Carl’s Jr. CEO: What recovery?

Feb. 17, 2013

By John Seiler

One of California’s largest businesses is the Carl’s Jr. restaurant chain, headquartered in Anaheim. Its CEO, Andrew Puzder, just co-wrote an article pointing out that the national economic “recovery” has been a mirage:

“The unemployment rate has dropped over two points from a high of 10.0 percent, reached in October 2009. But that figure is misleading because the government does not count people as unemployed if they have become so discouraged that they quit looking for a job. Much of the drop in the official unemployment rate since its peak is due to this aspect of the reporting protocol. In other words, the unemployment rate has declined mostly because millions of people have dropped out of the labor force. In fact, if no one in the United States was either working or looking for work, our government would report that the unemployment rate was zero….

“Since the February 2010 trough, the economy has only managed to gain, on average, 157,300 jobs a month—less than half the average number of jobs lost during the recession. The best year for average monthly job growth was 2012, with an average increase of 180,800 jobs a month. These numbers are dwarfed by the magnitude of the losses sustained from 2008 to 2010. As of January 2013, the country is 35 months from the employment trough, but is still 3.2 million jobs short of its pre-recession high.”

The solution is not the tax increases President Obama is seeking.

“Rather, a public policy that promotes positive market certainty, both in the regulatory and fiscal sphere, and pro-growth tax reform is the solution. It means lowering, not raising, marginal rates and capital gains and dividend taxes. It means putting an end to simply kicking the debt can down the road. It means dealing with the grossly inefficient expansion of the government regulatory bureaucracy created by Dodd-Frank and Obamacare.”

Alas, none of that is likely to happen. President Obama’s second term will be one of renewed recession, worsening deficits and much higher unemployment.