A Glacial July Employment Growth

Amid the chaos and the great effort of our federal government to sabotage the private sector, that often heroic and under-appreciated sector of our society struggled to create a few jobs.  The number of missing jobs fell from 13.30% to 13.21%.  This continues the pattern throughout the Great Socialist Recession of worsening and then briefly bettering job growth, but with the job creation never vigorous.

The number of missing jobs decreased by 132,000 jobs in July.  At this rate of net job creation, the number of missing jobs will be as few as the 11,023,000 of December 2007 in a mere 78.4 months or 6.5 years.  Of course, that assumes that even this anemic rate of job creation can be sustained.  Between now and the 2012 election, I doubt that it will be.

The job statistics table is given below.  The missing jobs are calculated in comparison to January 2000 when there are plenty of good jobs available for those who wanted to work.  At that time, 67.49% of the total non-institutional civilian working age population was working or looking for work.  The unemployment rate was only 4.04% then.  Many of the unemployed were actually just switching jobs with a little time off in between. How we long for those times!

I would expect the August jobs report to show some deterioration based on the fact that from the time a company decides to hire someone to the time they have and that person starts work, is usually a number of weeks.  Four weeks prior to mid-July was a time when the growth in GDP in the First Quarter was still thought to be 1.9%, not the second revision downward to 0.4%.  The Second Quarter disappointing growth rate of 1.3% was also unknown.  That was also a time when many major corporations, many of whom are doing better than most small businesses, were reporting fairly good earnings, largely made abroad.  The effort of Obama and the Democrats to once again raise taxes in the debt ceiling negotiations and their winning of a nearly blank check to continue mad government spending levels, will further discourage business activity.  Many a small businessman has simply decided to wait until after the 2012 election to see if there will be any hope for expansion of their business.

Obama's continued talk of creating jobs with high speed trains, green energy projects, electric cars, stimulus spending on infrastructure, extended unemployment benefits, and job training programs is just a continuation of ruinous transfers of wealth from the private sector to the government sector.  The actions are all job-destroyers. 

It is not a help to businesses to hire if extending jobless benefits means that states will continue the high unemployment insurance rates charged to companies on every employee they have.  Because of these unemployment funds, my company tax rate went up by a factor of 7.33 in 2009 and has continued there since.  This is not the way to encourage companies to hire more people.  But it is among Obama's crazy prescriptions.