Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Democrats: The Anti-Job Party

Everything that Obama does (or wants to do) either hurts job creation or prevents an improvement in the job market.

Obama has hurt job creation since day one.  For example, increasing taxes on the "wealthy," the very people who can afford to invest and create jobs, doesn't help the economy.  No income tax increases ever do--especially in recessionary conditions!  Higher and aggressive regulation by the EPA also hurts jobs.  His "cap and trade" idea, if implemented, would absolutely devastate jobs by over-regulating and over-taxing business. Cap and Trade is all about taxing and not about warming.

But it's ObamaCare that has hurt business the most and is substantially responsible for an unusually anemic job market recovery since the bottom of the recession in April 2009.

The Democrats are the anti-job party.

ObamaCare is a Poverty Trap and Hurts Jobs and Output.


Now the anti-job credentials of the Democratic party is becoming apparent to even Democratic voters thanks to recent reports out of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Last week, the CBO reported that ObamaCare would reduce employment by the equivalent of 2,500,000 jobs in the next decade.  This is because gov't subsidies drop-off at modest but increasing incomes, so ObamaCare has built-in incentives for people to NOT work harder or achieve higher incomes.  It's a disincentive to work!   Like all welfare programs, ObamaCare is a poverty trap.  This shows the problem for government welfare programs in general, but especially with steep cliffs (cutoffs) for subsidies or benefits.  Those "cliffs" didn't have to be steep.  But everything about that law is wrong.

Less jobs means less GDP growth and less income growth in the next decade. It also therefore means less opportunity to close the income inequality gap.   Like Europe, Obama is "transforming" America into a land of economic stagnation thanks to his ideas for creating a welfare state. 

The White House tried to defend the un-defendable again by saying that less jobs would "free" people from being "trapped" in jobs or that it enables more "leisure." So, for the Democratic Party, working is a problem now?    Only the anti-job Democratics would try to spin this as good news.   Sorry people, but less jobs is NOT good news---especially five years into the worse economic recovery EVER.

A Minimum Wage Increase a Job-Killer Too


One of the few remaining ideas from President Obama is to raise the minimum wage, but this is another job killer too.  Obama mistakenly thinks that an increase in the minimum wage would address "income inequality." (See my recent blog on the real fixes to the income inequality problem).  Now,  the CBO says that raising the minimum wage to $10 per hour would kill 500,000 jobs--maybe as many as 1,000,000 jobs.

Today, the CBO reported the following from Money News:
Raising the U.S. federal minimum wage to $10.10, as President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress are proposing, could result in about 500,000 jobs being lost by late 2016, the Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday.
First of all, it's a certainty that the biggest reduction of jobs would occur in the bottom rung of income earners--those making minimum wage.  Higher job costs would force firms to reduce staff and/or automate.  Also, like the negative job effects from ObamaCare, less jobs would in turn means lower economic growth than before.   And lower economic growth further hurts opportunities for the bottom 50% and would INCREASE income inequality--not reduce it.  Only Democrats would argue with these facts. 

Even what Obama is NOT doing is hurting the job market. A failure to work with Republicans to reduce marginal corporate taxes from the highest rate in the world to a rate closer to the OECD average would bring back jobs from Asia. This is a huge opportunity squandered by this administration. Another point: Obama's slavish adherence to a climate change agenda has also killed potential jobs in his refusal to allow the final leg of the Keystone pipeline go through.

I don't think Obama wants ANY jobs in this country (except government jobs)!   Bottom line: Obama and the Democrats are job killers!

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