At the end of April, this country’s unemployment rate stood at 8.9 %, a number not having been this high since 1983. Many States have double digit unemployment and are struggling financially to stay solvent. The numbers for the month of May have not been made public but we expect it to be another slight increase over April. But this is actually not the main topic of this article. While we all understand that job creation is the main tool to reverse unemployment, we want to distinguish between the types of jobs that are desirable and those that are just make-shift jobs.
Let us take the statistics for April as an example: The private sector lost 611,000 jobs while the U.S. government hired 66,000 people (almost all of them to be trained and preparing for next year’s U.S. Census). This somehow made the overall job loss numbers nationwide better than previous months and self-proclaimed ‘experts’ remarked that this was a sign of a turn-around in the economy. We can only wonder what makes these ‘experts’ tick? If their rationale was true, then we should be asking why President Barack Obama would not hire a few million more people, put them on the public dole and claim that he got us back to nearly full employment in America?
Would that not be a way to control economic ups and downs? Instead of letting people who get laid off in the private sector and become therewith unemployed and suffer hardship, find a formula where these individuals switch without any delay to government jobs and continue their lives, it’s just that they have changed employers. And when the economy actually picks up again, when the private sector hangs out the ‘For Hire’ signs, then these people can switch back and continue in their previous jobs. Brilliant solution, don’t you agree? We sincerely hope not!
This has been tried before and it was called Communism. It brought the Soviet Union with all its Eastern European allies to bankruptcy and collapse, they would be laughing at us here if we were to try this now. We think that this kind of tampering by the Federal Government with the economy would possibly be the end of America as we have known it. In our opinion here at Common Sense University, the only desirable jobs are in the private sector while government jobs should be held to an absolute minimum. Think of it in these simple terms: A job in the private sector does not cost the taxpayers a dime, in fact, such a job pays taxes to the government and helps run the country. To the contrary, a government job is paid by taxes collected from the people who work in the private sector and by privately owned companies. Ok, some government employees also pay taxes but the rest of their salary, in essence their take-home pay, is provided and paid for by the American taxpayer. It cannot get any clearer than this!
We should not allow ourselves to be fooled by these kinds of labor statistics. When the private sector loses jobs, such numbers should be reported on its own and not lumped in with government new-hire statistics to make the ‘bad news’ not look so ‘bad’. We are currently in an economic recession and it will take some time to get ourselves out of it. These ups and downs occur in cycles and are unavoidable but we know from history that the free market fluctuations based on ‘Supply and Demand’ will bring us out of this recession. It has always done so and it will happen again. The worst thing that could happen in America is that the Federal Government would try and take over the economy, it would be the end of free enterprise and capitalism.