April 14th, 2010, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today decried what he called “Barack Obama’s job-loss recovery.”
Today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified that although the economy was recovering from the financial crisis, “a significant amount of time will be required to restore the 8-1/2 million jobs that were lost during the past two years.”
According to Bernanke that “a recovery in economic activity appears to have begun in the second half of last year.”
“However,” said Wilson, “since July of 2009, unemployment has increased by 543 thousand and underemployment has jumped by 826 thousand.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in July 2009, headline unemployment stood at 9.360 percent (14.462 million) and U-6 underemployment stood at 16.3 percent (25.184 million).
Today, it has risen to 9.749 percent (15.005 million) and 16.9 percent (26.011 million), respectively.
Said Wilson, “Obama has not even given the American people a jobless recovery. He has given them a job-loss recovery.”
“Unfortunately for the American people, he has done nothing to enable a speedy recovery in the employment situation, and instead has only placed heavy burdens on the economy and American families,” Wilson added.
Bernanke warned that government spending was out of control: “maintaining the confidence of the public and financial markets requires that policymakers move decisively to set the federal budget on a trajectory toward sustainable fiscal balance.”
Obama economic advisor Paul Volcker has proposed a new national sales tax to address steepening federal budget deficits. Wilson called it a “jobs killer.”
Wilson said that instead Congress must slash entitlement spending, saying that “No amount of new taxes, which will destroy jobs, will be able to sustain the unsustainable: the unbridled growth of federal welfare spending.”
In its ten-year budget plan, the White House projects that the national debt will grow by $10.6 trillion. Wilson said that “will mean less opportunities for private job creation, as government sucks much-needed resources from the economy to finance its unsustainable trajectory that threatens to forever wreck the nation’s finances.”
“Obama is recklessly driving up the national debt, destroying the dollar, taking over health care, taking over the financial system, proposing to raise taxes and punish wealth creation, artificially drive up the cost of energy with a punitive tax on carbon emissions, and all the while continuing the easy money monetary policies that caused the financial crisis to begin with,” Wilson concluded.
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