How Democrats Kill Jobs

While Democrats continue to claim that they are focused on “putting Americans back to work,” Democratic policies led by President Obama have continued to kill jobs.

Job growth declined sharply in December, with only 74,000 jobs added, according to the government’s January labor report, the weakest month for job growth since January 2011. While the unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, the only reason for this so-called improvement is the decline of labor force participation, at the lowest level since 1978.

Meanwhile, President Obama has spent $831 billion of taxpayer money on a stimulus plan for the economy, $264 billion of which went to entitlement programs (http://www.recovery.gov/arra/Transparency/fundingoverview/Pages/entitlements-details.aspx#MedicaidMedicare)   Among other recipients were $50 billion to General Motors to keep it afloat and $500 million to energy company Solyndra.  All of the above were supposed to save jobs.

Now here comes his own signature initiative, Obamacare. The Republican argument has been that for many employers, the cost of providing health insurance to mainly low-income workers would be huge. Logically, many firms would try to evade the expense. There are two ways of doing this. First, businesses with fewer than 50 full-time workers are exempt from the insurance requirement (the “employer mandate”). So, a simple strategy would be don’t hire that 50th worker – killing potential new jobs. The second way is to make workers part time by cutting their weekly hours to less than 30 (Obamacare’s threshold for full-time workers). While the Administration contends this has not been the case, the job numbers suggest the opposite when we see only 74,000 jobs added in December.

Then there is the ultimate irony, the President has outsourced ObamaCare. After a disastrous rollout, the White House has hired Accenture as the new lead contractor. The deal, estimated to be worth $90 million, is now in the hands of the poster boy for global labor outsourcing – India, Pakistan, Ireland will benefit from jobs from Obamacare as well as non-American H1-B-visa workers. (Accenture used to be called Andersen Consulting, which was associated with Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm found to be complicit in the Enron scandal.)