Americans will celebrate Labor Day on Monday — the 126th such observance — with one looming question: “Where are the jobs?”

Despite being promised not to exceed 8 percent unemployment after a $787 billion stimulus bill passed in 2009, the unemployment rate has hovered around 9.5 percent nationally. Mississippi’s unemployment rate is near 12 percent.

Other statistics have the unemployment rate much higher because those who have quit looking for jobs completely are not counted in the general unemployment number.

Talk of a double-dip recession, the continuously tanking housing market and federal debt reaching astronomical, and unsustainable, levels this Labor Day will be spent talking more about the unemployed than the American worker it is designed to honor.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday spoke in a national television address, not to comment on the economic malaise, but to take credit for ending a war in Iraq he has opposed from the time he was a U.S. senator from Illinois.

He could have laid out economic plans that included the removal of federal government interference. He could have laid out a plan to let the American people fix what the bloated bureaucracy has failed to do — create real jobs in the private sector.

He didn’t.

The current administration’s economic plan seems to be simple — pump as much money at a situation as possible by printing money with no regard for the checkbook balance sheet for years to come.

Those who control the executive and legislative branches of government believe we should look to Washington for the answers to every economic problem small or large.

Others take a Ronald Reagan approach and see the government as the problem, not the solution.

To secure for future generations the freedom and economic security that this nation has enjoyed for generations, the latter must prevail.

Happy Labor Day.