Oiling The Economy
Recovery: With the job market in the dumps, and the president moving that to the top of his priority list, wouldn’t getting out of the way of 740,000 jobs that could be created in the oil industry be a no-brainer? Well, no.
Much has been made of America’s need to drill its own energy to end dependency on foreign petrotyrants. As if that isn’t urgent enough, so is the need to create jobs instead of America’s steady drip of bad employment numbers.
The latter, now at 9.2%, is rising every month now, as the threat of higher taxes, government growth, closed markets and regulation choke off economic growth.
The U.S. economy must create 100,000-plus jobs just to stay even with those entering the work force, and more still to absorb the 26 million currently unemployed and underemployed. Last month, the sorry story was that the U.S. produced just 18,000 jobs.
President Obama, in his briefing Monday, insisted he had no higher priority than creating jobs. With falling poll numbers, it seems an alarm clock has finally rung after two years of dithering.
But government doesn’t create jobs. Companies do.
Obama will make no headway until he gets serious about clearing paths for jobs to form — not just in his favorite “targeted” industries, such as infrastructure and “green” energy jobs — but in industries where market demand provably exists and companies want to hire. (IBD)
