The View From 1776

A Lost Decade for Jobs

Kartik Ariyur alerted me to this Business Week article, which graphically depicts the imbalance in growth of jobs over the past decade between the public and private sectors.

The writer of the article concludes:


A more accurate assessment is that, without massive government spending on the welfare state - which includes health care and education - and the attendant high taxes and strangling regulations, real jobs in manufacturing would have grown robustly.  Other factors associated with expanding government intervention, such as support for labor unions, played a big role in turning the employment picture upside down.

Western New York State, where I now live, is a case study at the state level of the destructiveness of the liberal-progressive lust to restructure society and redistribute wealth.  This area was an inventive and thriving manufacturing region through the 1950s.  Aggressively encroaching liberal-progressivism, manifested in higher taxes, environmental red tape, and suffocating labor union wages and work rules, led to a steady exodus of manufacturing jobs to business-friendly areas in the South and Southwest.

Beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, the same economic poison was administered to the whole nation.  Capping these welfare-state toxins with the resulting inflation made American companies increasingly uncompetitive in world markets.  Whence came the necessity to outsource jobs to overseas locations.