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Townhall...
The
Government Does Not Create Jobs,
President Obama
by Austin Hill
9/18/2011
If
I could get close to President
Obama, close enough to speak to him, I’d like to ask him this question:
“Mr.
President, how, exactly, is a job created?”
It’s
a rare opportunity for one to
speak directly with the President of the United States, and I’m not
anticipating that any of the privileged few who speak with Mr. Obama
regularly
– members of his Administration and the White House media
correspondents for
example – will approach this subject with him.
But after nearly three years of the President
claiming that he is
“creating (or ‘saving’) jobs,” even as unemployment rises and actual
job
creation has stalled, questions about the President’s policies have
quite
naturally begun to emerge.
Typically
the inclination is to ask
“where are the jobs you promised us Mr. President?”
To this, we have heard the President offer
clever responses like “shovel ready wasn’t as..uh…shovel-ready as we
expected”
(he made this little quip with a chuckle in his voice back in June, at
a
meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in North Carolina
when he
was confronted with the problems of federal government regulations
delaying
construction projects for months, or even many years).
But Americans need to take a step back, and
ask a preliminary question – not a question about “where are the jobs?”
but
rather, “how is a job supposedly created in the first place?”
President
Obama frequently juxtaposes
“Wall Street,” i.e., wealthy bankers and investors, from “Main Street,”
i.e.
everyday working class people, and he insists that his policies are
supportive
of those on “Main Street.” Given his affection for all us “Main Street
types,”
he would do well to look to the wisdom of Main Street for an answer to
the
question “how is a job created?,” and for some clues as to why job
growth isn’t
happening.
Take
for example a Main Street couple
named Steve and Gwynn. The
married
business partners co-own own a small chain of six Mexican food
restaurants,
with locations in two different Western states.
While consulting with them recently on some of
their marketing and
advertising strategies, I got an earful from them about how the federal
government is impacting their business – and the impact has not been
positive.
For
one, Steve and Gwynn’s greatest
struggle with advertising is not about getting customers in to their
restaurants. While
the past three years
have been a struggle for them, their revenues for 2011 have thus far
out-paced
2010 on a month-by-month basis, and their Limited Liability Corporation
is
doing well financially.
Interestingly,
Steve and Gwynn’s
biggest challenge is with labor. While
the hourly rate at which they employ kitchen help is slightly over the
government mandated minimum, they still have a difficult time finding
and
retaining workers for these otherwise “entry level” positions.
Be
sure to read the rest of this
column at Townhall
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