Mined to death!

By Capitalist Preservation's ace girl reporter, Trailbee

Each Saturday I get an E-letter from John Mauldin called Thoughts from the Frontline.  This week is the start of a series of letters on employment, the first being Where Will the Jobs Come From. I highly recommend it, as the information and charts included are important.   

Although the letter points out that our economy is definitely fluid and growing, two ideas jumped right off the page at me.

1.     […]  The participation rate is the number of people who either have a job or are looking for one, as a percentage of the total population. Students and retirees, for example, are not considered as participating in the labor force. Nor are people on disability payments who are not looking for a job. Some 25% of the people who lost jobs since 2008 have applied for and received government disability checks. As an aside, we normally think of disability as something physical (back pain, etc.), but since 2008 43% of those getting approved for disability cited psychological reasons like stress. A rising percentage of them are white-collar workers. This is now costing us over $200 billion a year, which is almost 10% of total federal revenues. (I get it that individual people get very small checks, but there are now 10 million people on disability. And less than 1% a year either give up or lose their disability payments.) […]

I wondered what happened to people whose unemployment checks had run out.  The playing field had changed – for the worse.  I finally found out what happened to them, which was that they filed for disability due to stress. There is no time limit on these checks and cannot be stopped easily.

2.     […] I point out the mountain we face in getting back to a reasonable unemployment level, not to be negative but to highlight the importance of job creation. The engine of job growth in the US is small business and new business. If we want to see rising employment, we need to be figuring out how to create more entrepreneurs. Roadblocks need to be removed. The amount of paperwork (and the cost!) required to hire just one new employee can be daunting for a small business. All those reports don't just magically fill themselves out. It takes time and money away from core business efforts to prepare them. […]

This second is a mind-blower when you consider it in close tandem to the first. The entire goal of ‘socializing’ America can only be done if everything is nationalized.  There is no better way to defeat this country than by deliberately ‘unemploying’  the work force; by hamstringing entrepreneurs and small business with countless policies and regulations. This is the minefield Obama has laid for America.