Thank goodness for that stimulus – from CNS:
Twenty-eight months after Congress passed President Obama’s signature economic stimulus law, and nearly one year after he declared the summer of 2010 to be “Recovery Summer,” 1.9 million fewer people are employed.
In February 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 141.7 million people were employed. By the end of May 2011 – the last month for which data are available – that number had fallen to 139.8 million, a difference of 1.9 million…
But, wait, you say – jobs have been created, haven’t they? Sure – but if the BLS says “X number of new jobs” were created in 2010, that doesn’t mean it was a net gain. The report does note that there are slightly more people working since December of 2009, the overall effect of the first two years of Obamunism is a smaller number of people working in the United States.
Why is this? Because as anyone who thinks about it realizes, the government cannot create a job – and this is because government cannot create wealth. Its like this: if I start up a business growing watermelons I have just created one job (for myself) while also creating the wealth to pay for that job (the watermelons for sale); if I do well then I might hire another person and pay them with wealth that never existed until I started up the watermelon farm.
Along comes Uncle Sam and says, “the economy is not good, so we’ll start some shovel ready stimulus to create jobs”; he then taxes me and regulates me and prints up money and I’m forced to let my employee go…who is then hired to build the road past my now abandoned farm. Government “created” a job only by destroying another one. You can some times and for very short periods of time get a net increase in jobs by doing the government route…but as the wealth for government jobs must be extracted from the wealth used for other, private sector jobs, it is always – at best – a wash. Often it is a net loss because government starts to absorb so much wealth that there is not enough surplus left over for a money man to back a new idea…and so jobs which would have happened never get started.
The quicker we get government out of the equation, the better it will be. Its no about the idiotic liberal dichotomy of “are you in favor of helping the poor or are you a callous bastard”…its a matter of understanding that the poor are better served by a genuine free market…a market free of government interference as well as crony capitalism. That is the ideal to head for – and that is where the wealth to re-employ Americans will be created.
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