Unemployment has risen to 9.2 percent in June, and the number of jobs added for June was the lowest in nine months.
There has been much talk over the debt limit, and a compromise still seems far away (watched the Speaker a couple moments ago). What I find interesting is both sides, in the public arena, seem to be focused on either increasing revenue (new or increased taxes) or reducing expenditures.
What is worse than the loss of 7.5 million jobs is an additional 3.5 million who have just stopped looking for work. You see, if you stop looking for work, you stop being counted as unemployed. According to Mortimer Zuckerman of US News, if you add in these folks, along with part-time workers who want to work full-time, then reality is 16% unemployment. Ouch.
Yet I haven't heard anyone discuss increasing revenue through new taxpayers. You see, if we increase the number of jobs, we inherently increase revenue through new taxable income AND we increase the productivity of the country. Increasing jobs requires less regulation on businesses and more incentives to produce. Those two facets are in short supply in today's political world.
Haven't heard anyone until now. I wrote a couple days ago about Senator Marco Rubio from Florida. His speech resonated with me. Now, this. Again I say, this guy "gets it".
Let’s stop talking about new taxes and start talking about new taxpayers, which means jobs. This debt is the No. 1 issue on everyone’s minds and rightfully so. It is a major issue, but everywhere else, in the real world, the No. 1 issue on people’s minds is jobs. And I tell you, every other problem facing America — a mortgage crisis, a home foreclosure crisis, this debt problem — all of these issues get easier to deal with if people are gainfully employed across America. And the impact that unemployment is having across this country is devastating. …
Our job here [in Congress] is to do everything we can to make it easier for them to find a job, not harder. And I think that’s what we have to do when it comes to ‘a balanced approach’ and when we talk about revenue. We don’t need new taxes, we need new taxpayers, people who are gainfully employed, making money, paying into the tax system and then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again. …
So you look at all these taxes that are being proposed and here’s what I say: I say we should analyze every single one of them through the lens of job creation, issue No. 1 in America. I want to know which one of these taxes they’re proposing will create jobs. I want to know how many jobs will be created by the planes tax. I want to know how many jobs will be created by the oil company tax that I’ve heard so much about. How many jobs are created by going after the millionaires and billionaires that the president talks about? I want to know! How many jobs do they create? …
I traveled the state of Florida for two years campaigning. I have never met a job creator who told me that they were waiting for the next tax increase before they started growing their business. I’ve never met a single job creator who has ever said to me I can’t wait ’til government raises taxes again so I can go out and create a job. I’m curious to know if they say that in New Hampshire because they don’t say that in Florida. So my view on all that is, I want to know how many of these tax increases the president proposes will create because if they’re not creating jobs and they’re not creating new taxpayers, they’re not solving the problem.
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