Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, received much praise for her job fair, but do job fairs create any new jobs? The answer is clearly no — no more than classified ads in this newspaper or Monster.com create jobs.
A job fair is just another marketplace where employers and job seekers can connect. It’s nice to have a job fair, but in the end, no more people will be hired than employers need to produce the goods and services their customers demand.
Many of Herrera Beutler’s votes and GOP policies will actually take jobs out of the economy. The GOP is doing its best to reduce the number of jobs for their own political gain. Congress’ debt-ceiling/expenditure-cutting deals, along with their failure to extend unemployment benefits and the payroll tax holiday, will reduce GDP by $241 billion and remove 1.8 million jobs from the economy in 2012 (Economic Policy Institute). Their shameful quest is to shift the blame for their handiwork to Obama.
If Herrera Beutler really cared about creating 100,000 to 150,000 new jobs per month next year to help the economy recover, she’d support the president’s jobs bill.
