Everybody understands that the government measures the number of people looking for jobs. Very few people know that the government also tracks the number of jobs looking for people. This week the federal government released the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the document in which that latter number is reported. In it we saw job openings hit the highest level since the recession. Before the president’s tax cut of 2003, there were slightly more than 2.5 million unfilled jobs in the country. Now there are over 5 million. According to Economy.com’s analysis of this new survey, “The high rate of openings combined with declining hiring suggests that employers are unable to find qualified workers for the open positions.”

Commentators have consistently underrated the dynamic effect of marginal and investment tax cuts. This has caused them to miss the fact that since 2003, millions of people have entered the work force. Some are immigrants, some new high school or college grads, and some are people who had given up on finding work and decided to try again. The economy absorbed 4.5 million of these new entrants, and then found room for enough of the existing unemployed to drive the unemployment rate down from 6.1 percent to 4.7 percent. After all of this, we still created enough new jobs to leave more than 4 million jobs open and waiting for qualified applicants.

It’s time to change the discussion away from the alleged weaknesses of the labor market to how our educational, welfare, and immigration systems can more efficiently get larger numbers of qualified people into the marketplace to do the jobs that currently are not getting done.

– Jerry Bowyer is the author of The Bush Boom and an economic advisor to Independence Portfolio Partners. He can be reached through www.BowyerMedia.com.