Republican Reaction to Feb. 5, 2016 Monthly Jobs Report

On Jan. 8, 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its monthly employment report for December 2009. On that date, Republican RNC Chairman Michael Steele had this to say when the unemployment rate was at 10%:  “‘More than 2.8 million Americans have lost their jobs since the stimulus passed, and the national unemployment rate remains at 10 percent. The American economy is a powerful and amazingly resilient system that will always naturally return to balance because of the determination and unique ingenuity of the American worker. But President Obama’s singular focus on enacting his government-run liberal policies are single handily preventing this return,’ said RNC Chairman Michael Steele in a statement. “‘It’s time for President Obama to heed the recent words of Democrat Senator Ben Nelson and finally do what he should have been doing over the past year – put his full and undivided attention on fixing our economy.'”

Today, Feb. 5, 2016, the BLS released its jobs report for the month of January. The unemployment rate has fallen to 4.9%. What are leading Republicans saying now? RNC Chairman Reince Priebus had this to say about the BLS report, ““The economy is still failing the millions of Americans who have given up looking for work,’ said Chairman Priebus. ‘With economic growth at a crawl, America can’t afford another Democrat president committed to extending President Obama’s failed policies.'”

The fact of the matter is that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in 6 years; the employment rate is higher than it has been in 6 years, and some Republicans are still trying to complain.

In 2010 Steele said that President Obama should focus his attention on fixing the economy, and his comments were stimulated by the unemployment rate as calculated by the BLS. Now that the economy is much stronger and President Obama’s policies have improved our economy dramatically, as indicated by the unemployment rate, the current RNC chairman is trying to blame President Obama because some people have decided to stop looking for employment. This is absurd. There is no way that the President is responsible for the actions of people who’ve decided not to look for employment — the responsibility for that lies with those people who have stopped looking for work.

There are many companies that have been having very great trouble — particularly for the last 12 months — filling positions they’d like to hire people for because the unemployment rate has dropped so low, and because employment is so high. Obviously, the number of people who have stopped looking for work is very small. There is no good reason that someone who actually wants to be employed is not employed.

Essentially, those people who are not employed are unemployed because they do not want to be employed.