed manufacturing industries, nearly made coal production extinct and clobbered the shale industry. So he blames companies like McDonald’s for not doubling the hourly pay for entry-level jobs to mask his inability to address the economic setbacks caused by his politics.

The economy is dismal not just in the old Rust Belt but nationwide. On Tuesday, the National Association of Counties released its gold-standard study that shows, six years after the economic expansion began, 93 percent of U.S. counties have failed to fully recover from the devastating contraction they suffered during the recession.

Only 7 percent, or 214 out of 3,069 counties nationwide, recovered by 2015 to their pre-2008 numbers on total employment, economic expansion, home values and unemployment.

Mr. President, the only person peddling fiction appears to be you.

Related: Obama orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent.