The Obama Jobs Record: Some Good News, but Only if the Bar Is Lowered

The most recent jobs report from the Labor Department contains both good news and the bad news.

If you’re a glass-half-full person, you’ll want to focus on some positive trends.

• The joblessness rate fell to 7.5 percent, the lowest level since Obama became President.
• Private-sector jobs are increasing.
• As I’ve noted before, the economy seems to do better if there’s gridlock.
• One reason for better economic performance is that the burden of government spending has been reduced, at least when measured as a share of GDP.

I made many of these points in the beginning of this interview for Real News on Blaze TV.

On the other hand, if you’re a glass-half-empty person, you might focus on these grim details.

• This is the weakest job performance for any recovery since the end of World War II.
• Unemployment is far higher than the White House predicted it would be if the so-called stimulus was enacted.
• There are headwinds that are undermining job creation, such as Obamacare, higher payroll tax rates, and the President’s class-warfare tax hike.
• The employment-population ratio is terrible, suggesting that the lower unemployment rate is really a measure of people dropping out of the labor force.

So who’s right, the optimists or pessimists? At the risk of sounding like a politicians, they’re both right.

If it sounds like I’m trying to have it both ways, that’s simply the reality of public policy. There are both headwinds and tailwinds impacting the labor market, which is why I talked about scales balancing in the interview.

But I will state without ambiguity that small government and free markets are the right formula to improve economic performance. In other words, get rid of the bad policies and adopt more of the good policies. Be more like Hong Kong and less like France.

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Plagued by Rising Costs and Vulnerable to Fraud, It’s Time to Focus Attention on the Disability Progam

When I think of the disability program, I think of the bum who is collecting a check so he can be an “adult baby” and indulge his fetish of wearing diapers. Though I guess that’s not as bad as the situation in Greece, where you can get a disability payment for being a pedophile.

But this is a much bigger and more serious issue. Earlier this morning, I took part in a joint Brooking Institution/American Enterprise Institute/Secretary’s Innovation Group conference on the disability insurance program.

I only had a minor role, posing question to Mark Duggan of the University of Pennsylvania and Stephen Goss of the Social Security Administration, but it was a very useful exercise because I was exposed to some sobering details about the program.

Let’s review a couple of Professor Duggan’s charts, starting with a look at how the disability rate has exploded in the past 22 years.

And here is some very disturbing data showing that much of the increase is in the areas that are most subject to abuse because of subjective judgements about “bad backs” and “depression.”

Hmmm…, I’m a bit depressed about the ever-rising burden of government. Maybe I should get a check from the government!

Joking aside, I briefly touched on this issue in a recent CNBC interview. Here’s the segment dealing with the disability program and the disturbing rise in dependency.

I’m not overly impressed by the counter-argument from Christian Weller. Does he really want us to believe that the service sector jobs of today are more disabling than the manufacturing jobs of 20-plus years ago?

This is a depressing topic, so let’s close with a couple of cartoons, starting with this gem from Chip Bok.

It’s amusing, but keep in mind that we have an unusually high joblessness rate right now, but it would be even higher if we counted the people who shifted to this other form of unemployment dependency.

And here’s a Chuck Asay cartoon that I really like because he augments my argument in the interview that it hurts the economy when you lure workers out of the job market and make them wards of the state.

Asay takes it one step farther and shows the lifeboat sinking. That’s basically what will happen if we don’t adopt the entitlement reforms that are needed to rein in the welfare state.

P.S. If you want some jokes referencing the disability program, we have the politically correct version of The Little Red Hen, as well as two very similar jokes about Jesus performing miracles and how liberals differ from conservatives and libertarians.

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The Overlooked Jobs Tragedy

When the monthly job numbers are released, most people focus on the unemployment rate.

On many occasions, I’ve cited that number, usually to point out that the unemployment rate is far higher than the Obama Administration promised it would be if the so-called stimulus was enacted.

That episode should be additional proof that Keynesian economics is misguided.

But that’s not the issue we should be worrying about now. Instead, our concern should be what appears to be a permanent reduction in the share of the working-age population that is employed.

As I explain in this interview for Blaze TV, our ability to produce is governed by the quality and quantity of labor and capital in the economy. Unfortunately, it appears that the Bush-Obama policies of bigger government have had a negative impact.

To build upon that interview, here are the very latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To be fair, the drop you see on the chart started before Obama took office. But he can be fairly blamed for the fact that there’s been no recovery.

The moral of the story is that bigger government is not a recipe for prosperity.

The burden of government spending is too high, the tax code is too punitive, red tape is hindering entrepreneurship, and various handouts are creating a dependency culture that discourages work.

Should we be surprised that the employment-population ratio is grim?

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What Can We Learn by Comparing the Employment Situation in Texas vs. California?

One of the great things about federalism, above and beyond the fact that it both constrains the power of governments and is faithful to the Constitution, is that is turns every state into an experiment.

We can learn what works best (though the President seems incapable of learning the right lesson).

We know, for instance, that people are leaving high-tax states and migrating to low-tax states.

We also know that low-tax states grow faster and create more jobs.

I particularly enjoy comparisons between Texas and California. Michael Barone, for instance, documented how the Lone Star State is kicking the you-know-what out of the Golden State in terms of overall economic performance.

I also shared a specific example of high-quality jobs moving from San Francisco to Houston. And I was also greatly amused by this story (and accompanying cartoons) about Texas “poaching” jobs from California.

In this discussion with Stuart Varney of Fox News, we discuss how Texas is leading the nation in job creation.

But there’s another part of this discussion that is very much worth highlighting.

As illustrated by the chart, we are enduring the worst overall job performance in any business cycle since the end of World War II.

I note in the interview that Obama inherited a bad economy and that Bush got us in the ditch in the first place with all his wasteful spending and misguided intervention.

But Obama also deserves criticism for doubling down on those failed policies.

His so-called stimulus was a flop. Dodd-Frank is a regulatory nightmare. Obamacare is looking worse and worse every day.

No wonder job creation is so anemic.

The real moral of the story, though, is that the poor are the biggest victims of Obama’s statism. They’re the ones who have been most likely to lose jobs. They’ve been the ones to suffer because of stagnant incomes.

Sort of brings to mind the old joke that leftists must really like poor people because they create more of them whenever they’re in charge.

P.S. Speaking of jokes, here’s an amusing comparison of Texas and California. If you want some California-specific humor, this Chuck Asay cartoon is great. And to maintain balance, here’s a Texas-specific joke on how to respond to an attacker.

P.P.S. To close on a serious point, California would be deteriorating even faster if it wasn’t for the fact that the state and local tax deduction basically means that the rest of the country is subsidizing the high tax rates in the not-so-Golden State. Another good argument for the flat tax.

P.P.P.S. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a great Kevin Williamson column dismantling some sloppy anti-Texas analysis by Paul Krugman.

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Minimum Wage, Maximum Foolishness

Should the federal government make life more difficult for low-skilled workers?

I hope everyone will emphatically say “NO!”

Heck, most people understandably will think you’re crazy for even asking such a preposterous question.

But some of those people will also think that it’s a good idea for politicians in Washington to make low-skilled workers less attractive to employers by raising the minimum wage.

I often ask such people whether they are more likely to buy a Big Mac if McDonald’s raises the price by 24 percent. They say they are less likely.

I then ask them if they are more likely to buy a car if GM increases the price of a Buick by 24 percent. They say less likely, of course.

But they seem to have a blind spot when I ask them whether employers will be more likely or less likely to hire low-skilled workers when the government increases the cost of those workers by 24 percent.

I explain further in this interview for Yahoo! Finance.

The interviewer, by the way, seems to be economically illiterate.

He apparently believes that we can reduce inequality by pricing poor people out of the job market. He also blames companies for sitting on piles of cash, presumably unaware that firms only will invest if there are profitable opportunities.

At one point, I delicately state that one of his questions “betrays a certain lack of historical knowledge,” which is a polite way of saying “you’re either lying or you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Ultimately, I try to help him understand by comparing fast-growing economies such Hong Kong and Singapore, which have relatively low burdens of government, with slow-growth economies such as France and Italy, where politicians ostensibly seek to “help” people with various forms of intervention.

I’m not sure I made any progress, so feel free to suggest other ways of convincing skeptics that freedom is better than statism.

Anyway, for those who want more information, this video explains the underlying economics of the minimum wage. We also have plenty of evidence (see here and here) that unemployment rose following the most recent hike in the minimum wage.

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The Perverse Unintended Consequences of Anti-Discrimination Laws

I recently wrote about the pinheads at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who are threatening legal action against companies that are leery about hiring people with criminal records.

Now some states and cities are making it illegal to discriminate against those that have been unemployed for a long period of time.

Unlike special legal status for ex-cons, this sounds reasonable. After all, we all would like to help the long-term unemployed break free of the chains of government dependency.

But sometimes good intentions generate undesirable effects. I explain in this Fox Business News debate that companies will do their best to avoid even interviewing the long-term unemployed if they have to worry about potential legal pitfalls whenever they make a hiring decision.

I also explain that businesses have no incentive to engage in unjustified discrimination. After all, that would imply a willingness to deliberately sacrifice profit in pursuit of some irrational bias.

But as Walter Williams has succinctly argued, some forms of discrimination make sense.

And if there are two applicants who otherwise seem to have equal qualifications for a certain job, but one has been out of work for more than 12 months, it’s only logical that the employer will think that a lengthy stint of sitting on a couch does not suggest great habits.

Which is why Obama’s policy of never-ending unemployment benefits is so misguided. People get lured into long-term unemployment and there is both anecdotal evidence (check out these stories from Michigan and Ohio) and empirical evidence (here, here, and here) showing this unfortunate impact.

Heck, even Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that you get more unemployment when you subsidize joblessness.

So you won’t be surprised to know that I’ve dispensed some tough love on this topic as well.

P.S. This cartoon does a very effective job of showing the consequences of paying people not to work.

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From Employment to Savings, Bad Government Policy Is Undermining the U.S. Economy

First, some good news.

The United States is in much better shape than most other developed nations, particularly if you look at broad measures of prosperity and living standards.

And our economy is growing and the private sector is creating jobs.

That’s the glass-half-full way of looking at things.

But if you’re a glass-half-empty person, the news is not so cheerful. The economy is expanding and jobs are being created, but both at a slow rate.

In this interview, I share this dour perspective as I grouse about how Obama’s policies of higher taxes and bigger government are somewhat responsible for the weak job market. And I also explain that the anemic employment situation is partially to blame for low levels of saving for many households.

On the topic of the low savings rate, I should have explained that government policies undermine savings, both because of the tax code’s pro-consumption bias and because reasons to save are diminished thanks to government-provided subsidies for things such as housing, education, retirement, and health care.

In my second soundbite, I jump to a different topic. I assert that it’s a good thing that we’re going to have gridlock for the next couple of years – particularly if the alternative is the kind of damaging legislation such as the faux stimulus and Obamacare that we got in the President’s first two years.

But I do warn that permanent gridlock is not a good idea. We need genuine entitlement reform at some point in the not-so-distant future if we want to avoid becoming another Greece.

And don’t delude yourself. If policy is left on auto-pilot, the burden of government spending is going to skyrocket. Indeed, both the Bank for International Settlements and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimate that America’s long-run fiscal problems are more severe than those is most European welfare states.

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In a Continuing Indictment of Obamanomics, another Bad Jobs Number Showing the “New Normal” of High Unemployment

I almost feel sorry for the Obama Administration’s spin doctors. Every month, they probably wait for the unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the same level of excitement that people on death row wait for their execution date.

This has been going on for a while and today’s new data is another good example.

As this chart indicates, the White House promised that the unemployment rate today would be almost down to 5 percent if we enacted the so-called stimulus back in 2009. Instead, the new numbers show that the jobless rate is 7.9 – almost 3.0 percentage points higher.

I enjoy using this chart to indict Obamanomics, in part because it’s a two-fer. I get to criticize the Administration’s overall record, and I simultaneously get to take a jab at Keynesian spending schemes.

What’s not to love?

That being said, I don’t think the above chart is completely persuasive. The White House argues, with some justification, that this data simply shows that they underestimated the initial severity of the recession. There’s some truth to that, and I’ll be the first to admit that it wouldn’t be fair to blame Obama for a bleak trendline that existed when he took office (but I will blame him for continuing Bush’s policies of excessive spending and costly intervention).

That’s why I think the data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve is more damning. It looks at all the recessions and recoveries in the post-World War II era, and presumably provides a more neutral benchmark.

As you can see from this chart of job creation during all post-World War II recoveries, there’s one period that stands out for having the worst performance. Take a wild guess which line includes the Obama years.

An Obama defender will argue that this chart is unfair because the recession began during the Bush years.

Since there’s no significant difference between Bush’s policies and Obama’s policies, I don’t think that’s a strong defense, but let’s bend over backwards and instead look at job creation during recovery periods.

These numbers are a bit more favorable (or less damning) to Obama, but you can see that job creation for this recovery has been far below the average. Indeed, it only surpasses Bush’s job numbers coming out of the 2001 recession.

But I’m not surprised that the job numbers for Bush and Obama are both dismal. As stated above, they both pursued a statist agenda (though a Bush defender doubtlessly will point out that unemployment didn’t drop that much in 2001, so it would have been impossible to have a strong post-recession bounce).

The real lesson to be learned is that we live in an era of higher taxes on productive activity, a heavier burden of government spending, and more costly government regulation and intervention. And since we’re now more like Europe, the “new normal” is to have weak European-style economic numbers.

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Just Because California Is Terrible, that Doesn’t Mean Texas Is Perfect

Texas is in much better shape than California. Taxes are lower, in part because Texas has no state income tax.

No wonder the Lone Star State is growing faster and creating more jobs.

And the gap will soon get even wider since California voters recently decided to drive away more productive people by raising top tax rates.

But a key challenge for all governments is controlling the size and cost of bureaucracies.

Government employees are probably overpaid in both states, but the situation is worse in California, as I discuss in this interview with John Stossel.

But being better than California is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Texas fiscal policy.

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal, written by the state’s Comptroller of Public Accounts, points out some worrisome signs.

As the chief financial officer of the nation’s second-largest state, even I have found it hard to get a handle on how much governments are spending, and how much debt they’re taking on. Every level of government is piling up incredible bills. And they’re coming due, whether we like it or not. Even in low-tax Texas, property taxes have risen three times faster than the inflation rate and four times faster than our population growth since 1992. Our local governments, meanwhile, more than doubled their debt load in the last decade, to more than $7,500 in debt for every man, woman and child in the state. In Houston alone, city-employee pension plans are facing an unfunded liability of $2.4 billion. But too many taxpayers aren’t given the information they need to make informed decisions when they vote debt issues. Recently I spent several months holding about 40 town-hall meetings with Texans across our state. Each time, I asked the attendees if they could tell me how much debt their local governments are carrying. Not a single person in a single town had this information.

In other words, taxpayers need to be eternally vigilant, regardless of where they live. Otherwise the corrupt rectangle of politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and interest groups will figure out hidden ways of using the political process to obtain unearned wealth.

P.S. The second-most-viewed post on this blog is this joke about Texas, California, and a coyote, so it must be at least somewhat amusing. If you want some Texas-specific humor, this police exam is amusing and you’ll enjoy this joke about the difference between Texans, liberals and conservatives. And if you want California-specific humor, this Chuck Asay cartoon hits the nail on the head.

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Obama’s Dismal Record on Jobs, Captured in a Single Chart and Explained with Common Sense

Economists may not agree on much, but we all agree that economic output is a function of capital and labor. Ask a Keynesian, a Marxist, an Austrian, a monetarist, or any economist, and they’ll all agree that living standards are determined by the quality and quantity of these two factors of production.

So it should be very worrisome that there has been a big drop in the share of the population that is employed. Here’s a chart produced from Bureau of Labor Statistics data, showing labor force participation during the 21st Century.

There was a big drop during the recession. That’s the usual pattern, and it definitely isn’t something that can be blamed on President Obama since the downturn began before he took office.

But what is unusual is that the employment/population ratio has not bounced back. As you can see from this second chart, taken directly from the BLS website, there’s normally a “V” pattern. The numbers drop during a recession but then quickly bounce back.

That hasn’t happened during this “recovery,” and that’s something that can be blamed on the President’s policies. Millions of jobs have vanished. But most of these lost jobs don’t even show up in the official unemployment rate data because workers have left the labor force.

Why have so many jobs – and so many workers – disappeared?

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Richard Vedder has a very compelling explanation.

The national income accounts suggest that about 70% of U.S. output is attributable to the labor of human beings. Yet there has been a decline in the proportion of working-age Americans who are employed. …The decline matters more than you may suppose. If today the country had the same proportion of persons of working age employed as it did in 2000, the U.S. would have almost 14 million more people contributing to the economy. …Why are Americans working less? While there are a number of factors, the phenomenon is due mainly to a variety of public policies that have reduced the incentives to be employed.

Richard lists several ways in which government undermines the incentive for work, starting with food stamps.

If the government provides food, then the imperative to work is severely reduced. Since the food-stamp program’s beginning in the 1960s, it has grown considerably, but especially so in the 21st century: There are over 30 million more Americans receiving food stamps today than in 2000.

He then identifies Social Security disability payments.

Barely three million Americans received work-related disability checks from Social Security in 1990, a number that had changed only modestly in the preceding decade or two. Since then, the number of people drawing disability checks has soared, passing five million by 2000, 6.5 million by 2005, and rising to nearly 8.6 million today. In a series of papers, David Autor of MIT has shown that the disability program is ineffective, inefficient, and growing at an unsustainable rate.

And he mentions unemployment insurance benefits as well.

…the traditional 26-week benefit has been continuously extended over the past four years—many persons out of work a year or more are still receiving benefits. True enough, the economy isn’t growing very much. But if you pay people to stay at home, many will do so rather than seek employment or accept jobs where the pay doesn’t meet their expectations.

Richard doesn’t include any specific estimates for the job losses caused by these forms of intervention, or for the other policies mentioned in his column that also encourage unemployment.

But there is a lot of data on the negative impact of unemployment insurance payments, and it’s obviously a damning indictment of Obama’s track record that the number of people signing up for disability payments has exceeded the number of jobs created during his tenure.

Which brings us to the moral of the story. As the burden of government spending increases, this creates an ever-growing incentive for more and more people to figure out ways of riding in the wagon while simultaneously imposing higher and higher costs on those pulling the wagon.

As we see in Greece, that formula doesn’t end well.

P.S. Since I’ve mentioned Greece and disability payments, I can’t resist noting that the United States may give disability payments to adults who want to wear diapers as a lifestyle choice, but at least we don’t reward pedophiles with disability payments. In the contest for the most abusive waste of tax dollars, Greece wins.

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An Amusing Comparison: Obama vs Reagan and Clinton

I shared a remarkable chart last year exposing Obama’s terrible record on job creation.

It showed that the economy enjoyed big employment increases during the Reagan and Clinton years, but it also revealed anemic data for the Obama years.

That’s not a surprise since Reagan was the most pro-freedom President since World War II and Clinton almost surely comes in second place.

Yes, Clinton did raise tax rates in his first year, but he put together a very strong record in subsequent years. He was particularly good about restraining the burden of government spending and overall economic freedom expanded during his reign.

He was no Reagan, to be sure, and the anti-government Congress that took power after the 1994 elections may deserve much of the credit for the good news during the Clinton years. Regardless, we had good economic performance during that period – unlike what we’ve seen during the Obama years.

Which makes this Michael Ramirez cartoon both amusing (in a tragic way) and economically accurate.

Since we’ve had relatively weak numbers for both jobs and growth this entire century, it would have been even better if the cartoon showed Bush and Obama both trying to raise the bar.

The real lesson is that big government is bad for jobs and growth, regardless of whether politicians have an “R” or “D” after their names.

P.S. Interestingly, now that the election is over, even the Washington Post is willing to publish charts confirming that Obama’s economic track record is miserable.

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Government Benefits Encourage Unemployment

It’s not something I should admit since I work at a think tank, which is based on the idea that substantive analysis can impact public policy, but I sometimes think humor and anecdotes are very effective in helping people understand issues.

On the topic of unemployment insurance, for instance, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this Michael Ramirez cartoon and this Wizard-of-Id parody have been effective in helping folks grasp the unintended consequences of excessive government benefits.

And I bet this story from Michigan and this example from Ohio will ring a bell with many people because they have some relative or buddy who also has used government benefits as an excuse to stay unemployed.

So when I went on Fox to discuss the issue, I mentioned that I had a couple of friends who goofed off instead of looking for work because they got unemployment benefits.

But since I am a think-tank policy wonk, I also explain that even left-wing economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers agree that subsidizing unemployment means more joblessness. The academic research on this topic is virtually unanimous.

Keep in mind, by the way, that the negative impact of unemployment benefits is just the tip of the welfare-state iceberg. Professor Casey Mulligan has some very good work about the negative impact of redistribution programs, and this chart shows how dependency programs create very high implicit marginal tax rates for the less fortunate.

P.S. My opponent got screwed in terms of airtime, something that I can sympathize with since I’m often the one getting the short end of the stick, even when appearing on overseas television. This previous debate on unemployment insurance, by contrast, was very balanced.

P.P.S. If you want an example of unintentional humor, you can watch Nancy Pelosi asserting that paying people not to work is an effective means of creating jobs.

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A Four-Picture Indictment: Final Pre-Election Jobs Report Is Not Good News for Obama

In some sense, the President is fortunate. I predicted a long time ago that he would win re-election if the unemployment rate was under 8 percent.

Well, the new numbers just came out and the joblessness rate is 7.9 percent.

So even though his stimulus failed, and even though his class-warfare tax policy is like a dark cloud over the economy, and even though his plans to further increase the burden of government spending will accelerate America’s descent a Greek-style fiscal quagmire, he may dodge the proverbial bullet.

You can see my latest election prediction by clicking here, and you can even cast a vote in my reader poll, but let’s set aside the crystal ball nonsense and focus on public policy.

Here are four images that summarize Obama’s dismal performance.

We’ll start with a chart showing what President Obama claimed would happen to unemployment if we enacted his so-called stimulus compared to the actual real-world results.

As you can see, the joblessness rate currently is more than 2-1/2 percentage points higher than Obama claimed it would be if we implemented his Keynesian plan.

Now let’s look at some updated images of how this “recovery” compares to previous recoveries in the past six decades, based on data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. We’ll start with the unemployment rate. Take a wild guess which President has presided over the red line at the bottom.

Previously, I’ve compared Obamanomics and Reaganomics, but this image may be even better because it shows all business cycles and confirms that the Obama years have been the worst in post-World War II history.

And we see something similar if we look at GDP growth. Once again, go out on a limb and guess who is responsible for the weakest recovery since World War II.

Last but not least, this info-graphic is a bit dated, but Obama’s dismal track record would not change if we added the past few months of data.

Defenders of the White House argue that all these bad numbers are a legacy of the dismal situation that Obama inherited. That’s partially true. Obama should not be blamed for the depth of a recession that began before he took office.

But he should be held at least somewhat accountable for an anemic recovery. Particularly since he promised “hope” and “change” and then continued the big-spending, pro-cronyism policies of the Bush years.

The moral of the story, needless to say, is that free markets and small government are the keys to growth and prosperity.

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Will Obama Benefit from Bad Jobs Numbers that Look Good?

That’s a clunky title for this post, but I couldn’t think of any other way of expressing the potential political impact of a very muddled employment situation.

Let’s start with the obvious. The White House is very happy about the recent numbers showing that the unemployment rate has dropped to 7.8 percent. And since I predicted a long time ago that Obama would win reelection if the joblessness rate dropped under 8 percent, I can understand their relief.

But in this CNN interview, I point out that we still have a big problem with labor force participation and I explain that Obama is way behind Reagan in terms of job creation (as shown in this remarkable info-graphic).

I also make the point that the unemployment rate is far higher than Obama promised when we enacted the so-called stimulus.

But most importantly, I cite the Minneapolis Fed to show that Obama has the worst performance – whether looking at GDP growth or job creation – of any post-World War II president.

P.S. Apologies for being underdressed. I was in Virginia Beach for a softball tournament and didn’t expect to be in front of a camera (and I wasn’t full of smiles since my one-a-year achievement didn’t occur until the following day).

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John Stossel Exposes the Fraud of Government Job Training Programs

There have been lots of studies showing that there’s no benefit to job training programs. People who sign up with these government schemes are not more likely to either get jobs or to earn more money.

Heck, even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that these programs are a costly failure.

To really understand how these programs operate, John Stossel put together an investigative mission. The results excerpted below would be funny, other than the fact that taxpayers are getting ripped off and people are getting lured into lives of dependency.

“There are no jobs!” That is what people told me outside a government “jobs center” in New York City. …I sent four researchers around the area. They quickly found 40 job openings. Twenty-four were entry-level positions. One restaurant owner told me he would hire 12 people if workers would just apply. It made me wonder what my government does in buildings called “job centers.”

So Stossel sent one of his interns to investigate.

Here’s what she found: “First I went to the Manhattan Jobs Center and asked, “Can I get help finding a job?” They told me they don’t do that. ‘We sign people up for food stamps.’ I tried another jobs center. They told me to enroll for unemployment benefits.” So the “jobs” centers help people get handouts. Neither center suggested people try the 40 job openings in the neighborhood.

I shudder to think how many people walking in off the streets get hooked on government dependency. It’s disgusting that the government is encouraging people to ride in the wagon instead of getting jobs.

But Stossel’s intern was told not to give up.

My intern persisted: “I explained that I didn’t want handouts; I wanted a job. I was told to go to ‘WorkForce1,’ a New York City program. At WorkForce1, the receptionist told me that she couldn’t help me since I didn’t have a college degree. She directed me to another center in Harlem. In Harlem, I was told that before I could get help, I had to come back for an 8:30 a.m. ‘training session.’” Our government helps you apply for handouts immediately, but forces you through a maze if you want to work.

Amazingly, the intern was told to show up at 8:30 when the building didn’t open ’til 9:15. But, again, she was under orders to keep going.

Workforce1 directed 30 of us into a room where we were told that WorkForce1 directs candidates to jobs and provides a resource room with ‘free’ phone, fax and job listings and helps people apply for unemployment insurance and disability handouts. This seemed like the only part of the presentation when people took notes. “One lady told me that she comes to WorkForce1 because it helps her collect unemployment. One asked another, ‘What do you want to do?’ The second laughed, ‘I want to collect!’ One told me, ‘I’ve been coming here 17 months; this place is a waste of time.’

The intern, following orders, refused to take the dependency option that the bureaucrats kept offering. She finally got results…sort of.

“Finally, I met with an ‘adviser.’ …she scheduled an interview at Pret, a food chain that trains employees. At Pret, I learned that my ‘interview’ was just a weekly open house, publicized on the company’s website. Anyone could walk in and apply. Workforce1 offered no advantage. Despite my ‘scheduled interview,’ I waited 90 minutes before meeting a manager. He told me that WorkForce1 had ‘wasted my time, as they always do.’ He said, ‘They never call, never ask questions.’ He prefers to hire people who seek out jobs on their own, like those who see Pret ads on Craigslist.’”

The last comment in the excerpt makes a lot of sense. If you’re hiring people, it makes a lot of sense to choose those who show the initiative to seek out positions rather than those who come through some sort of government program that teaches them first and foremost to be a moocher.

Here are some concluding thoughts from Stossel’s column.

It’s easier to get welfare than to work. The government would rather sign me up for welfare than help me find work. America has taxpayer-funded bureaucracies that encourage people to be dependent. They incentivize people to take “free stuff,” not to take initiative. It was easier to find job openings on my own. The private market for jobs works better than government “job centers.” …Job training does help — when employers do it. But government does everything badly. …America now has 47 federal jobs programs. They fail. Yet politicians want more. They always want more.

That’s the problem. The politicians always gravitate to “solutions” that means more government intervention, more government dependency, and more government spending.

One would think that honest left wingers would look at the research, understand that these programs hurt people, and recognize that the right approach is free markets and limited government.

But they don’t, which suggest that there are no honest leftists. Or maybe there aren’t any smart and honest leftists. Because all they ever do is come up with ideas that make this satirical poster a reality.

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A Picture Says a Thousand Words: President Obama’s Dismal Failure on Jobs

If it wasn’t for the fact that so many people are suffering and being seduced into empty lives of government dependency (symbolized by Julia, the world’s most disappointing daughter), I might feel sorry for President Obama.

He promised unemployment would never climb above 8 percent if Congress squandered $800 billion on a Keynesian stimulus scheme.

Well, Congress said yes and the results have not been pretty. And every month we get new numbers to show us that the Administration’s policies have failed. It’s like Chinese water torture for the White House.

The numbers released this morning from the Department of Labor don’t change the narrative. The Republican and Democratic spin-doctors obviously will spit out their talking points, but here’s a visual put together by Political Math that trumps all the political maneuvering. If you’re wondering where Obama is, look at the lower left portion of the image.

This image is a couple of months old, but job creation has been so anemic that the naked eye wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if it was updated.

Since I normally show a graph with the actual unemployment rate compared to what Obama promised, I’ll add that as well. Not a pretty picture. I wrote that last month’s version would cause anxiety for Obama, and see no reason to change that assessment.

Yes, the official unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent, but that was because more Americans dropped out of the labor force.

Most important, the rate of joblessness is about 2-1/2 to 3 percentage points higher than what Obama promised. Now he wants a second term, yet all he’s promising is more of the same.

Actually, I retract that statement. He wants to maintain his current approach, but then add some class-warfare taxes to the mix.

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The White House Is Crazy to Invite a Comparison of Job Creation under Reagan and Obama

I’ve done a few comparisons of economic performance under Reagan and Obama, sometimes using the interactive data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

And I’ve done a few TV interviews on the same subject.

But something was very different in this interview on the Fox morning show. I was asked to respond to the Obama campaign’s assertion that Barack Obama’s policies created more private-sector jobs than Ronald Reagan’s policies.

I confess that I did the interview without first checking the numbers, and may not have been overly animated since I was in Denver and had to wake up before 4:00 a.m., but I felt confident enough to joke about an intern torturing data in the bowels of the White House.

But now that I’m back at my desk and I’ve had a chance to review the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I can now say, with full confidence, that Stephanie Cutter must be smoking crack (she’s also smoking hot, but that’s a separate discussion).

And her intern should be fired.

Here are the numbers for private sector jobs (technically “Private wage and salary workers”), looking at the first 42 months in office for both Reagan and Obama. I’m including both seasonally adjusted and raw numbers, just to show that there’s no way to slice the data to justify Ms. Cutter’s assertion.

And here’s a look at the comparative performance of Reagan and Obama, based on the percent increase in private jobs in the first 31 months.

I also looked at what would happen if agricultural and/or self-employed workers were added to the mix, but nothing changes. Reagan beats Obama with both hands tied behind his back.

And what makes these numbers even more stunning is that Obama took office in the middle of a downturn, so a lot of the job losses already had occurred. Reagan, by contrast, got hit with a recession after taking office. So even though I think that downturn can and should be blamed on Jimmy Carter, all of the job losses show up in Reagan’s column. Yet he still kicks the you-know-what out of Obama.

The lesson to draw from these numbers is that Presidents should reduce the burden of government if they want better economic performance. Saint Ronald understood this basic insight, but Barack the Destroyer somehow thinks America will be more prosperous if we mimic Europe’s welfare states.

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Using the White House’s Own Benchmark, I Give Obamanomics an F on CNBC

I almost feel sorry for the ideologues and partisan hacks who feel obliged to defends Obama’s miserable economic performance.

Keynesian spending policies and class-warfare tax policies have produced dismal economic performance, with unemployment stuck above 8 percent – even though the White House promised the joblessness rate by this point would be about 5.5 percent if we squandered $800 billion-plus on the so-called stimulus.

Yet Keith Boykin gamely tries to put perfume on this hog in our debate on CNBC.

Notice that I began this post by saying I “almost feel sorry” for the spin-meisters who defend Obamanomics. But “almost” is the key word in that sentence. I reserve my genuine sympathy for the millions of people who can’t find jobs because of the President’s destructive policies.

Let me add a few comments.

Boykin tries to disavow the Romer-Bernstein report and pretend that the President didn’t highlight and promote its claims when pushing for the faux stimulus. That’s a remarkable bit of revisionist history and I think I was effective at tying that rotting fish around his neck.

Keith also highlights the relatively good performance of the Clinton years. As I’ve done before, I announce that we’d be much better off with the Clinton tax rates – but only if we also get rid of all the reckless spending and regulation of the Bush and Obama years. I thinks that’s an effective point to make, but I confess I don’t have any feedback one way or the other to indicate that it’s a persuasive argument.

The most revealing point of the interview is when the host incredulously remarked to Keith that “you think we should have bigger government.”

But if anybody thinks that it’s a good idea to increase the burden of government spending, then they need to explain why America will be better off if we make our country more like Greece and France.

Last week, I shared some numbers from the left-wing OECD which showed that living standards are much higher in the United States than they are in Europe’s welfare states. That is what this fight is all about.

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Will the Economy Sink Obama in November?

At the start of the year, I predicted Obama would be reelected, largely because of my assumption that the unemployment rate would drop below 8 percent.

But my prediction on jobs is looking quite shaky, so this discussion about the economy and the election with Fox Business News is very timely.

I argued, unsurprisingly, that the economy is anemic because Obama’s been pursuing an agenda of wasteful spending and class warfare.

So if he loses, he has nobody to blame but himself.

That doesn’t mean Romney would be an improvement, especially if the warning signs are correct and he saddles the country with a value-added tax, so the American people may be tossed from one frying pan to another.

P.S. Hadley Heath may look familiar because she narrated this video about the damaging impact of welfare programs for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

P.P.S. On the completely separate topic of the Greek elections, I am more peeved than ever that the idiots in the media are reporting the results as a victory for the pro-bailout parties over the anti-bailout parties. That is nonsense. All the parties favored bailouts. As I wrote earlier this year, the election was a fight between parties that want no-strings bailout money and parties that at least pretend they are willing to implement reforms as a condition of getting bailout money.

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What’s Better for the Unemployed, a Government Handout or a Private-Sector Job?

The continuing weakness in the job market, which I wrote about this morning, means that the debate over unemployment benefits will get more heated.

I’ve already noted that even left-wing academics like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that you get more unemployment when you subsidize joblessness.

And I’ve cited some good research on the topic from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, as well as other studies by academic economists.

But none of this evidence seems to matter, as I discovered in this debate with a former Obama Labor Department official.

To better understand the points I was making, here are two good anecdotes from Ohio and Michigan.

Last but not least, this cartoon does a very good who of teaching about the economics of unemployment insurance. And if you want to understand the absurdity of the left, this post shows Nancy Pelosi is a train wreck of economic illiteracy.

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More Sub-Par Employment Numbers

The Labor Department just released its monthly employment report and the White House is probably not happy.

There are several key bits of data in the report, such as the unemployment rate, net job creation, and employment-population ratio.

At best, the results are mediocre. The unemployment rate generally gets the most attention, and that was bad news since the joblessness rate jumped to 8.2 percent.

What makes that number particularly painful is that the Obama Administration claimed that the unemployment rate today would be less than 6 percent if the so-called stimulus was adopted. But as you can see from the chart, squandering $800 billion on a Keynesian package hasn’t worked.

While that chart is probably embarrassing to the White House, I think the most revealing numbers come from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s interactive website, which allows users to compare employment data and GDP data for different business cycles.

I looked at those numbers a couple of months ago, so I could compare Reaganomics and Obamanomics, and the difference is startling. The Reagan policies of lower tax rates, spending restraint, deregulation, and tight money generated much better results than the statist policies of Obama.

The most recent numbers, shown below, aren’t any better for the Obama Administration.

But I suppose the good news is that the United States is not Europe. Government is even bigger on the other side of the Atlantic and many of those nations are in the middle of a fiscal crisis and the unemployment rate averages 11 percent.

Sort of makes you wonder whether there’s a lesson to be learned. Maybe, just maybe, bigger government means weaker economic performance.

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Using Labor Department Data to Indict Obama’s Dismal Performance on Jobs

The new unemployment numbers have been released and the White House must be somewhat happy. The joblessness rate is down to 8.2 percent, which means the number that gets the most publicity continues to move in the right direction.

I’ve been predicting that Obama will win reelection if the unemployment rate falls to 8.0 percent or below, so my prognostication ability will be put to the test if this trend continues.

But let’s set aside the politics and take a dispassionate look at the U.S. job market. How are we doing?

Well, total employment is estimated to be a bit above 142 million.

The good news is that we have about 4.1 million more jobs than we had in December of 2009.

The bad news is that we still have fewer jobs than when Obama took office, and about 4.5 million fewer jobs than we had in November 2007.

Last September, I put together four charts to assess Obama’s performance on jobs.

Let’s update those charts to get a more complete look at the labor market.

First, let’s begin by comparing where we are now to where the White House said we would be if Congress enacted the President’s so-called stimulus. As you can see, the actual joblessness rate is about 2-percentage points higher. That’s not a good performance.

If Republicans want to highlight a number that favors them, they could point out that the unemployment rate began to fall once they took control of the House. It was near its peak, at 9.8 percent, in November of 2010, and now it’s dropped by more than 1.5 percentage points.

Of course, they really shouldn’t brag since a lot of the bad news is a lingering consequence of the statist policies of the Bush Administration.

Nonetheless, I think the economy has reacted positively to the 2010 elections since gridlock makes it harder for politicians of either party to impose new burdens.

Let’s look at another chart that was in my September post. As you can see, the unemployment rate for African Americans is especially dismal.

I’ve already made the point that Obama’s policies are bad news for Black Americans, particularly policies such as higher minimum wage requirements that cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Another bit of bad news can be found in the data on long-term unemployment. This chart shows the share of the unemployed that have been without a job for at least six months. Very damning.

Part of the problem, as even Democrat economists have admitted, is that Obama’s policy of extended unemployment insurance benefits has been subsidizing joblessness.

Last but not least, we have the chart that should be the most troubling of all. It shows a sustained drop in the labor force.

Economic growth and output are the result of labor and capital being mixed together by entrepreneurs and investors. If there is a permanent reduction in the availability of one of the ingredients, that obviously doesn’t bode well for American prosperity.

And this is why Obama deserves a poor grade. Not because his policies caused the weak job market. Those problems existed before he took office. Instead, he gets a bad grade because he continued the statist policies of his predecessor.

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Has Obama Made the Economy Better or Worse?

I’ve been a big critic of Obama’s policies on taxes, spending, regulation, and intervention, so you won’t be surprised that I argued on CNBC that his policies have made the economy worse.

Here are two graphs, which I posted earlier this month, that make my point. The red lines show the economy is finally – and slowly – moving in the right direction, but the blue lines show how the economy boomed under Reaganomics.

The gap between the two lines in the charts is a measure of how Obama’s policies have undermined the economy, as I mentioned on the program. However, I also said that this may not matter much this November if Republicans are incapable of making coherent economic arguments.

One last thing to emphasize is that Jared resorted to dishonest Washington math when discussing Obama’s make-believe budget cuts. When you use honest numbers, as i did when analyzing the President’s new budget, you find that the burden of government spending is going to climb by $2 trillion between 2012 and 2022.

