Is President Obama Creating Jobs?

Many people were jumping for joy when they heard unemployment decreased to only 8.3%. However, how the unemployment number is calculated can sometimes be misleading. For instance, people serving in the military, people in nursing homes, or prisons are not considered in the unemployment numbers. People who are on unemployment benefits are also not counted. Data from the Department of Labor shows that 3.46 million people are on unemployment benefits. If we include the amount of people who have given up looking for work unemployment would be almost a full percentage point higher.

A better measure is to look at the civil participation ratio which looks at what percent of the population is working. The civilian participation ratio is now 58.5%. The civilian participation rate has only decreased since President Obama has been in office. Today, there 12.8 million unemployed people and 43% of these people have not had a job in more than six months. Jobs skills don’t regenerate over time. Usually if you not constantly doing something every the brain will eventually forget what you are doing.

One positive however is that number of government jobs has been decreasing even though government spending has been increasing. I suppose this gives more power per government worker. In the last year, 276,000 jobs were lost. Nearly all these losses came from local and state government and not the national government.

Having millions of people out of work is unproductive. Not only are people unemployed but they are losing job skills since they are not working which will put them further behind. Many firms are skittish to hire because of fear of upcoming regulations, legislation, and what the future for taxes holds. If the government started to slash the most costly regulation to companies, cut thousands of pages of worthless regulations, and lowered corporate tax rates (also assuming they eliminate all deductions, subsidies, and corporate welfare) the economy would get a much needed jolt.