Three months ago, most of the CEOs of America's largest companies said they saw little prospect of being able to hire more employees in the near future.
Unfortunately, things have not improved since then. In the latest Business Roundtable survey of the leaders of large U.S. companies, 40 percent said they won't be increasing hiring in the next six months, and 25 percent said they will actually have to lay off workers.
Economic growth and demand for goods and services are just so sluggish that they cannot justify bringing on new employees -- and in all too many instances they can't even keep the number of employees they currently have.
There are a lot of reasons for the current lack of growth, some of which have to do with Europe's debt crisis and other factors over which the United States has little control.
But our domestic economic problems certainly are not "all Europe's fault," and we need not expect a big turnaround in job creation so long as Washington continues to layer more costly bureaucracy -- through ObamaCare in particular -- on business.
Nor should we look for much improvement while Congress keeps burning through our tax dollars and piling up debt by borrowing beyond what current tax rates bring in. The debt is already extracting hundreds of billions of dollars in interest from our economy every year. The more it grows, the more money we must divert out of the free market -- where it could be invested usefully -- and into unproductive interest payments.
If we really want jobs, then at some point we're going to have to stop doing things that destroy existing jobs and prevent the creation of new ones.