(‘76 Contributor) The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, and expecting a different result. Are the President and his administration insane to repeat their failed policies?
* Grants to states to prevent the layoff of public employees is no more than the Democrats taking care of a key constituency: not stimulative! Government jobs Don’t count.
* Continually extending the unemployment benefits only incentivizes people to not look for work and increases the deficit. Not stimulative!
* Infrastructure work was supposed to be underway by now from that last “stimulus”! Where is it? Why would another tranche now be any different? Even so, infrastructure work is done by contractors with few employees and lots of machinery. They descend on a community for a few weeks and then they are gone, leaving a fresh bridge or a newly paved stretch of highway. Nothing sustainable about that!
* Repairing public schools, building community centers, etc, are not simulative: they produce no sustainable demand for goods and services. Once the work is done, the economic activity dwindles to its former stagnated level.
The only result of the last “stimulus” I see in my own life is a repaired barb wire fence around Roxborough State Park. The fence looks good. But now that it’s up, it’s just sitting there. Yet I see more empty store fronts in my local Roxborough Village shopping mall, the result of more government taxes and regulation.
The Administration ideologically can’t face the option of cutting taxes (it would be rewarding “fat cats”) or cutting regulations (“leaving the people and the environment unprotected from evil greedy businessmen!”) and encouraging people to build their own businesses!
When a business starts, it creates an ongoing self–sustainable demand for goods and services, and jobs! Government jobs, on the other hand, can only be sustained by confiscating resources from more productive areas of the economy or by printing money. Both are detrimental and unsustainable.
To pay half a million morons to rake leaves in National Parks isn’t job creation! It’s a temporary redirection of welfare money, affecting no change whatsoever in the GNP!
The reason the government persists in these failed policies is that the Progressive Marxist–Leninists in the White House want the money (and the power that goes with it) to flow through their hands in Washington! They apparently Don’t care if the economy suffers! (Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven!)
And it’s telling that when the President has a “job summit” he sits down with the CEO’s of BIG BUSINESS (who for the most part are laying off and closing plants in the US owing to burdensome regulation and taxes and opening plants and hiring employees in China or India!) The President seems to despise small business, the real engine of job creation, because he can’t have one of his Czars sit down at a table with thousands of small businessmen and tell them what to do like he can Big Bank CEO’s!
To close, I Don’t believe the President and his administration are insane. But apparently, their long term plan for disaster is to eliminate small business with taxes and regulation, and to leave to remain only controllable big business.
