That’s the headline of a blistering column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal by Nevadan Wayne Allyn Root, a former Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee.
Unemployment in Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s state, is now up to 14.1 percent. Nevada has the highest jobless rate in the nation – even higher than in Rust Belt Michigan. After being the fastest-growing state in the nation for two decades, Nevadans are in shock at how far and fast their fortunes have fallen.
As liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein puts it, “the problem for Nevadans is not that they don’t want jobs, but that they can’t get them.” But in his argument for an extension of unemployment benefits, Klein doesn’t address the root cause of Nevada’s unemployment predicament.
Root’s analysis, on the other hand, pulls no punches:
I’ve polled all my friends who own small businesses – many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees provided by temp agencies….
The government can force people to pay taxes on their employees, and even to buy them health insurance, but it can’t force them to offer jobs to anyone. As long as federal policy makes business owners afraid to hire additional workers, unemployment will remain at unacceptably high levels in Nevada and elsewhere throughout the U.S.
