Thursday, July 21, 2011

Yet More Evidence Obamacare Is Costing Jobs

The Heritage Foundation is out this week with a new study quantifying Obamacare’s adverse impact on job creation.  The study notes that in the months prior to April 2010, private sector firms created more than 67,000 jobs per month.  After April 2010 – the month after the President signed Obamacare into law – private sector job creation plummeted to only 6,400 jobs per month, or less than one-tenth the prior pace.  This growth of 6,400 private sector jobs per month is MUCH less than the 100,000-150,000 jobs the economy needs to generate per month just to keep up with population growth.  And this lethargic pace of private sector job creation is also a far cry from the “4 million jobs – 400,000 jobs almost immediately” that former Speaker Pelosi said Obamacare would generate back in February 2010.

Separately, Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, provided further anecdotal support for Heritage’s findings in an interview with Investors Business Daily yesterday.  Marcus believes the federal government is the biggest obstacle to job creation, because “the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with.”  Chief on that list are new mandates imposed thanks to the President’s health care overhaul:  “As [President Obama] speaks about cutting out regulations, they are now producing thousands of pages of new ones.  With just ObamaCare by itself, you have a 2,000 page bill that’s probably going [to] end up being 150,000 pages of regulations.”

With unemployment remaining near record high levels and the economy plagued by moribund growth, these new developments reiterate what many Republicans predicted all along – Obamacare is costing the American economy jobs.