Silly us. Here we’ve been criticizing the Obama administration for the dismal job growth we’ve seen these past five years.
Turns out, we’ve got it backward. We’ve been measuring the president by the jobs the economy has been creating during his tenure. If two top Obama officials are right, we should count it an Obama success that more Americans will decide not to work.
The latest weighing in is White House economic adviser Gene Sperling. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” he responded to a Congressional Budget Office finding that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, as the president proposes to do, could cost 500,000 jobs. Sperling disputed the CBO report but did say it would be a good thing for Americans who “would prefer maybe not to work.”
He’s not the only one: When an earlier CBO report on ObamaCare found it would reduce American work hours by the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs, the CBO director said it would be “almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor.” White House spokesman Jay Carney hailed that as a success because it gives people the “opportunity” to decide “if they will work.”
One tiny problem: The most recent Gallup poll lists the No. 1 concern for American voters as jobs and unemployment. Over the last month, the percentage listing it as their top concern has grown.
Plainly, the American people, like us, are stuck on old paradigms, where a president’s economic policies are judged by how much growth and job expansion we have. If Sperling and Carney are right, we need to learn to sit back, relax and applaud the president for finding more ways to get Americans to drop out of the workforce.