YOU THINK? Lack of jobs increasingly blamed on uncertainty created by Obama’s policies.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I am an instructor in a technical school. It puts me in good position to stay close with my industry (auto service). Each year I am on a job hunt for up to fifty students, and you can bet I keep close tabs on what local employers are thinking.

The past two years, but this year especially, the single most common thought passed on by employers has
been “I’m not sure I want to hire anyone right now, until we know what’s going to happen with taxes and medical coverage”. This is understandable, as these two items make up huge parts of a business’s outgoing spending. Not knowing what they will be nailed with, a LOT of small employers are taking the only safe road. They are putting expansion and hiring plans on hold, till the business environment regains some sanity.

I think they may have a long wait, and signs indicate that’s exactly what local employers are expecting.

Ugh. Yeah, that matches up with what I’m hearing, too.

MORE: Reader David Moynihan emails:

You ain’t kidding about business uncertainty.

I’m a not-as-small publisher these days. Kindle+ Amazon ending its 5-year practice of burying all my titles in search results have sent sales skyrocketing, tripling last year and up around 80% this year (that’s up from Xmas, and before things like 70% royalty agreements from Apple+Amazon take effect this month).

Foreign rights alone (I print books in the UK+EU) are sufficient for me to hire somebody just to kind of wander around NY, drop off proofs* to local indie stores, run my twitter+facebook ‘n such. Recent college grad would kill for this. And I cannot pull the trigger, ‘cuz I have no idea what the future holds.

Instead, I’m commissioning translations and works for hire from established “names” in the field of smutty books, and I may hire an editor from New Zealand or Australia to do anthologies. The people I’m commissioning from are OK with it, but I’m not exactly serving the youth of America, many of whom are offering to work for me for free (a common industry practice I don’t approve of.)

*By proofs, I mean for my three non-smut imprints, which do make money, but of course I’ve been audited and will be again, so it’s like I’m running six separate lines of business. From my basement.

I hear a lot of things like this. It’s a job or two here and there, but across the country it adds up to a lot of jobs not being created.