By Bill Wilson — According to former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, employment needs to grow by at least 90,000 a month just to keep up with the growth of the population. But, since the fall of 2008, the civilian labor force has actually shrunk from 154.7 million to 153.8 million, a contraction of about 900,000.
It’s not that fertility suddenly dropped or there was a massive plague. It should have grown by 3.24 million since then, but it didn’t. Which means working age adults are simply not being counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS.
They are fudging the numbers.
Adding the 900,000 contraction to the expected growth, the total civilian labor force should be 4.14 million larger than is being counted, at about 157.94 million by now. And the unemployed should be about that much more larger, since if they could be counted as working, BLS would most certainly be counting them.
So, the amount of unemployed should really be measured at about 17.443 million, instead of 13.303 million, or a rate of 11.04 percent instead of 8.6 percent. And the underemployed rate should be about 17.8 percent instead of 15.6 percent, with 28.145 million people looking for full-time work that cannot find it.
All of which puts the happy talk of the Administration into perspective. When the jobs numbers were released, Barack Obama lauded the result, saying, “We need to keep that growth going.”
What growth? Propaganda is not going to get those 28 million people into honest, paying jobs. It’s not going to help folks who are on the edge of foreclosure keep their homes. It’s not going to help new college graduates from getting started off in the workforce on the right foot.
The economy needs to be expanding in order to create jobs just at the natural rate of population growth. We’re nowhere near there right now, and we need to be.
All of which makes Obama’s job-killing policies all the more inexplicable, whether the regulatory burdens that will be imposed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carbon endangerment finding or through Obamacare, or his insistence on raising taxes on job creators. He constantly slings mud in a class warfare gambit that is suited for perhaps the campaign trail, but is hardly the leadership the nation needs right now and won’t create jobs.
To get the nation back on its feet, the federal government must get out from under its crushing debt burden, where the national debt is nearly larger than the entire economy. It needs to slash its corporate tax burden, which is the highest in the world of advanced economies. It is imperative that the regulatory framework is unraveled. The dollar needs to be strengthened to lower costs and stabilize energy and food costs. Onerous federal securities laws and state-by-state blue sky laws that make it cost-ineffective for new businesses to raise capital.
In short, it must become competitive to do business here in America again. And that will probably not happen so long as Obama is in office. It is clear the nation needs new leadership that is intent on actually creating jobs that would restore hope, and not on continuing to allow the despair of millions of Americans looking for work to go unobserved.
Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Bill on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.
