Another month, another sub-par jobs report

The July unemployment numbers are in and they do not look good. The economy added just 162,000 jobs last month, falling below forecasts. Economists had predicted employers would add 180,000 jobs. That is below the recent average of monthly job gains and it is still not enough even to keep up with population growth. Worse still, revisions to the June and May figures show that the economy added 26,000 fewer jobs than originally reported. Both weekly hours and earnings fell slightly.

In what may at first appear to be good news, the unemployment rate fell slightly to 7.4 percent. However, it did so as 37,000 people dropped out of the labor force – meaning we are still at a 30 year low in the percentage of Americans who are actually working.

Furthermore, a majority of the jobs that have returned to our economy have been part-time positions. In fact, since March the ranks of part-timers have swelled by 791,000 versus just 187,000 for full-timers. It does not take a Ph.D. economist to tell you that full-time positions are more valuable than part-time ones – both for the employee and the employer.

I know I may sound like a broken record to many of you who read this column each month when these numbers are released, but the President’s economic policies have failed. We need pro-business, pro-growth policies so we can finally get our economy moving in the right direction again. That is what I have been working on since I was first elected a little over two and a half years ago. It is my sincere hope these dismal job numbers reinforce the need to move away from the agenda the Administration continues to push.

Much of the move from full-time to part-time employment can be directly traced to the President’s health care law. Under it, employers are required to provide health insurance to all full-time employees. However, the rising cost of health insurance associated with Obamacare has made compliance with the law unaffordable for many businesses, particularly those already struggling in the weak economy.  Consequently, many businesses have had to consider laying off workers or cutting their hours below the full-time 40 hour work week threshold in order to survive.

But that is not all the bad news coming from the President’s signature piece of legislation. Last week, the Ohio Department of Insurance announced that insurance premiums in the Obamacare exchanges are predicted to cost 41 percent more next year than their equivalent plans do now.

With this news, one has to wonder what happened to the lower costs we were promised when the President’s health care law was being rammed through Congress. We were told Ohio families could expect a decrease in premium costs of $2,500. Instead, what we are finding again and again is that costs in all aspects of health care continue to rise unabated.

This announcement is further proof that we must ditch this big government, bureaucrat-friendly quagmire. Ohio families and businesses simply cannot afford Obamacare, and they should not have to. That is why I have voted almost 40 times to repeal all or part of Obamacare and to replace it with patient-cen