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Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison: So what’s to blame for joblessness in America: Look no further than the mammoth fortress of federal regulatory agencies

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.”

Keep reading at Politico...

Rep. Tim Scott: Pivoting to jobs, Mr. President? Start by not killing them in my district

Congressman Tim Scott is a freshman Republican serving South Carolina's first congressional district.

Since the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided to sue the Boeing Co. for opening a new assembly line in my hometown of North Charleston, S.C., countless people have approached me regarding the situation. I want to share three numbers that go a long way toward showing what is threatening jobs - not just in South Carolina, but across our country.

c $60.7 million: The president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) stated in May 2009, “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama - $60.7 million to be exact - and we’re proud of it.”

c 6.9 percent: The percentage of our nation’s private-sector work force that belonged to a union in 2010.

c 11,000: The number of direct and indirect jobs the presidentially appointed NLRB is threatening to kill by suing Boeing in a misguided attempt to protect Big Labor.

If you are like me, you look at the numbers above and shake your head. Despite dwindling numbers, Big Labor drives a significant portion of work-force politics and policy decisions in our nation. Labor leaders are able to do so through a well-honed system of influencing workers and requiring many workers to accept membership in a union as a condition of employment, with fees ranging up to $800 annually. This amounts to more than $8 billion in membership dues annually in the private sector alone. Yet only 10 percent of current union employees voted to unionize in their workplace.

Keep reading at the Washington Times...

Rep. Geoff Davis: We need a better solution to create jobs - more government is not the answer

Congressman Geoff Davis is the US Representative serving Kentucky's 4th congressional district.

In August 2010, Treasury Department Secretary Timothy Geithner wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled Welcome to the Recovery.  One year later, as the economy teeters on the edge of a double dip recession, Americans are still asking: where are the jobs?

New unemployment data released last week revealed that only 117,000 jobs were created during July, short of the 125,000 new jobs needed every month just to keep up with population growth.  The national unemployment rate ticked down to 9.1%, but only because of the number of people who have given up looking for work or otherwise dropped out of the labor market.

To address this problem, President Obama announced last week that he will turn the focus of his administration to jobs.  This is the seventh time that he has claimed his administration will make such a pivot to jobs, but the problem is that his policies are not working.

For example, we were told the stimulus bill would create or save 3 million jobs and keep unemployment below eight percent.  Since the stimulus bill was signed into law more than two years ago, more than 1.6 million jobs have been lost.  Furthermore, the unemployment rate has been at or above eight percent for thirty consecutive months, the longest period since the Great Depression.

The last two and a half years have reinforced that we cannot spend, tax and borrow our way to economic prosperity.  And we only need to look at the example of Greece to see where we are heading if we continue to spend money we do not have.

We need a better solution.  More government is not the answer.  In order to foster a growing and healthy economy, Congress must enact policies that will increase our competitiveness, reward entrepreneurship and ingenuity.  

House Republicans are working to reverse course by passing bills to cut spending, and get government out of the way of our economic engines.  This will promote investment, encourage entrepreneurship and allow the private sector to grow and create jobs.  For these job creating bills to take effect, the Senate must pass them and the President should then sign them into law.

House Republicans passed legislation to repeal the President’s job destroying takeover of health care which would prevent over half a trillion dollars in tax increases and cut hundreds of billions in spending, in addition to easing the burden of PPACA on employers.

The House has directed ten committees to review existing, pending and proposed regulations to identify the effect on jobs and the economy.  We also plan to pass the REINS Act, legislation I introduced to require Congressional approval of any new regulations that have a significant impact on the economy.

Affordable energy is critical to job growth.  The House has passed four bills that would increase American energy exploration in Alaska and off of our coasts to increase supply and keep prices low.  We also passed the Energy Tax Prevention Act to prohibit the EPA from instituting a backdoor cap and trade program through regulation.

We have been calling on the President repeatedly to send Congress the three pending free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.  To date, he has not done so.  Finalizing these three agreements would create an estimated 250,000 American jobs by opening new markets to our goods and products.

