Sept. 7, 2012, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today issued the following analysis of today’s unemployment report:
“Since January 2009, the labor force participation rate has dropped from 65.7 percent to 63.5 percent, the lowest it has been in a generation. As a result, some 5.37 million people have given up looking for work since Obama took office or never even entered the labor force, with 368,000 leaving the workforce last month alone. That explains the drop in the unemployment rate. People are not finding work; they’re giving up. Hardly a measure of prosperity. This is a depression, and Obama has done nothing to make it better.
“If those 5.37 million people had been included in today’s unemployment report, the unemployed rate would be reported at 11.2 percent and the underemployed rate would be 17.5 percent. All together 28 million people cannot find full-time work in the Obama economy or have given up.
“Since January 2009, the working-age population has grown by 8.8 million, but the civilian labor force has only grown by 409,000. At full employment, the labor force should have grown by 5.8 million, but it has not. This in part represents younger Americans who are simply not entering the workforce — a lost generation—with more than half of recent college graduates unable to find work. If this trend continues, we are going to look like Spain or Greece in a matter of a few short years, where the youth cannot find work because there are no jobs in the economy.
“This sorry state of affairs will not be addressed by Obama’s tepid, fraudulent ‘green’ energy jobs program, as if millions of Americans are going to work on building windmills and harvesting algae.
“We need real jobs here in America, and we need them now, and that can only happen if we aggressively work to make the nation more competitive globally. That means eliminating the corporate income tax all together, which is currently the highest in the developed world, bringing an end to environmental and energy restrictions that make it impossible to access natural resources or to use land in a productive manner, repealing much of the labor laws that handcuff employers and restoring sound money. None of that will happen with Obama.”
Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.
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