Job creation

Recent Republican dogma suggests that government can't create jobs, yet they also feel it is important to have someone who has been a job creator in office. They say this as though looking through past presidents there is some correlation between the business acumen of the President and job creation. Ironically Rick Perry is currently the leading candidate for the Republican nomination and has a record of job creation in Texas that he is sure to run on yet he has no experience in business.

It seems be a fallacy that those who have created jobs in the private industry are somehow more qualified to create jobs from public office.

There also seems to be a considerable amount of debate recently on the "job killing" capability of government regulations. Unfortunately measuring the number of jobs that are not in existence due to something like say regulations or jobs not lost due to something like say stimulus, is a very hard thing to determine and prove with any accuracy. But what we do know is that small businesses concerns over government regulations, if a concern at all, are very low on the totem pole.

The top concerns for small business are Economic Uncertainty and Lack of Sales. Even massive repeals or changes in current government regulations will have little or no effect on either of these items. Future regulations could account for some of the concern over Economic Uncertainty. For his part the President did put some impending regulations on hold to quell some of these fears.

We also know that consumer confidence has a high correlation with consumption expenditures. Meaning higher consumer confidence leads to more consumer spending and more consumer spending clearly affects the lack of sales that in turn affects hiring.

So while our politicians talk about job creation as a number one priority their actions have a much greater affect. The vastly political debate over increasing the debt ceiling turned National Debt debate, caused a near 20 point drop in consumer confidence putting us at just 12 points above our great recession low. While we may have made some minor improvements regarding the national debt all of those gains may have been lost by the correlating drop in consumer spending from the massive decrease in consumer confidence. This partisan gamesmanship might be some of that Economic Uncertainty that is keeping private industry from hiring.

It should also be noted that all of the austerity measures that have been pushed for recently have cost a great number of jobs while forcing states to look elsewhere for funding. This has in turn lead to the highest average sales tax rate in our nations history. This has essentially lead to a shift in the tax burden to the poor who spend the greatest percentage of their income which again means less consumer spending.

I have no doubt that the majority of Republicans legislators believe they are doing what is best for the country but the empirical evidence suggests that their actions are having unintended results that run counter to their stated goal.

Perhaps Republican legislators are much more aware of their policy affects on job creation than I given them credit for since every legislative effort they support, proves their dogma that the government can't create jobs - a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy policy.