Finally, as Standard and Poor’s downgrading of our credit rating last week confirmed, we need to continue to cut spending, reduce our debt burden and make the tough choices necessary to live within our means.  While the House has taken some first steps in the right direction, and successfully changed the conversation in Washington from whether to cut to how much to cut, there is much more to be done.

If the White House and Congressional Democrats are serious about getting America back to work, they should join Republicans to pass these commonsense proposals to get our fiscal house in order and get the government out of the way of job creation.  Only then will Americans stop asking, where are the jobs?

Minimum Wage: A barrier to unskilled labor

Ken Silva is a ConservativeHome College Columnist winner. He studied Economics and Politics at Kent State University.

It is another long summer for teenagers searching for jobs.

With unemployment for 16 to 19-year-olds hovering around 24 percent—nearly double the rate of 10 years ago and close to the record high 27.6 percent of 2009—teenagers are the hardest-hit demographic among the civilian population.

The massive unemployment rates among teenagers and other unskilled workers can be attributed to—in no small part—minimum wage laws.

Minimum wage laws have popular support because they are viewed as a protection against labor being exploited by capitalists, and as a way to insure a livable income for workers. However, minimum wage laws fail to fulfill these goals for a simple reason: government law cannot change the laws of economics.   

Most people understand the law of demand—the law that people will buy more of a good when it is cheaper, and vice versa—when it concerns consumer goods. It is simple to conceive that when government tries to set prices on consumer goods, shortages or surpluses occur in the market. For example, if the government tried to set the price of milk at $10 per gallon, one can imagine that far less milk would be purchased.

However, many of the same people that recognize the absurdity of price controls in the goods market change their position when it comes to the labor market. They fear that without a minimum wage everybody would be making pennies an hour for backbreaking labor. Such fears ignore the fact that a wage is simply the price of one’s labor, and thus wages follow the same economic laws of supply and demand that every other product does.

Imagine a factory worker whose labor was worth $5 an hour to his boss as a press operator. If the government set the minimum wage at $6, what do you think would happen to the worker? It may be possible that his boss is an altruist and loves to lose money keeping him employed, but the most likely scenario is that the worker will lose his job.  

Conversely, if the boss tried to pay the worker only $1 an hour for his labor, it is likely that another businessman would outbid him and hire the worker for himself. Henry Ford did this in 1914, when he instituted the “Five Dollar Day” plan. Ford’s $5 dollars a day was far higher than any of his competitors’ wages, and thus attracted the best workers and helped Ford become one of the dominant auto manufacturers of the world.

The most atrocious effect of the minimum wage is not necessarily how many jobs it destroys, but the type of jobs it destroys: low-skilled jobs. Low-skilled workers are often those who can least-afford to lose their jobs—people living close to poverty, as well as those who would rather enter the labor force than go to school. 

When such people lose their jobs, it hurts society twofold: first, society loses the productivity of the newly unemployed person’s labor; second, society bears the burden of the unemployed entering the welfare system or taking out student loans that he otherwise would not have taken if he were employed.

President Obama stated in 2009 that he wanted to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011. While this may score him political points among his supporters—who are seemingly ignorant of the true effects that an increased minimum wage would have on the economy—such a policy would only bring about more unemployment. If Obama and the Congress were sincere about helping the poor and unemployed, they would lower the minimum wage and allow unskilled labor to go back to work.

Reps. Eric Cantor and Bob Goodlatte: The choice is ours. The stakes are high. Failure is not an option.

Eric Cantor represents Virginia's 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives and is House majority leader; Bob Goodlatte represents Virginia's 6th District.

Imagine if your government were as focused on saving money as it is on spending money.

Flash back to March 2, 1995. On that day, the U.S. Senate failed — by one vote — to send a balanced budget amendment to the states for ratification. The amendment had previously passed the House by the required two-thirds majorit, and the Senate vote was the last legislative hurdle before ratification by the states.

If that amendment had passed, then we would not be facing the fiscal crisis we now face. If that amendment had passed, then balancing the budget would have been the rule rather than the exception, and we wouldn't be facing the annual deficits and skyrocketing debt that we must address today.

