Obama's Socialist Fantasy Tale - Jobs

In the State of the Union address before Congress, some of the Justices of the Supreme Court, and a number of top military leaders, Obama made the claim to them and to the American People, that he has created 3.1 million new jobs in the private sector.  Let us examine this claim.

First, we should look at some employment numbers.  In December 2007, before the recession hit the United States, we had 146,334,000 people employed according to the household survey that covers all jobs.  At the depth of the jobs recession in January 2010, we had only 136,809,000 jobs, for a loss of 9,525,000 jobs!  In December 2011, when Obama was in the White House for 3 years and two years after the bottom in the employment market, we have had an increase of 3,872,000 jobs since the bottom with 140,681,000 people employed.  Great, but the number of people of working age has also increased during that time.  Strangely enough, many of the additional 3,752,000 people want jobs.

Note that in December 2011 we actually still had 5,653,000 fewer jobs than we had in December 2007.  Meanwhile, the working age population grew by 7,428,000 people over the course of that 4 year period.  This is a monthly average growth rate in the working age population of about 154,750 people.  Back in January 2000, when jobs were plentiful, 67.49% of the working age population had or wanted jobs.  If we use that figure to calculate how many of the added 154,750 people a month in the working age population want jobs, we get 104,441 people/month want a job.

During this Obama recovery between the bottom in January 2010 and December 2011, we would have needed 23(104,441) = 2,402,143 new jobs just to keep up with population growth.  Since 3,872,000 were added in that time, we did a bit better than keep up with population growth.  Over and above those wanting new jobs due to the working age population growth, 1,469,857 jobs were created.  We can count these new jobs against the 9,525,000 jobs lost from before the recession to that low month of January 2010.  At this rate, in 6.5 years we can re-employ all the people who lost their jobs in this recession.  Thus, this recovery will take a total of 10.5 years from December 2007.  A truly lost decade that only the Great Depression exceeds.

The jobs situation is much more grim than Obama would have us believe.  He is not lying about the 3 million new jobs, but he is using the fact that the number sounds impressive to misdirect our attention from a real understanding of the magnitude of the problem.  He is assuming, as Progressive Elitists so often do, that most of the People are too ignorant or too busy to notice how he is misdirecting them.

His prescription for creating new jobs is more of the same old failed policies of his administration to date.  The reason he will not learn from his past mistakes, which were dumb in the first place, is because his policies are really all about politics and giving his core supporters what they want.  He is not really motivated by solving the jobs problem and most certainly is not motivated to let the private sector create jobs.  He wants to reward teachers with more federal funds, despite the fact that the present huge federal fund expenditures on education have not improved student knowledge.  He wants to throw more money at infrastructure despite such projects doing little to revive the economy.  Since those getting infrastructure money have to go through long environmental studies, which provide jobs for many government workers, and contractors have to use union labor, this is really just another scheme to give taxpayer money to his supporters.  His other big claim to fame is funding so-called green energy.  As we have seen, that is just a means to provide his rich supporters with tons of money as their companies fail because even with government grants, subsidies, and mandates to use their energy, that energy is so expensive and unreliable that it cannot compete except in niche markets. 

Meanwhile, Obama continues to threaten most businesses with volume after volume of new and expensive regulations, with ObamaCare, with Dodd-Frank, and plans to pick more losers from among businesses.  This will never be a successful approach to creating jobs.  We desperately need a new man in the White House who realizes that jobs are best created by the private sector with little government interference.