Despite claims from the White House that economic stimuli and bailouts have "saved or created" 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs, statistics from the Bureau of Labor show that U.S. businesses have shed 3.1 million jobs since President Obama took office, The Investors Business Daily reports.
Despite close to $3 trillion in "stimulus," bailout spending, and Fed money-creation over the last two years, official unemployment is at 9.5 percent, not below 8 percent, as White House advisers promised over a year ago.
Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, writes in the National review’s blog that the Obamanomics job estimate is based on an economic fallacy: that government spending creates more economic activity than it consumes, thereby transforming each dollar government takes in into $2.50.
De Rugy notes that history shows just the reverse effect: A dollar given to the government actually reduces GDP, due to the waste, inefficiency and dead-weight tax loss of removing money from productive uses in the private sector.
Thus far this year U.S. businesses have added around 100,000 new jobs a month, and about 125,000 people join the work force each month, leaving the country 7.5 million jobs below the level of December 2007, when the recession began.
The Washington Post reports that The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in an open letter, accused the Obama administration of not making job creation a priority.
"Instead of continuing their partnership with the business community and embracing proven ideas for job creation, they vilified industries while embarking on an ill-advised course of government expansion, major tax increases, massive deficits, and job-destroying regulations," the letter said.
After initially supporting the Obama administration's Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the chamber vigorously opposed both the health-care overhaul and the administration's approach to new regulations for the financial industry.
Chamber CEO Tom Donohue warned of the "cumulative job-killing impact of over-regulation," saying that government involvement in the economy "is so overwhelming and beyond anything we have ever seen, that we risk moving this country away from a government of the people to a government of the regulators."
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