The jobs report for the month of March said this from cnn.com:
‘NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Hiring slowed dramatically in March, clouding optimism about the strength of the recovery. Employers added 120,000 jobs in the month, the Labor Department reported Friday, falling far short of economists' expectations. The number marked a significant slowdown in hiring from February, when the economy added 240,000 jobs. "It's discouraging that job growth was half of what it had been the previous month," said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project.’
Politicians are now playing a cat-and-mouse game, watching the jobs report every month to see if the economy is improving enough for Obama to get re-elected (it isn’t).
This is a futile pursuit. Because the economic outlook for America no longer depends on monthly jobs numbers. We are way beyond that.
Oh, sure, if job creation exploded to 400,000 a month for the next 5 years they would be more relevant. But they will not do so or even come close until major economic reforms are made.
And we must start to look at the Big Picture.
For the last 70 years America has recovered well from recessions, but this time it is not. Because this time there are three other severe crises that have developed over long periods of time and that are not being addressed – not only an unemployment crisis, but a housing crisis, a national debt crisis and an energy crisis.
Look at this from zerohedge.com about another facet of the unemployment numbers that is not being discussed:
‘The unemployment rate drops to 8.2% for one simple reason: the number of people not in the labor force is back to all time highs: 87,897,000’
So in other words, no matter what the unemployment figures are for any given month, we have a record 88 million people no longer in the work force(!) This is not going to be fixed by even two million new jobs per year. Because our population is growing every year. We are falling further and further behind.
This 88 million figure is unsustainable. The American economy can no longer afford to support increasing millions of people who are not working and who are being supported by a shrinking group that is employed and by an even smaller group that is paying the federal taxes.
After all it is being reported that almost half of all Americans earning a weekly paycheck (about 70 million people) are not even paying federal taxes because of all of their deductions.
So with Obama refusing to cut spending we have more and more money going out and less coming in, and we have reached a crisis point. Meanwhile Republicans are being savaged for proposing steep spending cuts, which are the only solution that will solve the problems in the economy.
We conservatives have been warning about this situation for decades. We said that the construction of a massive welfare state would strangle America. And now it is doing exactly that.
We said that the nation should watch every penny of its spending even when times were good. Because like a family that spends lavishly in the good years, the bad years can drive it to bankruptcy very quickly and irrevocably.
The American economy today is only staying afloat for three reasons:
*Because the lower Bush-era tax rates are still in effect, surprisingly voted by the Democrat Congress and signed by Obama in December 2010. These will expire at the end of 2012.
*Because a Social Security tax ‘holiday’ is allowing Americans to keep more than $100 billion instead of paying it into SS. This also is helping the economy somewhat but it is draining Social Security.
*Because the election of a tidal wave of Republicans to state and federal offices in November 2010 offered a boost to business confidence.
But this is not enough. Because the economy desperately needs big federal spending reductions now that our annual deficits are so huge. Major cuts would bolster business confidence and increase job creation dramatically.
But Obama and the Democrats never want to cut spending. That is how they have added an unprecedented $6 trillion in new debt in just 4 years. Because they refuse to say to anyone (except the military) that “Your handout check must be reduced” or “The excessive pay/benefit/pension package of your government job is not sustainable” or “Your government job is being eliminated because it is not necessary”.
Today there are 5.5 million more people(!) proportionally working for government than there were 50 years ago.
Spend, spend, spend… This is precisely why the economy has so many crises. Because so many tens of millions of people now are dependent on a government check rather than on themselves. And this Dependency State has been built methodically by the Democrats over prosperous decades during which the money was rolling into the Treasury and the Democrats were spending every penny… and then an extra $15 trillion (our accumulated national debt).
We conservatives warned that this would happen if we nurtured dependency through growing handouts year after year after year. In other words, if you subsidize dependency and poor people with more government handouts you are going to get more dependency and more poor people. It’s really simple and straightforward.
It happens every time the government subsidizes anything. For instance when the government subsidizes solar panels, we get more solar panels going up everywhere. If you cut off the subsidy there would be no more solar panels going up. Period. End of story.
There recently was a story on the internet about a man in North Carolina who is re-opening his family’s furniture business after losing all the business to China years ago.
It is called “onshoring” or “reshoring” (versus the trend to “offshoring” jobs overseas).
This certainly sounds like a good trend but we must understand why jobs have fled America since the end of World War II.
And the reasons all come from the Democrat party. Jobs have been pushed overseas when liberals made business too expensive to operate here through excessive taxes and regulations, labor union agitation, environmental restrictions and lawsuits from the trial lawyers.
Imagine trying to run a furniture company using local wood. The environmentalists would be doing everything they can to stop you from cutting down trees.
Why did Obama bail out General Motors and Chrysler?
Primarily because the cost of unionized labor had pushed them into insolvency, along with myriad regulations and mandates from the government along with steep taxation (as of April 1, America has the highest corporate tax rate in the world).
Look at the map of the United States today. The most jobs, and the best jobs, are generally being created in relatively conservative, non-union, low-tax states. Jobs are fleeing states with far-left Democrat legislatures and governors like Massachusetts, New York, California and Illinois.
We also need to confront the housing crisis and the energy crisis. Both could be addressed if the economy were growing and if Obama’s environmentalist backers were not blocking our energy supplies.
Please go to the search engine at the top of this page and type in ‘US Has Vast Energy Reserves’ to read about another myth from the Democrats and their eco-backers – that America must suffer with high energy costs because we are running out of energy. We are not. There are huge amounts of energy within our shores, more than enough to meet our needs.