With the media focused on a presidential election that is now five months away, any jobs data is going to be viewed from the standpoint of its possible impact on the campaigns. Today’s dismal report that only 69,000 jobs were created last month, with jobs data for the last two months revised downward and the unemployment rate moved up to 8.2 percent, is no exception.
For a minute, can we please just set aside politics and stop worrying about the impact of the unemployment rate on the prospects of President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney? The last time I checked, they both had jobs — which puts them ahead of the millions of Americans who want to find work but can’t, because our economy is sputtering. Those millions of unemployed Americans, many of whom have been out of work for years, are at the end of their ropes. They’re about to be joined by a host of new college graduates, many of them saddled with absurd amounts of debt, and high school graduates searching for jobs in the driest of dry holes.
Before the talking heads start spinning the data, or trying to assign blame to one political party or another, let’s pause for a moment to think about the jobless women and men who have lost their houses, spent their retirement nest eggs and children’s college funds, and beat the pavement trying to find gainful employment without success. They’re beaten down by failure, worried about their futures, and tired of the constant infighting.
Can’t we all agree that this latest round of unemployment data shows that what we have tried hasn’t worked? “Quantitative easing,” extensive federal “stimulus” projects, and massive deficit spending have not produced the promised results. It’s time to try something else.
When something like that happens to a person you know, it shakes you. You think about your own family medical history and wonder how many of those health problems were due to lifestyle and how many to awesome genetic forces lurking deep within our cells, like tiny time bombs that could explode with devastating consequences at any moment, irrespective of how much lettuce you eat? Did my father, uncle, and grandfather die of cancer because they were heavy smokers, or because of some squamous anomaly in their mitochondria that was triggered by strands of DNA without regard to intake of tar and nicotine?