Once again we are standing at a crossroads. The decisions we make today will determine the direction of our country for years to come. We can take action now to ensure that our children will face a much brighter fiscal future. We must not allow ourselves to miss this opportunity.

Keep reading at the Richmond Times-Dispatch...

Negroponte, McLarty, Jones and Mosbacher Jr.: Approve the free-trade agreements

John D. Negroponte, a deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence in the George W. Bush administration, is chairman of the Council of the Americas. Mack McLarty, a former special envoy for the Americas and White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, is president of McLarty Associates. Jim Jones, a Democratic former U.S. representative from Oklahoma, was White House appointments secretary in the Johnson administration. Rob Mosbacher Jr., the president of Mosbacher Energy, was president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation during the George W. Bush administration. All are members of the Council of the Americas’ trade advisory group.

The U.S. economy needs swift approval of the pending free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. Yet a week after the release of a disappointing employment report, procedural disagreement over a program that has provided benefits to American workers for almost 50 years is stalling the entire trade agenda.

Deficit reduction is an urgent task requiring intense scrutiny of spending measures. But it is counterproductive to delay long-overdue trade agreements that finally have a chance of passing over a relatively inexpensive assistance program designed to smooth out the rougher edges of the global economy.

 Republicans have argued in the debt-ceiling negotiations that economic growth, rather than higher taxes, is key to raising revenue. At the same time, they understand that the United States will not achieve such growth without the benefits of international trade. Given political realities, the cost-benefit analysis should be clear: better to incur the fiscal cost of renewing the Trade Adjustment Assistance program than to lose the much greater benefits of free trade with three important trading partners.

Keep reading at the Washington Post...

Senators Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee: We know what needs to be done; we just need the will to act

Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, both Republicans, are Utah’s two U.S. senators.

It’s been called the most preventable disaster in American history.

The coming debt crisis is so predictable it’s difficult to find a single economist, expert, politician or American taxpayer who doesn’t warn of the consequences of spending and borrowing ourselves into oblivion.

A recent publication from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office called America’s debt problem “daunting.” The ratio of debt to gross domestic product has just crossed 90 percent, a threshold linked to lower-than-average economic growth. If left unchecked, our ballooning debt will almost certainly lead to the country’s long-term economic decline.

Fortunately, the solution is basic and one that is followed by most responsible state and local governments, families and business owners. When faced with tough times they know they must eliminate spending on the things that aren’t absolutely essential. Then they make a budget for the things they need and have the discipline to stay within that budget. Finally, they stop borrowing and spend no more than they take in.

Keep reading at The Salt Lake Tribune...

Rep. Rob Woodall: By continuing to punish wealth, growth and productivity, we are handicapping ourselves in the global marketplace - it's time to eliminate hidden taxes

Rep. Rob Woodall is a freshman Republican from Georgia and serves on the House Budget Committee.

I’ve been in Congress for a little more than six months now, and not a single day has gone by without a call for more jobs, more innovation and faster economic recovery. We wonder why foreign investment continues to stay overseas and our own American companies are flocking to foreign shores as fast as they can. All the while, our corporate tax rate remains the highest in the industrialized world, our federal government continues to punish productivity, and roughly $431 billion will be wasted this year trying to comply with our baffling tax code. We continue to ask the questions, but the answer is simple: The United States is no longer the best place in the world to do business.

The Department of Labor reported recently that for the fourth month in a row, the unemployment rate has risen. That rate stands at 9.2 percent, and in June, employers hired the fewest number of workers in nine months. Rampant federal spending and borrowing has increased our national debt by more than $3 trillion since President Obama took office, and as a result, foreign and domestic investors are financing food stamps, unemployment benefits and debt rather than private-sector innovation and jobs. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that for the first time in decades, America is on net losing, not attracting, growth capital. While these numbers are troubling, they cast a sanitized, clinical perspective on the pain and uncertainty that many American families are feeling as the result of a sad reality: Job creators are simply taking their ball and going home.

Keep reading at the Washington Times...

Rep. Robert Dold: The importance of free trade

Robert J. Dold is the US Representative serving the 10th Congressional District of Illinois.

