May Jobs Report: Hold the Malaise, Please
Please attribute this statement to Tom Stemberg, founder and CEO of Staples and a member of the Job Creators Alliance.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 7.6 percent for May, proving our nation continues to suffer from economic malaise. But this increase in joblessness is just the tip of the iceberg. There are nearly four million Americans who aren’t impressed with today’s unemployment report because they’ve dropped completely out of the workforce. In fact, the Labor Participation Rate is staying stagnant at 63.4 percent – the lowest percentage of Americans in the workforce since the salad days of President Jimmy Carter. If these Americans were included in today’s number, the real unemployment rate would be nearly 14 percent.
What’s worse: Labor now reports that April saw only 149,000 jobs created – a significant downward adjustment from the 165,000 first announced. With several months in a row of this stagnation, we aren’t just trending – we are in a rut. America is going in the wrong direction.
Job creation comes from Main Street, not K-Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. Our politician employees need to do their job: Get the federal government’s fiscal house in order, fix the job-killing mistakes they’ve made with the Affordable Care Act, and then leave job creation to America’s entrepreneurs – where it belongs. To help create jobs, Congress and the President must work together to purposefully control spending, cut regulations and make pro-growth tax reform and simplification a reality.