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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Making it more difficult than it needs to be

An IBD editorial nails it pretty well right here:

Jobs: Obamanomics has done more than just keep unemployment high during a modest recovery. It may also be keeping high joblessness permanent by raising the costs to businesses of hiring new workers.

July's 9.5% unemployment level was bad enough. But the real problem is that the private-sector jobs machine, which is usually going full tilt at this point in a recovery, now seems to be broken.

To many, it's becoming clear that if President Obama's radical job-killing agenda stays in place, job growth will be nonexistent.

One of America's great advantages has always been its flexible, private-sector labor markets. From 1985 to 2008, U.S. unemployment averaged 5.6%. For the six largest economies in the European Union, the average rate was 34% higher, at about 7.5%.

Yet many of those countries now have jobless rates lower than ours. Why? They've been dropping Keynesian stimulus as a strategy and moving more toward cutting spending and, in some cases, cutting taxes.

Businesses today face rising burdens — from ObamaCare, the financial overhaul, the expiration of tax cuts for entrepreneurs, the threat of new energy taxes or the surge in growth strangling regulations on business — that discourage hiring.

"The real threat to a robust recovery on the labor side," Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, warned recently, "has come from employer and entrepreneurial fears that once the economic environment improves, a Democratic Congress and administration will pass pro-union and other pro-worker legislation that will raise the cost of doing business and cut profits."

It's never been costlier to hire and keep a worker employed. And as ObamaCare kicks in and Bush's tax cuts expire — not to mention the huge tax hikes that will be needed to make Social Security and Medicare solvent — businesses will simply quit hiring.

This Keynes-on-steroids model has been tried before, in Europe. It didn't work. It led to permanently high levels of joblessness — what economists call structural unemployment.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Sweden found that for every 100 new jobs government creates, 114 are destroyed in the private sector. Similarly, a French study of data from OECD countries from 1960 to 2000 discovered, on average, "creation of 100 public jobs may have eliminated about 150 private sector jobs."

In short, it was a disaster that the U.S. is now duplicating. The next Congress should have no greater priority than reversing it all.

If the european statists realize that at some point the state starts to crowd out the private sector in a destructive manner, shouldn't we?

5 comments:

Harry Eagar said...

Pro-worker legislation? The horror!

It is reported that you can now hire an American for only a 15% premium over an Indian. Reaganomics wins.

Susan's Husband said...

Only Mr. Eager would consider legislation that destroys workers' jobs to be "pro-worker" on the theory that if it hurts businesses and their owners, it must be good for workers.

Hey Skipper said...

The real threat to a robust recovery on the labor side ... has come from employer and entrepreneurial fears that once the economic environment improves, a Democratic Congress and administration will pass pro-union and other pro-worker legislation that will raise the cost of doing business and cut profits.

Presuming the Democrats take a beating in 60 days (really, is there anything much more satisfying than seeing politicians get turfed by the spittoon load?), then we'll get to see if there is any merit in this assertion.

Harry:

You keep beating that Reaganomics drum while completing ignoring (so far as I have been able to tell) two things:

1. The flip side of cost is price.

2. What, pray tell, is the alternative?

Hey Skipper said...

Pro-worker legislation? The horror!


Odd how pro-worker legislation -- take Spain for just one example -- acts to coddle those with jobs, while standing on the necks of those without.

Harry Eagar said...

There is no magic alternative. That's why you shouldn't have unsupervised markets: Nobody knows what to do after they get -- as they inevitably do get -- into what a friend of mine calls a Selden Crisis (after the scifi character Harry Selden).

The problem is that the banks were far worse off than anyone -- even the bankers -- realized in October 2008. They are still insolvent and refusing to lend.

There are -- I speak to them nearly every day -- private job creators ready to hire except they cannot get private credit.