“After a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999,” Barack Obama boasted in his State of the Union address. Indeed, he mentioned “jobs” some 19 times. The trouble is, it’s not his policies that are growing the job market – it’s the end of his policies. Democrats have long claimed that paying people not to work creates jobs, but as Ronald Reagan once quipped, “Our liberal friends … know so much that isn’t so.” According to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, roughly 60% of 2014’s job growth came because Democrats’ lavish unemployment benefits were not extended again. The study is by no means the last word on the subject, as there are innumerable factors that go into something so complex as the job market. But as National Review’s Patrick Brennan summarizes: “The general economic consensus has always been that unemployment insurance slightly boosts the unemployment rate. … [W]e still have unemployment insurance, of course, because we want a safety net for people in the event of job loss. That just has to be balanced against the costs that the program imposes on the labor market.” More…

Oh, and by the way, look to Texas for all the jobs. According to American Enterprise Institute’s Mark J. Perry, “It’s a pretty impressive story of how job creation in just one state – Texas – is solely responsible for the 1.169 million net increase in total US employment (+1,444,290 Texas jobs minus the 275,290 non-Texas job loss) in the seven year period between the start of the Great Recession in December 2007 and December 2014. The other 49 states and the District of Columbia together employ about 275,000 fewer Americans than at the start of the recession seven years ago, while the Lone Star State has added more than 1.25 million payroll jobs and more than 190,000 non-payroll jobs (primarily self-employed and farm workers).”