Jobs & Economy (July 2011)

With $14 trillion in debt, sustained unemployment over 9 percent and a liberal Washington orthodoxy that demands continuously higher borrowing and spending, America is on the verge of drowning in red ink. Washington’s inability to control spending creates daunting obstacles to job creation in the short term while threatening America’s very being in the long term. 

The jobs report released last week disappointed a lot of Americans, and I’m one of them. Our private sector added 57,000 jobs in June, but with public-sector layoffs across the country, the total number of jobs created added up to just 18,000. To be sure, that’s far better than the situation our country faced as President Obama took office, when we were losing nearly three-quarters of a million jobs per month. Since then, our economy has been steadily adding jobs, and our private sector has grown for 16 straight months. But that’s hardly any consolation to the millions of Americans who are still out of work, still suffering the effects of 2008’s financial crisis. What can we do to make their future brighter?

June’s disappointing jobs numbers should serve as another wake-up call to Washington to focus on the economy and move quickly in a bipartisan manner to create the climate for job growth. Here are seven common-sense ideas Congress could take up and pass this year to make our economy more competitive and help struggling families in Ohio and around the country.

I’m not sure if the House Republican leadership understands that we are moving in the wrong direction. A disappointing jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor last Friday indicated that despite 54,000 private-sector jobs created last month, the unemployment rate increased a tenth of a percent. 

Last summer, the president lauded a supposed “recovery summer” initiative that celebrated the “success” of the administration’s stimulus plan. However, during that span of time, the U.S. economy shed jobs for three straight months, and unemployment edged up to 9.6 percent.