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Pres. Obama Policies Are Leading to the Loss of More American Jobs
Raymond Richman, 2/16/2013

Mortimer Zuckerman, editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, in an op-ed piece in the Wall St. Journal (2-16-13) entitled “By Any Measure, the Jobs Disaster Continues”, confirms what we have been writing in this space for months namely that the press has been misreporting the unemployment data because they employ the seasonally adjusted numbers reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics instead of the actual numbers. He writes: 

“January was supposed to have seen 157,000 jobs created…But the supposed hiring was based on seasonally adjusted numbers … The real, unadjusted figures for January show that nearly 2.8 million jobs disappeared, which happened to be worse than the 2.63 million lost in January 2012.”  

He  also points out that the statistics do not include the number of “discouraged workers who have dropped out of the labor force.” Were they included, “the formally announced unemployment rate would be around 9.8%, not the headline 7.9%.” And, “After four years America remains in a jobs depression as great as the Great Depression.” 

All of the misinformation in the media and the media’s concentration on social issues enabled Pres. Obama to be re-elected. Our readers were not taken in so easily because we concentrated on the economic issues. Even now, we are being diverted from dealing with our massive unemployment by media concentration on such topics as gun control, gay marriages, returning veterans and their problems, crimes, and health care.  No one is asking the President why his policies have not been effective in creating jobs. 

The President’s policies actually perpetuate the massive unemployment. The lower payroll taxes during the past two years benefited only those who had jobs.  The enormous subsidies to inefficient wind and solar plants created few permanent jobs at a truly enormous cost per job and burden households and business by causing higher prices for electricity. A Spanish economists estimates that wind and solar plants cost two jobs for every job they create.  The huge expenditures to rescue households threatened by foreclosure create no jobs. The huge expenditures for public education and student loans create no jobs. Increased health expenditures have created jobs but that is the exception rather than the rule. The huge subsidies to electric-powered and hybrid automobiles created a number of  temporary jobs in the automobile industry but the jobs lasted only as long as they were subsidized and displaced jobs producing ordinary gasoline-powered autos. For all practical purposes, the jobs created were less than the number of jobs.  

Considering that the federal government has been running trillion dollar deficits for several years, it has little to show as a contribution to job creation. Moreover, until Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives in 2010, Congress was doing everything in its power to make investment in manufacturing less attractive. We now face, in our opinion, a second recession. The fourth quarter of 2012 was one of negative growth in the GDP and there is a better that even chance that the first quarter of 2013 will show negative growth as well. 

As we pointed out on this site recently, a million workers lost their jobs since the President was re-elected. Nothing that the President has proposed in his state of the union address in which he dealt with, as Zuckerman points out, “health, education, immigration, guns, deficit, debt, energy, climate, economy, Afghanistan, wage, spend or tax (the runner-up)” made unsubsidized private investment in this country more attractive . To the contrary, it was encouraging to the out-sourcing of American jobs.