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Jobs report a nightmare for Obama progressivism
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | Jason |
| Last Edited | Jason Jun 28, 2010 07:03am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Author | George F. Will |
| Media | Newspaper - Washington Post |
| News Date | Thursday, June 10, 2010 01:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Concerning the job numbers from May, one can almost echo Henry James's exclamation after examining letters pertaining to Lord Byron's incest: "Nauseating perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant." Except that the May numbers' significance can be expressed: A theory is being nibbled to death by facts.
Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May. The 41,000 jobs created were dwarfed by the 411,000 temporary and low-wage government jobs needed to administer the census. Last year's stimulus having failed to hold unemployment below 8 percent as predicted, Barack Obama might advocate another stimulus -- amending Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, which mandates a census every 10 years. If it were every year, he could take credit for creating 564,000 -- the current number of census takers -- permanent jobs.
May's 41,000 jobs were one-fifth of the April number and substantially fewer than half the number needed to keep pace with the normal growth of the labor force. This is evidence against the theory that a growing government can be counted on to produce prosperity because a government dollar spent has a reliable multiplier effect as it ripples through the economy from which the government took the dollar.
Today's evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government's control of economic life. The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is. |
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