By Rick Manning
A version of this article appeared at TheHill.com.
The headline writers and political spinners will celebrate an unemployment rate of 7.4 percent, even though they know this does not reflect the millions of people who have simply dropped out of the economy since President Obama took office.
What they aren’t likely to tell you is that the percentage of Americans participating in the workforce has dropped to its lowest point since 1981.
You aren’t likely to hear that more than 11.5 million Americans who want a job cannot find one or that 8.2 million Americans are counted as employed in spite of being trapped and struggling in part-time jobs when they want a rewarding full-time job.
It is even more likely that you will never learn that in July the number of people who could have been in the workforce rose by 204,000 but the civilian labor force actually declined by 37,000 people.
All you are likely to hear are the hallelujah chorus singing the praises of an unemployment rate that dropped.
The almost 20 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed need Washington, D.C., to stop putting roadblocks in the way of their ability to take care of their families and start their careers free from government dependency.
It is time for Washington, D.C., to stop trying to delude the people that the Band-aid approach of providing more time on the unemployment rolls is the answer to this crisis. Instead, Congress needs to take immediate steps to end the regulatory attack on the jobs Americans need.
They should start by defunding ObamaCare, which private sector employers, and increasingly labor unions, agree is killing jobs and forcing people out of full-time and into part-time employment. Congress needs to defund ObamaCare now and take this job killer’s boot off the throat of workers and employers alike — no excuses, no obfuscation from either side of the aisle. When you get the labor coalition cracking because it sees the negative impact of this big-government debacle, there is no excuse not to act quickly and decisively.
Congress needs to grab the Environmental Protection Agency by the purse strings and force it off its reckless course of economic destruction at the altar of a purported global warming crisis. It’s time to stop the EPA’s slavish devotion to fighting this crisis in name only, given the fact that the world’s temperatures have been stable for 15 straight years. Once again, many of the construction and manufacturing trade unions are on board and it is time to rein in the EPA job-killing machine.
Enough rhetoric, it is time to act.
It is time for Congress to pass a debt-ceiling increase that stops funding the president’s healthcare law and cuts EPA funding immediately, and if Obama wants to shut down the government by exercising his veto powers, so be it.
The dreams and futures of 20 million Americans who are trying to work, prosper, pay taxes, have families, purchase a home and make a better life for their children than they themselves enjoy demand action, and they demand action now.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is the vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
