Reprise: business, not government, creates jobs.

"Prosperity is just around the corner."
--Herbert Hoover (1932)

"When I said 'Change we can believe in,' [w]e knew this was going to take time."
--Barack Obama (2011)

Reprise: how bad it is.

From Fortune’s Nina Easton:

• a quiet cultural crisis brews as one out of five American men stop collecting paychecks -- getting by instead on unemployment or disability checks, the incomes of friends and family, and . . . illicit activity.

• There are now 6.2 million Americans (more than 44% of the unemployed) who have been out of work for more than a year -- and are dead last on any list of employers seeking to fill positions. These are people whose skills have rusted in a fast-paced global economy, along with twentysomethings who haven't even developed the habit of work.

• Safety nets, built to protect people in trouble, are actually contributing to their long-term unemployment -- and thereby hurting their job prospects. A study by the Chicago Fed suggests people go back to work -- and unemployment drops -- when unemployment insurance is set to run out.

Reprise: how wrong current policies are.

More from Nina Easton:

The Obama team resists a pro-growth tax and regulation agenda that business leaders insist would give them the confidence to invest their growing profits in an expanded U.S. workforce. . . Washington spends more than $18 billion a year on 47 different training programs -- spread across nine agencies. What has all that bureaucracy and money bought? Employers who complain that they can't find qualified workers -- even in this market (one out of three employers, according to a recent McKinsey Global Institute survey). As many as 3 million jobs in this country are sitting unfilled.

Reprise: we need business, not government, creating jobs.

From Canadian David Warren (Ottawa Citizen):

Most moral issues [aren’t about] distinguishing between right and wrong. [They are about] finding a way to justify doing the wrong thing. And once you think you have found it, the people still arguing for doing the right thing may be dismissed as "simplistic."

[“Simplistic:”] If what we want is a functioning, even flourishing economy, and therefore jobs, jobs, jobs, then the policies of Texas make sense. They are, as Rick Perry says, low taxes, minimal regulation, the avoidance of debt, and business-friendly attitudes. It is a political culture [focused] on the political questions (law, order, and so forth), [leaving] economic questions to the free market.