No joke, Joe

Vice President Joe Biden is famous for his public speaking gaffs so we're not sure if his remark Sept. 3rd stating that "the recovery act is doing more, faster, more efficiently and more effectively than we had hoped" was indeed a gaff or if the coordination of information between the Labor Department and the Vice President has been sidetracked. But the Labor Department announced Friday morning that employers had eliminated another 216,000 American jobs last month, driving the unemployment rate to 9.l7%.

The apparent contradiction elicited comment from Rep. Dave Camp, Midland Republican who represents Roscommon County in the Congress.

"The so-called stimulus bill has disastrously failed to meet its main objective: getting Americans back to work," Camp said Friday. "The unemployment numbers today confirm that the only thing this bill stimulated was more deficit, which will haunt us for years to come."

Camp, who is the House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member, said that in January 2009 the President's senior economists projected that if the stimulus passed the unemployment rate in August 2009 would be 7.9%, far below the actual level of 9.7%. In the current labor force of 154.6 million, that difference means there are now 2.8 million more unemployed workers than the Administration projected in touting its stimulus package. In Michigan "seasonally unadjusted payroll jobs in Michigan fell by 65,000 in July to 3,834,000," according to the Michigan Department of Energy, Labor and Economic Growth's latest unemployment statistics.

Many workers who lost jobs at the start of the economic downturn are out of the labor market pool and thus are not counted. There's little evidence the stimulus money has helped create or retain jobs in Michigan, or Roscommon County. Encumbering our economic future through loans by foreign nations won't keep us safe nor strong. Congress must rein in the federal budget because there is little effort on the part of Joe Biden and Barack Obama's administration to secure our economic future. Our economic survival as a nation, and as individual taxpayers, is too important to be left to speaking gaffs by a political buffoon.

The United States is leveraging its economic future by the boat loads of loans coming from China while the tax base of employed citizens is heading to extinction. We'll soon be the serfs of China if our economic course is not changed, and changed soon.