RightChange: Highest Unemployment Since Great Depression

When President Obama was pressed by a reporter on why he broke his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by his first term, he said it was because the economy was worse than he thought.  His excuse for all of that deficit spending was because he needed it to pull us out of the recession.  Are you satisfied with the results?  Ask the common man on the street and his answer is not “no” but, “heck no.”  The CBO’s latest report shows that record unemployment isn’t going anywhere:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that despite the trillions of dollars in stimulus, we have had the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression.

From the CBO Director’s Blog:

“The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. CBO projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The share of unemployed people who have been looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 and has remained above that level ever since.”

They also cite the factors for this unemployment.  Two of which are worth pointing out:

“Weak demand for goods and services, as a result of the recession and its aftermath, which results in weak demand for workers;

Incentives for people to stay in the labor force and continue searching for work that result from extensions of unemployment insurance benefits”

This is a direct result of Obama’s policies.  The combination of stimulus and unemployment benefit extensions were supposed to reduce the number of those without a job.  Nancy Pelosi said herself that extending the unemployment benefits would inject demand into the economy and put people back to work.  Clearly it did neither.  You cannot put people back to work by paying them to stay out of work.  Trillions of dollars was wasted so that we could have the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression.  It’s time change the ranks in Washington to leaders who are committed to growing the economy without the government.

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