'How many jobs have we created?'.

ALTHOUGH CREATION of jobs has been a high, often the highest, priority for our nation, as long as I have been serving on boards, which is over three decades, I have never heard directors discuss the number of jobs being created by their .company. There is little, if any, sense that the board has an obligation, yet alone an accountability, to address America's employment needs. Once a year we discuss the composition of our company's workforce in terms of, for example, diversity. When we do talk about the size of our workforce, it's often in terms of how to become more efficient, which generally means "how to do more with less."

It's not that boards fail to embrace their social responsibility; how-ever, we rarely if ever ask, "How many good-paying jobs have we created this quarter?" Over the past five years, labor force participation, working age Americans 18 to 64 who have a job or are looking for one, has dropped from 65.7% to 62.8%, the lowest share of the population in the labor force since 1978. Today fewer Americans have jobs than in 2007.

With the administration calling for more unemployment insurance, Republicans are quick to point out that six years into an Obama economy, millions. of Americans still need "emergency" unemployment assistance. Many of the President's policies may actually be dampening job creation. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress's official fiscal scorekeeper, reported that his proposal to raise the minimum wage would throw a -half million poor Americans out of work. And last month the CBO concluded that by 2024, 2.5 million. Americans will work less or not at all as a result of Obamacare.

When these statistics were reported, some Democrats...