Government Action Causes Unemployment
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Posted: 07/08/09
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Government Action Causes Unemployment
By Thomas E. Brewton
The more the President flails around with barrages of new programs,
taxes, mandates, and business takeovers, the warier businessmen
become about hiring new workers.
Hence the accelerating level of unemployment, now at 9.5%, the
highest level in more than 25 years. That picture is even worse when
allowing for the decline in the average work week to 33 hours.
The administration continues to use the crutch of blaming President
Bush for everything that goes wrong. But it can't escape the fact
that its first official economic act was the $787 billion stimulus
package, which was by many multiples the largest such program in
history. When it was enacted, the unemployment level was
approximately half the present 9.5%.
The standard liberal-progressive-socialist rationalization for
failure was provided, in advance, by the New York Times's left-wing
propagandist Paul Krugman: the government isn't spending enough. Mr.
Krugman, in his February 12, 2009, column (shortly after passage of
the stimulus bill), wrote:
"For while Mr. Obama got more or less what he asked for, he almost
certainly didn't ask for enough. We're probably facing the worst
slump since the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office,
not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three
years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy
could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion,
while it sounds like a lot of money, isn't nearly enough to bridge
that chasm."
Since then, the President has upped the ante to many trillions of
dollars, with proposals for socialized healthcare and other
enlargements of government's interventionist role in our lives.
All this not withstanding, the July 6, 2009, edition of the Wall
Street Journal, in its front-page headline article, reports "Calls
for More Stimulus Grow."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124680904844296383.html
Such blather, coming from politicians and Keynesian government
economists, may make the public believe that effective action is
being taken. But it's just a PR smoke screen.
Much of the first-round stimulus package, aimed at public works that
would put people to work, remains unspent. That is the inescapable
nature of government public works spending. Months' or years' time
is needed to clear challenges by environmentalists and other special-
interest groups, not to mention planning and letting of contracts.
But that can't be used by the administration as an excuse, because it
was the Democrat/Socialist Congress that designed the pork-laden
stimulus package.
What then is stopping business from hiring more workers?
The answer, in large part, is that, with its pretensions to a new New
Deal, the Obama administration is recreating the atmosphere of FDR's
Hundred Days blitz of new Federal agencies, huge tax increases and
continual business bashing. See "A Jackboot at Home, an Olive Branch
Abroad" and "A New Deal Frame of Mind."
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/index.php/weblog/a_new_deal_frame_of_mind/.
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/index.php/weblog/
a_jackboot_at_home_an_olive_branch_abroad/
Businessmen were so frightened and unsure of what might come next
that they stopped hiring workers.
Jerry Bowyer, in Why Isn't America Hiring?, explains:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=070609A
"America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small
business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of
the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are
paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up
doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have
to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so,
for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will
turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping
costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market
move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a
politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care
(being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat
nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon
(pulverized)? Until you know, you don't grow, and until you grow your
market, you don't grow your payroll.
"Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts.
They're languishing because of them."
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