Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=329439208568423
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, June 09, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Economy: More than 1.6 million jobs have disappeared since the stimulus package was signed in February. Government can't create jobs, only dependency. Make-work jobs will not turn the economy around.
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The Obama administration, totally unfamiliar with the first rule of holes, has announced it's about to really, really ramp up stimulus spending to create 600,000 jobs this summer. That's on top of the 150,000 jobs it has "saved," though there's no way to identify or measure such jobs.
The unemployment rate, which was never supposed to rise above 8% because of the stimulus, is now approaching 10%. The excuse given is that not enough of the stimulus money has been dispersed.
Monday's announcement of a new and improved stimulus is just old wine in new bottles. In the first 100 days of the stimulus, some $44 billion was spent as jobs continued to hemorrhage. Now we're asked to do more of the same and expect different results.
Obama's 600,000 figure includes 125,000 temporary summer youth jobs and is based on economic projections, not an actual count. The only thing you can accurately count is the number of Americans working — and that's going down fast.
The administration is playing a shell game with its "saved or created" job claims. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said as much to the tax-challenged Timothy Geithner at a March hearing.
"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," Baucus told Geithner. "If the economy loses 2 million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs."
We need only see how the Obama administration has mucked up the U.S. auto industry. If the administration wanted to save jobs, what about the car dealerships forced to close by Government Motors? What about the car salesmen and auto mechanics?
We could have just let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt. We were told they were too big to fail, that the job loss would devastate the economy. Yet how was it that after 9/11 we continued to fly bankrupt airlines that stayed in business till they got back on their feet?
Cars could have continued to be built and sold and dealers would have continued. But union contracts would have been voided by a bankruptcy judge. A key Democratic constituency would have been ticked off. Better to wait until tens of billions were squandered and the car companies had no choice but to sell themselves to the government and the unions. One hastened their demise with burdensome regulations, the other with horrendous legacy costs.
This is no way to run a railroad. And speaking of railroads, the U.S. car industry is about to be run by the people who gave us Amtrak, which loses so much money per passenger on some routes that it would be cheaper to buy them plane tickets. All this gives a new meaning to the phrase: Would you buy a used car from this man?
The way to create jobs is to do the things that actually work. Let people and businesses keep more of what they earn. Applaud profit as a reward for success and efficiency. Let the risk takers take the risks and reap the rewards. And when they fail, well, let them fail.
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