It’s been two years since Dwight Michael Frazee lost his construction job in New Jersey, and he’s starting to feel desperate. Frazee, 50, the married father of a 5-year-old daughter, has applied for work at car dealerships, insurance companies, big box stores, bail bond firms, even kitschy boardwalk shops—but he keeps coming up empty. After 99 weeks, his unemployment insurance ran out. “My life has been total stress,” he says. “I sleep maybe fours hours a night, worrying about money.” He has lots of company, said Michael Fletcher in The Washington Post. Nearly 15 million Americans are out of work, half of them for more than six months, “the most serious bout of long-term joblessness since the Great Depression.” And with nearly five unemployed people for every opening, job prospects are dismal. With the economy slowly rebounding, and employers ringing up good profits, unemployment should be dropping, said John Harwood in The New York Times. But it’s not. It’s “the biggest conundrum” facing President Obama as Democrats brace for a drubbing in November. “Where did the jobs go?”
It’s no great mystery, said Thomas Sowell in The Washington Examiner. From health care to finance, Washington keeps coming up with “more red tape, more mandates, and more heavy-handed interventions.” This massive expansion of government has created massive uncertainty for the private sector, which is reluctant to commit to hiring new, full-time workers. Obama promised that his $862 billion stimulus package would keep unemployment at 8 percent, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Wrong again. Unemployment remains stuck at 9.5 percent since “employers are afraid to hire because they don’t know what costs government will impose on them next.”
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