By Bill Wilson — The private sector is not doing just fine. It is growing, just barely, in spite of Obama and his policies. Obama lauds the 4 million private sector jobs created in the establishment survey, but that is just happy talk. That is not recovering nearly fast enough to retrieve the 8 million jobs that were lost in this recession since 2008. It does not even keep up with the growth of the working age population, which has increased by 10 million since that time.
For all of Obama’s ‘stimulus’ and overregulation and government expansion, the fact is that only 21.9 million people work for the federal, state, and local government, or 15 percent of the 142 million people employed nationwide. Obama says the problem is that government jobs are not growing fast enough, but we could never have a government big enough, growing fast enough to help the 27 million Americans out there who cannot find full-time work in the Obama economy.
What Obama fails to understand are that all public sector jobs are consumption, they are a net cost to the economy. In and of themselves, they create nothing.
We need robust private sector expansion to get out of this hole. And right now we’re not getting that with Obama, contrary to his happy talk rhetoric. We’re overregulated, overtaxed, overspending, and overindebted — and Obama has done nothing to stop the bleeding. So, unless Obama gets robust, private sector job growth, he won’t have the money to pay for his army of government employees. Not even Ben Bernanke can print enough money to satisfy Obama’s lust to expand the government payroll.
Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow him on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.
