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Obama Jobs Council Ends the Way it Started — with Americans Still as Unlikely to Have a Job as Before

January 31, 2013

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

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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