This article was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on September 10, 2011 in response to this question:

What do you think will help decrease unemployment and underemployment? What role do you think the government can, or should, play in encouraging job growth?

Space aliens attack!  Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman says we need scientists to “fake an alien threat.”   ”A massive buildup to counter” the threat, real or not, would end the economic slump “in eighteen months,” he said. Dr. Krugman unwittingly shows how loony Keynesian economic “stimulus” schemes are.

As an EconStories rap explains: “If every worker was staffed in the army and fleet, we’d have full employment and nothing to eat. Jobs are a means, not the ends in themselves. People work to live better, to put food on the shelves. Real growth means production of what people demand. That’s entrepreneurship not your central plan.”

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Repealing parts or all of last year’s health control law [HR 3590] would encourage real growth. One-third of small business owners sited the law’s requirements as the greatest or second greatest “obstacle to hiring more employees,” reports a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey. Three of four business owners “somewhat agreed” that the law “makes it harder … to hire more employees.”

For example, the law compels employers to buy insurance for full-time employees.  In response, half of surveyed employers said they would “change their workforce strategy so that fewer employees work 30 hours or more a week,” reports Mercer consultants.

Is it merely coincidence that private-sector jobs growth stalled after health “reform” passed?  Economist James Sherk shows that in the fifteen months before “reform,” average monthly job growth exceeded 67,000 jobs. Since then, it has plummeted to around 6,500 jobs per month. Don’t blame alien abductions.

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Thanks to Grace-Marie Turner for her article: Repealing Health Care Legislation Will Create Jobs, which led me to the health care bill references above.

Related, via FIRM, The Hill reports:

The medical device industry says it could lose 10 percent of its U.S. workforce because of a tax created by healthcare reform.

The Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) released a report Wednesday that says device-makers might ship 43,000 jobs overseas once the tax takes effect in 2013.

Read more: Device-makers say tax will cost 43,000 US jobs.