March Employment Situation Worsened

After a long period of almost total stagnation in the employment numbers, the March 2013 household survey numbers without seasonal adjustment show more missing jobs than was the case in each of the last three March months of 2012, 2011, and 2010!  Not only has there been no jobs recovery, but there is now a clear backward slide.  With Obama's European socialism economic policies, we are now seeing evidence of long-term European unemployment.  To be sure, the so-called unemployment rate fell from 8.08% in February to 7.65% in March, but this is only because the workforce participation rate fell to 63.07%, the lowest rate in the table below.  Americans are still dropping out of the labor force.  Apparently they are not feeling the Hope that Obama has so often claimed he was going to deliver to them.

Basically, the number of missing jobs is maintaining the pattern it has from the start of 2010.  There is no evidence of improvement.  Yes, the March data was a step back, but one month is of very limited import by itself.  What is important is that the pattern of total stagnation shows that Obama's anti-business policies have been very effective in preventing the economy from rebounding from the recession.  This is truly the never-ending Obama Recession.

The situation is really even worse than the missing jobs chart indicates.  More and more people are under-employed.

Many employers who had not been too worried about the implementation of ObamaCare are learning to worry about it.  Many had planned to have more part-time employees so they would not have to provide them expensive ObamaCare health insurance policies or pay tax penalties on them.  By now many have heard that the IRS is going to add up the hours of all employees and treat employers as though they have 50 employees or more if the equivalent hours of all employees equal or exceed those of 50 employees working the minimum 30 hours required to be on employer paid health insurance.  This has to have forced many employers to cut back on employees to get under the 50 employee limit or to not hire additional workers.  Many employers probably still do not know about this insidious IRS plan to sweep employers into ObamaCare.

In addition, employers are learning that the exchanges that were to provide them with some measure of health insurance options in 2014 will not now be implemented until 2015.  These employers will be forced to take a single plan, like it or not, in 2014.  They are also now hearing more and more about how much more expensive health insurance will be under ObamaCare.  All of these ObamaCare factors are very negative factors for job creation.

The ADP says for those companies with employees numbering from 50-499, the group most directly affected by the health care reform, a rather sharp slowing in job creation has occurred this year: 43,000 jobs created in January, 20,000 in February, and -5,000 in March.  Of course smaller companies do not have to provide health insurance or pay the penalty tax, but for those that do provide health insurance, ObamaCare is going to drive their costs way up.  The Society of Actuaries believes the cost will go up an average of 32% due to ObamaCare.  The costs for young workers, therefore for most new workers, will go up much more since they are expected to cover more of the costs for those in less good health, such as much older workers and the chronically ill.  Small growing companies will face much higher costs in their early years since they tend to hire more of the young workers whose health insurance used to cost much less than it will.  This will add to the woes of young people in finding their first jobs.

We may be looking back a year from now and be wishing for the jobs stagnation of the last 3.25 years.