Tag: employment

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Job Growth in 2014

President Barack Obama takes full credit for the job growth in 2014. Democrats on the Internet relentlessly push these growth rates with typically goofy superlatives like “highest ever” or “highest growth rate in decades.”

So, what did Obama and the Democrats do in 2013 and 2014 that led to the growth we saw last year?

Well, Obama refused to renegotiate with Republicans on any unemployment or budget reforms.

As 2013 ended, we heard Democrats complaining that stingy Republicans were letting federal government extensions of unemployment compensation (which had been re-extended many times) lapse altogether. Obama predicted disaster. The Keynesian economists who circle the Democratic Party like moths to a candle held to a simple prophecy:  because of a hit to “aggregate demand,” unemployment would increase.

Instead, in 2014 employment bounced back.

In a droll quasi-opinion piece, “President Costanza’s Jobs Boom,” the Wall Street Journal reports that “job growth in 2014 was roughly 25 percent higher than any post-2009 year. Joblessness plunged to 5.6 percent from 6.7 percent. Net job creation averaged 246,000 a month.”

Citing a National Bureau of Economic Research study by economists Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii and Kurt Mitman, which treated the abrupt policy change as a “natural experiment,” the Journal reveled in the knowledge that the increase in incentives from lapsed benefits led unemployed workers to (gasp!) seek jobs.

And they found them. Granted, many of the new jobs are not as good as their pre-bust jobs. But they are jobs, which is better than nothing.

So when your big-government promoting friends attribute 2014’s job growth to Democratic policies, ask which policies, precisely. And ask why Obama’s predictions of 2013 for disaster in 2014 didn’t pan out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government U.S. Constitution

Not His Job

President Obama will address the State of the Union, today, speaking before Congress. These annual efforts are almost uniformly unbearable, with too much applause and too much rah-rah-boy politicking. And far too little thought.

Scuttlebutt has it that the president will concentrate on the economy, on “jobs.”

After the sea change of the last election, one might hope that he’d stay on topic and address constitutionally-mandated issues of his office.

“Jobs” are none of his business. “Jobs” — by which I mean the number of people employed this way or that out there in the non-governmental sector, and by which he means the number of jobs total, including those paid for out of taxpayer expense — should not be his chief worry.

No president in recent memory has excelled by fiddling with policy to micromanage “the economy.” No one knows this stuff. Not even college professors specializing in macroeconomics.

What government operatives know is how to get elected, stay in office. How to preen for television cameras, read a prompter.

You know, the essentials.

But they cannot possibly know enough to “run the economy.”

And yet, Obama talks about making the country “more competitive.” Oh, come on. Just open up trade — which promotes widespread co-operation as well as competition — stop micromanaging the money supply through the Fed, make regulations fit a rule of law and not a vast bureaucratic command system, and let it go. Let individuals and businesses worry about “competiveness.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

A Wealth of Joblessness

Did you know that the unemployment rate — as high as it is — is actually very much understated? It doesn’t include those who are out of work but have given up trying to find a job.

This puzzles me.

Oh, I see the rationale for not counting those who have abandoned their job searches (the information gets harder to collect and maintain, and you enter into the farther regions of statistics), but, nevertheless, they certainly do remain unemployed.

What puzzles me is the ability to remain permanently jobless. I don’t think my wife would let me make that choice. And even if she did, without income where would we get the money to pay the mortgage or buy food?

There’s unemployment insurance, which helps tide folks over when they lose a job. Yet, a condition for receiving unemployment benefits is continuing to actively seek a new job.

Like many, we could fall back on family and friends. But I’d feel bad enough about that if I was pounding the pavement every day in search of gainful employment. I can’t imagine doing so without any intention of landing a position and getting back on my own two feet.

So what can we conclude about folks who don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one? There are apparently a lot of rich folks out of work.

This yields the unwelcome-to-many conclusion that, in America, everyone is rich. Inequality notwithstanding.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Gross Jobs

The president says he’s creating jobs. I’m skeptical. I guess there are some things government can do to ensure that jobs get created, out there in the bill-paying, profit-making world. But these do not include spending trillions of borrowed money.

And neither do they include simply giving more money to state and local governments.

The truth about Obama’s much-ballyhooed job creation is that more than half of his alleged new jobs turn out to be government jobs.

Government jobs don’t count, Mr. President.

Remember, many things governments do actually drain us. Jobs in the marketplace, on the other hand, serve real consumer demand, make us all better off. They also help pay the taxes for those government jobs. Employing more people in government means needing more real jobs to pay for the government ones.

And how much work do politicians cause us to engage in just to unbury ourselves from their silly, wealth-extracting regulations? I know, I know: Every time they add on some new complication to the tax code, jobs emerge in the accounting and tax-consulting industry. But this doesn’t exactly make us better off, does it? Not on net.

This lesson applies generally. Here’s the bottom line. Government can borrow and tax to spend to create “gross jobs.” Sure. But on net, after balancing the collective books, we’re not better off.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.