Majority’s New Direction for America: Higher Unemployment and Phantom Jobs

In 2006, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi stated that “Democrats are proposing a New Direction for America”. However, nearly three years into Speaker Pelosi’s “New Direction,” jobs are down and unemployment, poverty, and misery are up. Specifically, over the past three years the number of unemployed has increased from 7 million to nearly 16 million; the unemployment rate has skyrocketed from 4.6 percent to 10.2 percent; and the misery index, an economic indicator which adds the unemployment rate to the inflation rate, has increased by 27 percent. Further, the federal budget deficit has increased by a staggering 471 percent; federal spending has increased by 33 percent; and the national debt has ballooned to $12 trillion. In addition to these harrowing statistics, this week the media reported more instances of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Democrats’ $787 billion Economic Stimulus Package. According to the Recovery.gov website, nine California congressional districts that do not exist received millions of federal stimulus dollars. What is worse, the website claims that 24.2 jobs were created in the nine nonexistent districts with a total of $5.7 million stimulus funds spent, meaning that each phantom job created cost taxpayers over $237,000. Rather than continue down the road of failed promises and wasted taxpayer dollars, Congressman Miller believes firmly that Washington must get its fiscal house in order and our nation’s job creators must have increased access to their own capital to create jobs.