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Why Won’t Washington Understand that Paying People to Be Unemployed Means More Unemployment?

I’ve written periodically about the perverse incentives of the unemployment insurance system. Simply stated, there will be fewer jobs if the government subsidizes joblessness, and I even showed that this is a consensus position by citing the academic writings of left-leaning economists such as Larry Summers and Paul Krugman.

The San Francisco Federal Reserve also has produced research measuring the negative impact of unemployment insurance on the job market.

Now we have some additional academic research on the topic, and the results once again show that the unemployment insurance program causes a significant increase in unemployment.

The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program created in the summer of 2008 provided for unprecedented extensions in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. Combined with persistent high unemployment and historically long durations of unemployment during the 2008 and 2009 recession, this extension of UI has prompted renewed interest in the impact of UI benefits on job search, the duration of unemployment, and the unemployment rate. …This paper uses multiple regression analysis to estimate the impact of extended UI benefits on the unemployment rate after controlling for the severity of the recent recession. The extension of UI is found to have a positive and significant impact on the national unemployment rate… The UI benefit extensions that have occurred between the summer of 2008 and the end of 2010 are estimated to have had a cumulative effect of raising the unemployment rate by .77 to 1.54 percentage points.

If you’re trying to educate a statist friend or colleague about the relationship between unemployment insurance and joblessness, this research should help. But you may also want to share this real-world story. And here’s another powerful anecdote.

Last but not least, this cartoon does a very effective job of showing the consequences of paying people not to work.

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In a Victory for Gridlock, the Unemployment Rate Has Dropped 1.5-Percentage Points Since Republicans Took Control of the House

The new unemployment numbers show a joblessness rate of 8.3 percent.

From a political perspective, this is good news for the White House. Even though the Obama Administration projected that the unemployment rate today would be about 2-percentage points lower if the so-called stimulus was adopted, most people aren’t looking at the numbers analytically.

Instead, what matters most is the trend. And since there’s been steady movement in the right direction, the President can say it’s somehow because of his policies.

Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter. Politics is about perception. And since I began predicting, back in 2010, that Obama would win reelection if the joblessness rate was 8 percent or below, the folks at the White House should be smiling.

But there’s another group of people who should be happy. Republicans can argue that the improvement began almost precisely at the moment they took control of the House of Representatives.

Here are the monthly numbers, beginning in November 2010.

But I’m not here to spin a happy story for either Obama or House Republicans. The real story is that gridlock works, just as our Founding Fathers envisioned.

Once Republicans took control of the House, it meant that there was almost no chance that Obama would be able to impose more of his agenda.

This means no possibility of cap-and-trade industrial policy. It means no big new spending initiatives. It means no threat of a value-added tax.

And this means that the private sector finally has some degree of comfort that things won’t get worse in the future. This is not a trivial matter. Indeed, the Great Depression lasted so long and was so deep in part because Hoover and Roosevelt kept expanding the burden of taxes, spending, regulation, and intervention. The productive sector of the economy kept getting knocked to the canvas, so there’s was never an opportunity to adjust to the new burdens.

This isn’t to say gridlock, by itself, solves problems. Necessary reforms such as the Ryan budget can’t be implemented if we have gridlock forever, and that means America eventually would become another Greece.

But if the choice is between moving in the wrong direction and treading water, then the latter is better. It means the economy can adjust and slowly recover.

Yes, the potential long-run growth rate won’t be as high because of the bad policies implemented in Obama’s first two years, but gridlock means that nothing really bad will happen in the near future. As such, we can at least expect continued improvement in the jobs market and decent – albeit not impressive – growth.

Ironically, that’s good news for Obama. If he wins reelection, he should send a bouquet of roses to John Boehner.

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One Year Later, Another Look at Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics

On this day last year, I posted two charts that I developed using the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank’s interactive website.

Those two charts showed that the current recovery was very weak compared to the boom of the early 1980s.

But perhaps that was an unfair comparison. Maybe the Reagan recovery started strong and then hit a wall. Or maybe the Obama recovery was the economic equivalent of a late bloomer.

So let’s look at the same charts, but add an extra year of data. Does it make a difference?

Meh…not so much.

Let’s start with the GDP data. The comparison is striking. Under Reagan’s policies, the economy skyrocketed.  Heck, the chart prepared by the Minneapolis Fed doesn’t even go high enough to show how well the economy performed during the 1980s.

Under Obama’s policies, by contrast, we’ve just barely gotten back to where we were when the recession began. Unlike past recessions, we haven’t enjoyed a strong bounce. And this means we haven’t recovered the output that was lost during the downturn.

This is a damning indictment of Obamanomics

Indeed, I made this point several months ago when analyzing some work by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas. And it’s been highlighted more recently by James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute and the news pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, the jobs chart is probably even more discouraging. As you can see, employment is still far below where it started.

This is in stark contrast to the jobs boom during the Reagan years.

So what does this mean? How do we measure the human cost of the foregone growth and jobs that haven’t been created?

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, former Senator Phil Gramm and budgetary expert Mike Solon compare the current recovery to the post-war average as well as to what happened under Reagan.

If in this “recovery” our economy had grown and generated jobs at the average rate achieved following the 10 previous postwar recessions, GDP per person would be $4,528 higher and 13.7 million more Americans would be working today. …President Ronald Reagan’s policies ignited a recovery so powerful that if it were being repeated today, real per capita GDP would be $5,694 higher than it is now—an extra $22,776 for a family of four. Some 16.9 million more Americans would have jobs.

By the way, the Gramm-Solon column also addresses the argument that this recovery is anemic because the downturn was caused by a financial crisis. That’s certainly a reasonable argument, but they point out that Reagan had to deal with the damage caused by high inflation, which certainly wreaked havoc with parts of the financial system. They also compare today’s weak recovery to the boom that followed the financial crisis of 1907.

But I want to make a different point. As I’ve written before, Obama is not responsible for the current downturn. Yes, he was a Senator and he was part of the bipartisan consensus for easy money, Fannie/Freddie subsidies, bailout-fueled moral hazard, and a playing field tilted in favor of debt, but his share of the blame wouldn’t even merit an asterisk.

My problem with Obama is that he hasn’t fixed any of the problems. Instead, he has kept in place all of the bad policies – and in some cases made them worse. Indeed, I challenge anyone to identify a meaningful difference between the economic policy of Obama and the economic policy of Bush.

• Bush increased government spending. Obama has been increasing government spending.
• Bush adopted Keynesian “stimulus” policies. Obama adopted Keynesian “stimulus” policies.
• Bush bailed out politically connected companies. Obama has been bailing out politically connected companies.
• Bush supported the Fed’s easy-money policy. Obama has been supporting the Fed’s easy-money policy.
• Bush created a new healthcare entitlement. Obama created a new healthcare entitlement.
• Bush imposed costly new regulations on the financial sector. Obama imposed costly new regulations on the financial sector.

