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Heritage
Foundation…
Morning
Bell: Obama’s Dismal Jobs
Record
September 7, 2012
By Amy Payne
The
unemployment rate is now 8.1
percent, marking 43 months straight that it has stayed at 8 percent or
above.
At least 12.5 million Americans are out of work. Yet President Obama
has been
trying to convince people that he’s a job-creating President.
Have
4.5 million new jobs been
created under President Obama, as several speakers in Charlotte have
claimed
this week?
A
fact check shows that under
President Obama, the U.S. economy has created a net 415,000
private-sector
jobs—less than 0.2 percent of the 155 million-member American
workforce. But
even that statistic does not tell the full story, since the workforce
itself
has shrunk dramatically in size since Obama took office. Labor force
participation is at 63.5 percent, its lowest level since 1981. In other
words,
a large chunk of Americans have simply given up looking for work. A
significant
number are collecting disability insurance instead, according to new
research
from Heritage’s James Sherk.
In
fact, the share of the adult
population with jobs has remained flat for the past two years. The only
reason
the unemployment rate edged down slightly in August was that fewer
people looked
for work and thus no longer count as unemployed. The percentage of
people
participating in the labor force dropped by 0.2 percent—the same amount
the
unemployment rate dropped. As Sherk has explained, we are in the
slowest
recovery in 70 years, and job creation has not recovered since the
recession
began in 2007. (continues below chart)
The
economy is treading water and
struggling for breath. This is exactly the wrong time to raise taxes.
Yet with
Taxmageddon bearing down on the economy, that is exactly what some
members of
Congress have proposed. This would be a terrible mistake.
The
Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) reported recently that if Congress and the President do not act
before
the end of the year to prevent Taxmageddon, America will have another
recession
on its hands in the coming year. With 12.5 million Americans already
out of
work, imagine a fresh recession.
Read
the rest of the article at Heritage
Foundation
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