Saturday, January 09, 2010

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month said Democrats will measure their success by "jobs, jobs, jobs." So far, things aren't working out. It may be, as some economists believe, that job growth will resume soon. But the bar is a bit higher than many suppose.

Each month, the U.S. adds 110,000 to 140,000 new employees to the work force. Monthly job growth, therefore, must average more than 100,000 just to stay even. And even at that pace, it'll take six years just to get back to the number of jobs the U.S. had in 2007.

Last February, after the Congress and President Obama triumphantly passed their $787 billion stimulus program, we were told it would mean 3.5 million new jobs over two years. Unless something unforeseeably dramatic happens, there's no way that will occur.

Yet there was Obama on Friday, doubling down, getting serious one more time about jobs, jobs, jobs. His answer? More stimulus funding for clean technology manufacturing.

That might be funny if people weren't hurting so much already from the administration's focus on government make-work. For the record, every program the government put in place in 2009 has failed. Yet, we keep doing the same thing, at a cost of literally trillions of dollars. This is madness to the nth power.

Read it all on IBD


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