The Obama Jobs Catastrophe Continues in June

Once again this June's unemployment numbers, offer no indication that the very high employment rates of the last three and a half years are abating or improving.  Despite the wild-eyed claims of the Obama administration, the Stimulus Bills and the drunken spending of the federal government over this period has resulted in no jobs growth improvements.  Combining these wasteful transfers of wealth from the private sector to the control of the government with the expenses and uncertainties of ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank finance reform bill, the concerted efforts to force us to go abroad more and more for oil and gas while leaving extensive fields undeveloped at home and rejecting Canadian offers of tar sand oil, the efforts to bankrupt all of the coal-fired electric plants, the increased threat of anti-trust lawsuits, the developed world's highest corporate tax rate, a Justice Department bent only upon injustice, mandates for the use of unreliable and very expensive energy at unattainable levels in the near future, and myriad other anti-business and anti-earning-a-living efforts, has had just the impact on employment anyone not brain-dead would expect.

The employment numbers for June 2011 are shown in the table below based on the more job-inclusive household survey data, which is not here seasonally adjusted.  The Jun 2011 data is best compared to the July 2010 data to see if there has been any improvement in jobs creation over the past year under Obama's watch.

In making that comparison, the unemployment rate seems to have fallen from 13.75% in July 2010 to the June 2011 rate of 9.32%.   Unfortunately, this is only because many more people have given up on finding employment in that time.  It is more significant to note that 140,134,000 people were employed full-time in July 2010, while only 140,129,000 were employed in June 2011.  This is an actual decrease in the number of Americans employed by 5,000.  That is not a significant decrease, unless you take it in the context that the civilian working age population increased by 1.6 million people in that time!  A stagnant economy at least creates jobs enough to employ those of the growing population who want to work.  The effects of the socialist policies to remove vast wealth and decision-making power from the private sector to the government have produced an economy that cannot even keep up with population growth, let alone actually make progress on recovering from the Great Socialist Recession.

Based on January 2000 when the economy was robust and the existence of good jobs enticed many Americans to take jobs and the unemployment rate was a meaningful 4.0%, we can calculate how many jobs we would need now to have a similar good job economy.  The number of missing jobs now is 21,502,000, which is 1,084,000 more missing jobs than in July 2010.  One would have to say that Obama's so-called effort to "create jobs" is actually a job-destruction effort, which is very effective in doing that.  After any normal recession, the private sector makes adjustments and comes roaring back.  Obama has strangled the lion's roar.

An unemployment rate of 13.3% based on the number of missing jobs is a much more realistic unemployment rate than the 9.2% rate given by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Obama administration.  To that we have to add the 8.9 million employed only part time for economic reasons, according to the BLS.  They want full-time jobs, but cannot find them.  This makes a full-time job shortage of at least 18.8%. This still does not count the many millions of Americans working at jobs for which they are educationally and by experience over-qualified.

As has been historical demonstrated over and over, socialism is a disaster for people who want to earn a decent living, over and above the value many of us attach to our liberties and other aspects of being able to manage our own lives.