West Virginia’s Private Sector Best Job Creator
During December 2007 to May 2011, jobs in the mining and logging private sector grew by 11.1 percent despite the Obama administration's war on coal.
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West Virginians have maintained for years that if government would just leave our economy alone, we’d be just fine. President Barack Obama and liberals in Congress reject that philosophy. Our state’s keystone industry, coal, needs to be destroyed, Obama and company think.
Not to fear, though, Obama reassures us. Government can replace jobs lost in the private sector, with spending such as the “stimulus” program.
But employment information released this week should put to rest the question of whether government is better than business and industry as a job creator.
Employment in the state has increased slightly this year, according to the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. But the addition of 900 jobs since Jan. 1 has not offset massive unemployment that began hitting the charts in 2008. We still have 11,700 fewer jobs than at the end of 2007.
Some employment sectors have fared better than others, however, and it is in those numbers government’s failure becomes strikingly evident.
It may be remembered that much of Obama’s stimulus program was in public works projects such as construction of new buildings and highways. Between December 2007 and this May, however, construction employment in West Virginia crashed, with loss of 19.6 percent of the jobs formerly provided. About 7,400 construction jobs were lost.
A bright spot was in mining and logging - entirely private-sector endeavors. During the December 2007 to May 2011 period, jobs in those industries grew by 11.1 percent. This was despite the Obama administration’s war on coal.
Clearly, the stimulus program was nothing more than a waste of about $800 billion, in terms of providing lasting job growth. One wonders how many more coal and logging jobs in West Virginia might have been created had the war on coal not begun and if the $800 billion had been used more wisely - to develop coal liquefaction plants, perhaps.
Source: The Intelligencer
