Op-Eds and Blogs

Things may be getting better soon for people left without a job: The extended-benefits program for the unemployed expired nationwide Jan. 1 and hasn’t been reinstated. How can this help? Because the evidence from North Carolina shows the kind of improvement in hiring that apparently comes after ending extended benefits. John Hood lays out the numbers in the Wall Street Journal. North Carolina dropped out of the extended-benefits program early, on July 1, 2013. The state, he writes, “didn't descend into the Dickensian nightmare critics predicted." "For the last six months of 2013, it was the only state where jobless recipients weren't eligible for extended benefits. Yet during that period North Carolina had one of the nation's largest improvements in labor-market performance and overall economic growth. “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of payroll jobs in North Carolina rose by 1.5% in the second half of 2013, compared with a 0.8% rise for the nation as a whole. Total unemployment in the state dropped by 17%, compared with the national average drop of 12%. The state's official unemployment rate fell to 6.9% in December 2013 from 8.3% in June, while the nationwide rate fell by eight-tenths of a point to 6.7%.”

As Obamacare is revealed to be a bigger failure than anyone predicted, we can’t expect that liberals who believe that increasing the size and scope of government is always the solution will just give up. Instead, expect them to tout Canada’s government-run system as a solution. Jason Clemens and Bacchus Barua of the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank that has long documented that country’s health care performance, offer a warning. Not only do the data show that Canada’s single-payer system is among the most expensive in the world, it doesn’t offer value to match: “The reality of Canadian health care is that it is comparatively expensive and imposes enormous costs on Canadians in the form of waiting for services, and limited access to physicians and medical technology.”