Unemployment Rises, Driven Up By Failed Government Policies

U.S. employment growth ground to a halt in June, with employers hiring the fewest number of workers in nine months . . . Non-farm payrolls rose only 18,000, the weakest reading since September, the Labor Department said on Friday, well below economists’ expectations for a 90,000 rise. The unemployment rate climbed to a six-month high of 9.2 percent, even as jobseekers left the labor force in droves, from 9.1 percent in May. ‘The message on the economy is ongoing stagnation,’ said Pierre Ellis, senior economist at Decision economics. . . . The government revised April and May payrolls to show 44,000 fewer jobs created than previously reported.

Our 9.2 percent unemployment rate is much higher than the Obama administration predicted it would be if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package. It claimed unemployment wouldn’t rise above 8 percent if the stimulus were enacted. It argued that Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose very rapidly after its passage, and the stimulus has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and also used taxpayer money to encourage the outsourcing of American jobs to create “green jobs” overseas.

New EPA rules will wipe out at least 800,00 jobs. And another 800,000 jobs will disappear due to Obamacare’s work disincentives. (The CBO noted in October that Obamacare contains disincentives to work that will shrink the labor force by hundreds of thousands of jobs.)