The unemployment rate isn't high for no good reason. The Obama Administration has played a huge part in helping create this situation through the passage of their highly unpopular health care legislation earlier this year. House Republicans have done everything in their power to speak out against it. Reps. Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa and Peter Roskam published an op/ed in Big Government today on this subject:
Last January, President Obama declared, “Jobs must be our number one focus in 2010.”
Since that time, more than 2.5 million Americans have lost their jobs and unemployment stands at 9.6%. Some focus. The President and his Democrat allies in Congress instead chose to unleash a torrent of bills that do anything but create jobs, like the so-called financial services reform bill that didn’t fix the real problem of government meddling in mortgages, and another round of “stimulus” spending that only deepened states’ addiction to Washington bailouts. Last week, Congressional Democrats canceled a vote on tax relief for all Americans until after the November elections, creating more economic uncertainty while delaying private sector job creation.
The primary job killer is the trillion-dollar folly of ObamaCare. The bill hits America’s struggling small businesses and their families with 2,801 pages of new taxes and complicated rules, creating a climate of hyper-regulation and uncertainty that the nation’s most important small business alliance – the National Federation of Independent Businesses –has called “death by a thousand cuts.”
Just a couple of those painful wounds: by 2018, self-employers and small firms will be hit by a $14.3 billion health insurance tax, while a projected $17 billion will be raised by taxing every business-to-business deal over $600. Washington insiders pushing ObamaCare appear to ignore these truths and clearly don’t understand the negative impact the law is already having on entrepreneurs.