As the lead-up to the presidential elections gets into gear, now is a good time to reflect on the policies of the major parties concerning employment in our country. All the major players, be they Democrats, Republicans, conservatives or liberals, have their own ideas about who should be responsible for job creation in the United States.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment fell 0.6% over the course of 2011, with 1.9 million jobs added by private enterprise.  Over the same period, the government sector showed a slight decrease of 280,000 jobs.

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has lambasted the Obama government for rejecting the Keystone XL Project, the creation of an oil pipeline extension between Canada and the United States, which purportedly would have created a minimum of 20,000 jobs. Given that, Boehner has used various bills that have nothing to do with employment as a part of his “forgotten 15”, a series of bills linked to job creation that have allegedly been ignored by the Democrat led Senate, even though they have passed the Republican led House.

Republican Eric Cantor has made no secret of his affiliation with the Tea Party and their general stance that private enterprise is the way of the future for job creation in the United States.

Senate Minority Leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell has taken the interesting political tack of calling for an immediate vote in the Senate on the Obama government’s $447 billion dollar Jobs Bill. This has been touted by various commentators as a political stunt in an attempt to expose divisions amongst Democrats, a move which might have had more credibility if it had not simply been added as an amendment to an unrelated currency bill. Senator McConnell rejected a bid by Democrats Majority Leader Harry Reid to vote on the jobs package separately to the currency bill without going through the usual series of procedural hurdles.

It seems that the question of jobs creation in the United States is being used as a political football by both major parties. Surely it is the responsibility of both the government and private enterprise to ensure that the American people are not left out in the cold when it comes to employment. The wealth of the nation lies in its people, and the ongoing health of the nation is decided by its people’s ability to survive and prosper. This would seem to be the overall point of democracy – a point which, in the struggle for political power, is often overlooked.

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