Where Have All The Jobs Gone?

A CNNMoney.com article suggests that 7.9 million jobs have been lost in the recession and are gone forever. Americans patiently waiting for an economic recovery should be asking themselves when this madness will stop.

"The recession killed off 7.9 million jobs. It's increasingly likely that many will never come back.

The government jobs report issued Friday shows that businesses have slowed their pace of hiring to a relative trickle.

"The job losses during the Great Recession were so off the chart, that even though we've gained about 600,000 private sector jobs back, we've got nearly 8 million jobs to go," said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute."

At some point, in order get the economy rolling again, the government has to unshackle business people by reducing taxes and putting a halt to their current pastime of demagoguing business persons (if Congress were half as critical of their own actions as they are of the average business person, they'd be holding subcommittee hearings into their own missteps pretty much every day).

It's simply not acceptable that a national economy that until recently sported an unemployment rate under 5% now features an unemployment rate hovering around 10% (which would be even higher than that if the people who have grown frustrated from searching for a job and have given up were actually counted in that statistic).

A reduction in the corporate tax rate to 20%, changing the tax code to permanently allow the immediate expensing of all business equipment and property acquired, extending the Bush individual tax cuts another 10 years, AND paying for all these changes with a commensurate reduction in federal government spending would have this economy rolling again in no time.

For those wondering what aspects of federal government spending could possibly be cut, the defense budget would be a wonderful place to start, followed by changes to social security system (increasing retirement age, means testing, etc.), eliminating or dramatically scaling-back unnecessary or redundant federal departments (Education, Agriculture, etc.) and surely a lot of other areas.

Continuing to mire in a job-less recession is increasingly looking like a political decision by those who want the government to continue spending money it does not have, while the people who truly can kick-start the economy (yes, business people) and put people back to work are hamstrung by an onerous business environment.