Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Unemployment now stands at a staggering 9.1 percent. For the past 30 months, unemployment has been at 8 percent or higher. Recent indicators point to jobless numbers even higher than 9.1 percent in coming months.
President Barack Obama last week cited “bad luck” as the reason that economic recovery is not happening. Does this mean the American people and their elected officials are merely helpless pawns, at the mercy of a stubborn strain of bad luck?
So what’s to blame for joblessness in America: bad luck or bad policies? Look no further than the mammoth fortress of federal regulatory agencies.
Though private businesses have struggled to create jobs, under Obama, one sector in particular has experienced explosive growth: the federal government’s regulatory agencies. In the past three years, the U.S. economy has grown at an anemic 5 percent. The budget growth for federal regulatory agencies, in contrast, was 16 percent.
“If the federal government’s regulatory operation were a business,” Investors Business Daily reported, “it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third-largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald’s, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.”
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