Nations commonly enter into free trade agreements to increase economic prosperity, lower the cost of goods, better allocate resources, access new markets, and encourage innovation. Since World War II, America has consistently sought and received these benefits by liberalizing its trade policy and by becoming a party to a number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral trade agreements across the globe. Currently, our participation in these trade agreements significantly increases trade and investment that benefits America and other member nations. Right now, the U.S. has free trade agreements pending with Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that every $1 billion increase in exports directly results in 6,250 manufacturing jobs created here in America. Expanding free markets brings benefits to consumers in the form of lower prices, greater variety, and better quality. It also encourages companies to innovate and specialize.  Extending these three trade agreements will bring new economic opportunities to the United States.  

According to the President’s analysis, if the U.S. were to sign these three agreements it would create 250,000 U.S. jobs without any government spending.  Compared to most countries in the world, the United States has relatively low tariffs on imported goods, so free trade agreements remove the higher barriers of our trade partners.  Lowering these artificial barriers to goods and services will help all businesses, big or small, and create new jobs.  Every day that the U.S. delays signing these agreements is yet another day of higher tariffs imposed on our country. These tariffs amount to nothing more than a tax on US consumers.  Removing such artificial barriers and tariffs has so far increased the purchasing power of American families by $10,000.  With rising gas and food prices, this would be a welcome relief for the family budget. 

Just last week, a free trade agreement between the European Union and Korea went into effect.  This is putting American companies at an extreme disadvantage.  At this very moment, Europe is establishing new business ties in Korea, meanwhile we sit idly by and continue to pay steep tariffs. The European Union is now benefiting from lower trade barriers, increased export opportunities, and job creation.  The U.S. needs to stop the delay and sign these pending trade agreements.  America only falls behind when other nations pass free trade agreements.

There is no question that passing these pending free trade agreements helps every American family and creates new opportunities for growth for American businesses. Given this winning combination, it is unacceptable for Washington to play political games with these free trade agreements and delay their passage.

Sen. John Boozman: E-verify is commonsense technology that allows us to hold employers accountable

John Boozman is a Republican Senator from Arkansas.

Unemployed Arkansans are struggling to find jobs to support their families and put food on the table. The unemployment level nationwide continues to increase and because of uncertainties in regulations from federal agencies, our job creators are their halting hiring practices. In this economic environment I believe we must take steps to provide hardworking Americans with job opportunities and American workers must be given an advantage over illegal immigrants in the workplace.

I believe one of the best ways to ensure this is done is by making it mandatory for employers to verify the work eligibility of new hires. This can be accomplished through E-verify, a web-based tool that allows employers to confirm eligibility of a job candidate by their name and Social Security number.

E-verify has a proven track record of combating the hiring of illegal immigrants and is currently used by nearly 270,000 employers nationwide. I recently cosponsored legislation to make E-verify permanent and mandatory for all employers. This is commonsense technology that allows us to hold employers accountable and helps them abide by the law.

The legislation gives businesses one year to comply with the electronic verification program and also increases the penalties for employers who do not use the system or knowingly hire undocumented workers. 

We have an immigration crisis on our hands, and I believe the E-verify system is a way to start working toward a solution to the problem that transcends into other issues our government faces today including our struggling economy and our education system.  Our nation admits one million immigrants each year, but those who arrive illegally to our nation have broken the law and must be held accountable. So to, should the employers who knowingly hire them. When federal laws go unenforced, it leaves cash-strapped local and state governments to fend for themselves and find resources they do not have to absorb millions of undocumented workers.

While the current administration is encouraging amnesty to illegal immigrants, I believe those who come into our nation illegally should not be rewarded for their actions. I will continue to vote against President Obama’s amnesty proposals, as I did as a member of the House of Representatives.

I believe firmer E-verify rules can make an impact on the illegal immigrants who cross our borders undetected, and prevent millions of illegal immigrants from infringing upon every legal citizen’s right to pursue the American dream.

With millions unemployed in the United States, I believe it is vital that we give employers the right tools to ensure they aren’t hiring illegal workers so they may contribute to improving the job market.