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October 31, 2009
What a Scam
Here's the stimulus story in a sentence: The government — in which I'm including the entire structure from the town to the nation — insulated itself from the souring economy and is now attempting to justify and perpetuate the scam by touting its own health. A little bit of basic math puts this in perspective:
Nearly 650,000 jobs have been saved or created under President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, the government said yesterday, and the White House declared the nation on track to meet the president’s goal of 3.5 million by the end of next year.
A $787 billion program "creating or saving" 650,000 jobs comes at a price of $1.2 million per worker. Alright, fine, the whole amount hasn't been spent, yet. But look at it this way: The federal government could have given 650,000 people the nation's median income of roughly $52,000 at a total cost of $33.8 billion. For $50 billion, the government could have given one million Americans $50,000 and said, "You've got a year to figure out a way to make a living."
It's a matter of plain deduction to observe that a lot fewer people must be getting a lot more money thanks to government action.
Of course, as I began by implying, the audience of the government's self-congratulations isn't the group of people whom it merely represents. Rather, the government is advertising its success for the benefit of its real clients: its various codependents. Look to some of the details in Rhode Island:
Nearly all of the 1,489 jobs created or saved through the state's allocation of funds were in three areas: corrections, education and labor and training. ..."There aren't a lot of sustainable jobs in those numbers," [gubernatorial spokeswoman Amy Kempe] said.
Transferring money from productive, economy-growing segments of the population in order to maintain the government workforce at a cost of over a million dollars per job is a teetering model.
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About Engaged Citizen
Government cannot create wealth, so all it can do within its power is:
a)make things illegal, usually victimless crimes, and then threaten people with violence and incarceration if they violate them, or
b)steal from one person and give to another through taxes or inflationary policy
This is precisely why government as we know it has to be kept small or eliminated entirely. Big government always leads to this immoral and unsustainable self-interested and self-perpetuating redistribution scheme.
Posted by: Dan at October 31, 2009 11:37 AMDan - well said.
Obama's stimulus money has nothing to do with making Investments that will simultaneously stimulate economic activity.
Rather, Obama's stimulus money is all about maintaining the status quo with respect to the Unsustainable Cost structure that is the result of Public Employee Union entitlement minded demands.
Instead of making investments in long-lasting hard assets (e.g. Infrastructure), we have instead poured our limited resources down the rat hole of the Unions.
Instead of forcing the Unions to bring their pay and benefits in line with what the economic realities are able to afford, Obama & Co. instead thru them a life-line and kicked the can down the road.
Very simply, we can not afford the unsustainable Cost Structure that has evolved as a result of the Entitlement-minded Union-hack demands. And just when we thought that the natural forces of basic economics was going to provide the long overdue and neccessary correction, along comes Obama and Joe Biden to interfere.
Will anyone forget Joe Biden's rant when he was chosen as the VP ..."I'm doing this for Teachers, the Fire-fighters and the Police." He wasn't kidding. Joe's real sorry about the rest of you fools that have to carry these Union hacks on your backs everyday, but afterall, it is the Unions who blindly deliver the votes ...so the rest of you can eat shite.
Posted by: George Elbow at November 1, 2009 11:13 AMI disagreed with the 'stimulus' from day one, It was clear to me that the stimulus would be used inappropriately by the Rhode Island legislature, given our history with one-time payouts. We don't wear band-aids, we eat them. States that have those issues should have recieved consultants trained in cost-cutting rather than cash payouts. It's the proverbial fish issue, we just got more, but we still haven't figured out how to do it ourselves.
Posted by: mangeek at November 1, 2009 11:31 PMSorry for the double-post and poor formatting. My phone isn't the bee's knees when it comes to mobile web.
Posted by: Mangeek at November 1, 2009 11:35 PM