Morning Bell: So, How’s That Pivot to Jobs Going?

Conn Carroll / March 05, 2010

Last week President Barack Obama hosted a seven-and-a-half-hour televised health care summit. This week the President launched his “final” campaign for passage of his health care plan. Next week, President Obama will travel to Missouri and Pennsylvania to continue this “final” effort to jam his unpopular plan through Congress. With this all-health-care-all-the-time White House agenda it seems like eons ago that the Obama administration announced, following the complete rejection of its health care plan in the Massachusetts Senate special election,  that President Obama’s first State of the Union would mark a “pivot” from health care and to a “razor sharp focus on jobs”. So how is that pivot to jobs going? Well, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report this morning and it showed the U.S. economy shed another 36,000 net jobs last month. Our nation’s unemployment rate is still at 9.7%.

So why is our economy having such a tough time pulling out of recession? Here are the facts: the most recent data available show that the U.S. economy actually lost fewer jobs during this recession than were lost during the 2001 recession. Specifically, 50.8 million jobs were lost through the first six quarters of the ’01 recession while 48.2 million jobs were lost through the first six quarters of this recession.

But if our economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama’s stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That’s a 7.3 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren’t businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration: (more…)