I could continue, but you probably get the  point. On economic issues, the only real difference is that Bush cut taxes and Obama is in favor of higher taxes. Though even that difference is somewhat overblown since Obama’s tax policies – up to this point – haven’t had a big impact on the overall tax burden (though that could change if his plans for higher tax rates ever go into effect).

This is why I always tell people not to pay attention to party labels. Bigger government doesn’t work, regardless of whether a politician is a Republican or Democrat. The problem isn’t Obamanomics, it’s Bushobamanomics. But since that’s a bit awkward, let’s just call it statism.

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Why Does Mitt Romney Want Low-Skilled Workers to Be Unemployed?

Earlier this week, I explained why Mitt Romney is a Republican version of Barack Obama. His transgressions include being open to a value-added tax, a less-than-stellar record on healthcare, weakness on Social Security reform, an anemic list of proposed budget savings, and support for reprehensible ethanol subsidies.

Now we can add something else to the list. He wants to cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder and hurt low-skilled workers.

Here are a couple of passages from a report in the Oregonian.

Mitt Romney…continues to be a supporter of indexing the minimum wage for inflation. Oregon and Washington were among the first states to index their own minimum wages to inflation – nine states now do so – and it’s a favorite of liberals… Romney campaigned in favor of indexing the minimum wage when he ran for governor in 2002.  However, ABC News noted in 2007 that he wasn’t sure he supported indexing the federalminimum wage (which is lower than the minimum wage in several states).  In this new video, you could quibble that he doesn’t explicitly say he’s talking about the federal minimum — but that sure seems to be the tenor of his comments.

In other words, Romney is willing to condemn lower-skilled workers to unemployment, in hopes that he will gain some sort of short-term political advantage. In this regard, he will be just like Bush.

For a good explanation of why the government should not try to dictate wages, here’s a video narrated by one of my former interns.

It’s also worth noting that the minimum wage imposes disproportionate damage on the African-American community, as Walter Williams has explained.

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New Unemployment Numbers Are Good News for the White House, but the Silver Cloud Has a Dark Lining

The White House doubtlessly is happy that the unemployment rate has dropped to 8.5 percent, in part because the President is much more likely to get reelected if voters think the economy is heading in the right direction.

My political predictions have a mixed track record, so take this for what it’s worth, but I’ve been telling audiences for quite some time that Obama will definitely win reelection if the joblessness rate drops to 8 percent or below by next November.

But the latest drop in the unemployment is not unambiguous good new for the Obama Administration.

Before explaining why, let’s take a brief detour and look at how the unemployment rate is calculated. The key thing to understand is that there are two moving parts. First, the government estimates the number of unemployed people. That’s the obvious part of the calculation.

But in order to calculate the unemployment rate, the government has to estimate the size of the labor force. But this is not a simple number to calculate because many people who could work – such as women with young children, students, people approaching retirement age – sometimes decide that their time could be better spent doing other things.

So the government has to look at all the people who don’t have jobs and guess how many of them would like to work.

With this in mind, let’s look at the unemployment rate. The simple way to think about unemployment numbers is that the joblessness rate can rise or fall for good reasons and bad reasons.

If the unemployment rate drops because hundreds of thousands of jobs are being created each month, that’s obviously good news.

But if the jobless rate falls because the government estimates that lots of people have become discouraged and dropped out of the labor force, then that’s not good news.

In other words, sometimes the unemployment rate, by itself, doesn’t tell the full story.

That’s why one of the best statistics to look at is the employment-population ratio, which measures the number of people who have jobs and compares it to the number of people who could have jobs.

And by this measure, the Obama White House can’t be very happy. As illustrated in the chart, the job numbers have barely begun to recover.

This is a woefully under-reported piece of data. A few news outlets do mention the phenomenon of “discouraged workers” dropping out of the labor market, but only policy geeks like me seem to pay attention.

But the employment-population ratio does have real-world implications. The economy’s overall level of output (i.e., national income, gross domestic product, etc) depends on how many people are working. And that is what determines whether living standards are rising, falling, or stagnating.

This is why the Obama Administration can’t rely of a falling unemployment rate. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the American economy appears to have suffered a permanent loss of output in recent years.

So what does this mean, for those of you who care about political implications of economic statistics? The honest answer is that I have no idea. But since living standards are still stagnant, a falling joblessness rate won’t necessarily translate into a victory for the incumbent party.

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Real-World Evidence Showing that Unemployment Insurance Benefits Increase Unemployment

I’ve written before about the perverse impact of the unemployment insurance program, and I’ve even cited how left-wing economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers admit that you get more joblessness when you pay people for not working.

I’ve even shared a very good cartoon making the same point. And who can forget Nancy Pelosi’s mindless comments about unemployment benefits being a great way to stimulate job creation.

But sometimes it helps to have real-world anecdotes, and this letter-to-the-editor from a newspaper in Ohio is very educational. Here are key excerpts.

Little did I know that attempting to hire the employees needed, which I had thought to be the easiest part, would turn out to be a nightmare if not impossible. …Before 2009 if our company advertised for an open position, on average we would get 20 to 30 applications, interview six to eight of the applicants, and hire one or two, based on the quality and potential of the candidates. This process has been deteriorating dramatically since 2009 and now at the end of 2011 it has completely hit bottom. Of all the applications that we have received this year, when asked why they were seeking a job with us, one out of three answered: my unemployment is running out and I have to go back to work. Earlier this year after I hired two new full-time employees, went through our company’s orientation process, fitted them with our work clothing and booked them to start within a week, they both quit. One called ahead of the start date to apologize but wanted to inform us he would not be coming in because the government had just extended unemployment benefits again. The second one just did not show on his first day and when I called him he said he couldn’t come in now because unemployment had been extended and he was making almost as much as we were planning to start him out with.  …Our government is considering extending unemployment benefits again soon. The final absurdity might be that extending unemployment is the only thing that both the Democratic and Republican majorities both agree on.

By the way, here’s a post with a similar real-world story from Detroit.

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A Simple Lesson about Job Creation for Barack Obama

Even though leftist economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that unemployment insurance benefits are a recipe for more joblessness, the White House is arguing that Congress should enact legislation to further subsidize unemployment.

It’s understandable that the Obama Administration is concerned about the issue. These four charts show that the labor market is in terrible shape.

But how can we convince the President that more government is just making a bad situation even worse? What will it take to educate him about the need to reduce government-imposed barriers to job creation?

Perhaps this cartoon will do the trick

And if statists learn from this cartoon, then maybe we should show them another cartoon showing the link between unemployment insurance benefits and joblessness.

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