Note: Please compose your own letter!  Multiple letters, emails, faxes mirroring thousands of others are counted as only (1). 

Quote of the Day: “From where I sit, the government’s message is unmistakable: Creating a new job carries a punishing price.” — Michael P. Fleischer, President, Bogen Communications Inc., as reported in the Wall Street Journal

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In this message . . . an explanation for the “jobless recovery,” and a cure for the problem.

Unemployment is still officially at 9.6%.

As the letter below indicates, we believe a large part of the reason for this is that federal regulations are constantly changing. Business owners don’t know what their unelected regulatory overlords will do next. This creates uncertainty about the future costs and benefits of hiring a new employee. We think this is why . . .

* Businesses aren’t hiring
* Congress should pass DownsizeDC.org’s Write the Laws Act (WTLA).

Please send your elected representatives a letter, telling them to introduce WTLA.

You may borrow from or copy this letter . . .

The Write the Laws Act would require Congressional approval for all regulations. This is a needed reform, because the unelected bureaucrats who today write and implement regulations are causing high unemployment by creating uncertainty.

You can begin to see how this is happening by comparing this recession with the one in 2000-2001. As James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation notes, the 2008-2009 recession led to a peak unemployment rate of 10.1%, whereas the 2000-2001 recession led to an unemployment high of just 6.3%. 

But here’s the most startling fact: Even though total unemployment was lower in the earlier recession, jobs losses were actually 2.6 million HIGHER than in the current downturn! The reason for this is very instructive . . .

The earlier recession had both more job losses and a lower unemployment rate, because more businesses back then were doing new hiring at the same time that they were cutting other jobs. By comparison, during this recession, businesses have stopped hiring, so all we have are the job losses, resulting in a “jobless recovery.”

This is happening because business owners don’t know what the government will do next. The exact same thing happened during the Great Depression. Back then GDP rose, but unemployment remained high because the New Deal’s laws and regulations were constantly changing. This made hiring risky. The economist Robert Higgs calls this problem “regime uncertainty.” More