July Jobs: Worse than the Worst

(ATLANTA, GA) – The official unemployment rate is now more than a full percentage point above what was projected if Washington had done nothing at all to create jobs and never spent the Federal Stimulus, the chief executives of Job Creators Network said today in response to the monthly unemployment report released by the US Department of Labor this morning.

One JCN CEO says it’s time to examine why we’re worse off and the Affordable Care Act might be one reason.

“In 2009, we were told unemployment would be 5 percent if we did nothing,” noted Douglas Haugh, president of Mansfield Oil. “Yet we spent the Stimulus, passed the Affordable Care Act, monkeyed with our economy in many other ways, and here we are with unemployment stalled at 6.2 percent.”

“It’s clear Washington’s way has been worse than doing nothing, and we need to begin undoing our mistakes,” Haugh said. “The job creators in America’s private sector are growing jobs, but much more slowly than we could with reasonable government policy.”

A January 2009 White House white paper advocating the benefits of the then-proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act warned unemployment would spike to 9 percent in 2010 unless the plan was implemented. Instead, even after enacting a Stimulus plan, the unemployment rate shot up to near 10 percent during most of 2010. Under both options – passing the Stimulus or doing nothing – the White House predicted inaccurately that unemployment would settle back to 5 percent by 2014.

“The ACA, the War on Coal and many other policies came with clear warnings about job losses that never figured into those unemployment projections,” Haugh said. “And not surprisingly we now have higher unemployment than anyone expected at this point and healthcare reform is one cause.”

“There are ways to reform health care so that it covers every American without killing their jobs,” Haugh said. “The recent serious legal setbacks for the ACA should be a signal to Washington that it’s time to fundamentally reform the ACA and repair our broken economy and our broken health care system.”