We can understand why 411,000 Americans are happy to have been hired in May as census workers — especially if they had been laid off from other jobs. And we are glad that hiring helped reduce the nation’s unemployment rate slightly, from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent.
But that is still a very high rate of joblessness, and it is not a good thing that almost all the job creation that did occur in May was in government jobs.
For one thing, the census jobs are temporary. Once the census is over, they will disappear, pushing unemployment higher. And for another, those federal positions add to our ruinous $13 trillion national debt.
In the same month that the 411,000 new government jobs were being propped up by taxpayer dollars, the private sector added not even one-tenth as many jobs: 41,000. That is alarming because private-sector jobs — unlike government employment — do not add to budget deficits and are a source of true economic growth.
Incredibly, President Barack Obama called the massive expansion of the federal workforce by new census workers “a sign that our economy is getting stronger by the day.”
It isn’t. Rather, the lack of private-sector job growth is a sign of continued, extreme sluggishness in the economy. Making government even larger won’t solve that problem.
To put the ongoing economic crisis in human terms, 15 million people were “officially” counted as unemployed in May. That’s roughly the combined populations of Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma! But that is only part of the problem. Millions more have either given up trying to find jobs or would like to work full time but can find only part-time jobs.
About 6.8 million Americans had been out of work six months or longer as of May, which is a record high. Those long-term unemployed workers are a disturbing 46 percent of all the jobless, which is a record, too.
Despite President Obama’s assurances to the contrary, the weakness of the economy is not lost on the American people. Only one-fifth of those polled in an Associated Press-GfK Poll believe the economy is in good shape.
The federal government has grown explosively since President Obama took office and began signing into law huge new spending programs passed by the Democrat-run Congress. That spending has harmed, rather than helped, the economy.
It is past time we elected members of Congress who understand that bigger government is a big part of our problems, not the solution.