Unemployment Jumps to 9.8 Percent; Stimulus and New Regulations Wipe Out Jobs

Unemployment has jumped to 9.8 percent. The population has grown recently, but the number of jobs has remained virtually flat. The White House seems to have learned nothing from this, and there is talk of yet more wasteful stimulus spending.

The stimulus package’s costly “green jobs” subsidies sent American jobs overseas. Their biggest recipient was a bankrupt Australian company that imported Japanese turbines for a windmill farm.  79 percent of the subsidies went to foreign firms.  Spain’s “green jobs” program, which Obama cited 8 times as a model for his own green jobs and global warming programs,  completely failed, destroying jobs and driving up Spain’s skyrocketing government deficit. Each new green job “created” in Spain wiped out 2.2 existing jobs and cost $800,000.   New EPA rules dealing with global warming are expected to wipe out more than 800,000 jobs, while proposed EPA ozone rules could wipe out millions more.

48 out of 50 states have lost jobs since passage of the $800 billion stimulus package.  The Obama administration falsely claimed that passing the stimulus package would keep unemployment under 8 percent, but now it’s close to 10 percent.  The stimulus also contained other provisions that wiped out jobs in America’s export sector, and it encouraged states to impose new job-killing burdens on business through changes to their statutory unemployment-compensation schemes.

Obama’s EEOC appointees are unprecedently hostile to employers, making the Carter-era EEOC look friendly to business by comparison.  New laws backed by Obama, and Obama administration regulations governing employers, have discouraged employers from hiring new employees.