If you are one of the nearly 15 million people who want to work and can’t find a job, you are not impressed that 151,000 new private sector jobs were created in October. That’s because it represents less than 1 percent of the workforce while 9.6 percent are still unemployed, which is nearly four million more than when President Obama took office.
If you are unemployed it’s not encouraging that the president says he is willing to consider some compromise with the new Republican majority in the House. Compromise does not produce a job or stimulate the economy. Certainty about taxes and regulations does.
Certainty about taxes and regulations will cause businesses to start growing again, if that certainty is lower taxes and fewer regulations. I wish I were optimistic that President Obama heard the American people last week through the mid-term election results, but during his press conference the next day he would only say that if the other side has some ideas about creating jobs, he would consider them.
Some ideas! Republicans have been screaming proven ways to stimulate the economy for the nearly two years he has been in office, but he and the Democrats continue to claim falsely that they are the failed policies of the past. A previous commentary shows where we were when President Obama took office versus June 2010, and the results are even worse today. The failed policies are the ones we have seen in the last two years.
Many writers have written extensively about what we need to do to truly stimulate the economy. But the ideas have fallen on deaf ears. The ideas do not reinforce the liberals’ ideological belief that more government is the answer.
In his February 2010 State of the Union address, the president once again promised the American people he would make creating jobs a top priority. What we have seen is unprecedented spending, and a health care bill the majority of the people did not want. Every day people are learning that it is filled with regulatory grenades that have nothing to do with health care, and that health care costs are going to go up instead of down as promised by the president and the Democrats.
The president and the Democrats obviously do not understand the pain of unemployment like some of us do who encounter it every day. We continue to loan money to relatives and friends who are looking hard for work but can’t seem to be in that 1 percent that’s landing one of the newly created private sector jobs. Although competent and qualified, many of them remain stuck in that unemployed 9.6 percent.
Even more discouraging are the calls I get to my radio show of businessmen and women who say they can’t hold on any longer, and that they are going to be forced to start letting people go, and in some cases shut down the business altogether.
The president and Congress see the unemployment situation in a Labor Department report or a news story. Many of us see it in the faces of those that don’t know where the next rent payment is going to come from, or how they will be able to scrape enough money together for groceries.
The newly elected Republican majority in the House is not a mandate for business as usual in Congress. It’s a probationary period for Republicans. Even if they do not achieve everything they said they would do, they have to try. They may have to compromise on some issues, but a half-pregnant economic stimulus will not put people back to work.
The unemployed are tired of promises, politics and the personal pain of being unemployed. They want a job.
The president and his administration don’t seem to understand that urgency.
Herman Cain is a former CEO, a radio talk show host on AM 750 and 95.5 FM WSB in Atlanta, and a FOX News contributor.
