Today, the Obama Administration announced that they would shut down the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  But will Americans really miss it?  When it did meet, the President largely ignored the council’s most substantive recommendations.  And now the council hasn’t met in over a year.  In fact, here’s what happened to jobs and unemployment since the council last met in early 2012:

Jobs

• The Obama jobs recovery continued to lag even longer than the recovery from the Great Depression.
• The slow jobs recovery meant that, at the current pace, the “jobs gap” won’t close until after 2025.
• New workforce dropouts during the Obama Administration outnumbered new employees by a staggering 237 to 1.
• Full-time employment remained depressed, while the number receiving government benefits soared.
• Three years after the recession officially ended, employment among men in their prime working years remained over four million below pre-recession levels.
• Small business (which is the largest engine of job growth) confidence remained near all-time lows.
• Contractions in manufacturing continued to be a “headache” for the U.S. economy.

Unemployment

• The unemployment rate remained nearly 50% higher than the Administration predicted under its “stimulus” policies.
• The “real” unemployment rate – including people who dropped out of or never joined the workforce – continued to hover around 11%.
• The number of working-age people not in the labor force swelled by over four million in recent years.
• The rise in unemployment and debt during the Obama Administration, called the Obama Misery Index, swelled past 80% for the first time.

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