Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Canada, Jobs Report, Recession
While the United States lost another 11,000 jobs in November, Canada has added 79,100 jobs, five times more than expected. Their jobless rate fell to 8.5 percent from October’s 8.6 percent.
One very interesting source of jobs up north, is a new $90 million SUV plant owned by — General Motors.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: "Jobs Summit", Capitalism, The Free Market, Unemployment
The United States lost another 11,000 jobs last month, and everyone is celebrating because 11,000 is fewer jobs lost than in September, and the smallest monthly number since the recession began. I guess that if you are grasping at straws you grab onto anything that floats.
Democrats are really concerned about the unemployment situation. People vote their pocketbooks and mid-term elections are coming next year. If you include those who involuntarily have only part-time work and those who want a job but have stopped looking, the under-employment rate is 17.5 percent, a postwar peak. When everyone is really concerned it is important to look as if you are doing something, so the President held a “Jobs Summit.“
He invited union people and environmentalists, liberal economists from academia, some high-tech companies and Wall-Street types, but not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce nor the National Federation of Independent Business. Liberals labor under the illusion that jobs are created largely by the government.
They are still dreaming of non-existent “green jobs,” though so far all the green-job money is going to China, where wind turbines are being manufactured. We have all sorts of businesses in the private sector here who replace windows, install insulation, caulk doors and windows, but they are mostly hurting for business, in spite of government rebates.
Government does not create jobs. Government takes taxpayer money and gives it to people for performing a task. No product is created, and less money goes back into the economy than was taken from taxpayers. The ‘multiplier-effect’ doesn’t seem to work.
Jobs are created by the private sector, and mostly by small business. (Not mom-and-pop small business or free-lance small business, but growing businesses with 15-50 or so employees) hoping to get bigger.
Businesses will hire when they feel some confidence that they can succeed in their endeavors. Right now, all they see in the near future is uncertainty. Taxes are going up, but how much is unknown. Health care reform is claimed to save money, but anyone who has been paying attention knows that it will cost in the trillions. The government is intent on cap-and-trade in spite of the revelations of ClimateGate, which will also cost the economy trillions of dollars. Credit for small business has dried up and there is uncertainty about new financial regulation, more bank failures and bailouts.
No administration going back as far as Teddy Roosevelt has had a cabinet with so little experience in the private sector. It is no wonder that they simply have no idea how jobs are created. They are notably unenthusiastic about capitalism and free enterprise, which they blame for most everything that they cannot blame on Bush.
The President says he will have a plan by next Tuesday. Congress is wondering about spending the rest of the TARP money, the remainder of the stimulus funds that are not being saved for just before the election, or leftover bailout money. Quite a bit of that is supposed to be our money, but once the government get their hands on it it is government money.
My bet is that the plan will not include tax-relief for business, health care reform will neither be dropped nor scaled back, and there will be continued war on coal companies and subsidies for uneconomic wind farms and solar arrays will continue or increase. Freedom is not really on the table.
Filed under: Capitalism, Energy, Environment, Freedom, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Being "Green", Climate Change, Congressional Lies, Democrat Demagogues
Most people get angry when they discover that they have been lied to, or made fools of, or simply deliberately misled. The lie alone is bad enough, but problems arise when you act upon false information.
We are just beginning to see the repercussions of ClimateGate. Careers have been damaged, publication dishonestly refused and skeptical scientists have received death threats. Environmental journalists have made careers of transcribing what those who share their ideology say, slandering those who do not, and ignoring the scandal.
All the individual damage pales before the attempts of officeholders across the world who have used junk science as a pretext for increasing their personal power and control and expanding their control and their take from international energy markets. They have a lot invested in their power grabs, and they’re not going to give it up peacefully.
If climate change is a natural phenomenon — which I believe that it is — and carbon dioxide is a natural fertilizer for plants which will help us feed the world — which I believe that it is — then just think of all the things that we don’t need to be doing.
We can stop the silly war on coal and create all sorts of jobs. We can drill for our own natural resources and increase refinery capacity — creating even more high-paying jobs, and worry a lot less about price hikes in the petroleum markets. We can build nuclear plants. We can stop making cars lighter and less safe in order to meet some mpg standard designed to cut our use of carbon-based fuels, and stop pushing the electric cars that nobody wants.
We can stop subsidizing wind farms and solar arrays that are completely inefficient and save enormous sums of money. We can stop hoarding incandescent lightbulbs for fear of the onset of those nasty twisty bulbs. We can stop worrying about the polar bears who are just fine.
And just possibly, we can stop being assaulted with the demand that we be “green.” I am so fed up with businesses informing me about how environmentally sensitive they are, how pure, how conscious of Mother Gaia — aaaack! The more they attempt to patronize with their environmental wonderfulness, the more I take my business elsewhere. No, I will not use cloth bags in the grocery store. No, I will not buy “organic” food, organic cosmetics or organic cotton. I will not pay extra on my power bill to buy “green” power from some hideous wind farm that cannot produce any energy at all without massive subsidies. And we can get rid of Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman, for they are of no use at all.
There. I got that off my chest!!
Filed under: Capitalism, Freedom, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Andrew Klavan, Humor, Mainstream Media
(h/t: Pajamas Media)
Filed under: Capitalism, Freedom, History, Politics, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Despotism, Liberty, Tyranny
I frequently recommend the conversations that Peter Robinson has with various guests on the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge.” Paul A. Rahe (pronounced Ray) is Professor of History and Political Science at Hillsdale College, and holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage.
Professor Rahe’s scholarly career has been focused on studying the origins and evolution of self-government within the West.
In the first chapter of five, Professor Rahe defends his position that President Obama’s health-care proposals “presuppose the administrative state’s assuming a power over our lives that is nothing less than tyrannical.”
In the second chapter, he explains the nanny state. There is a nanny in all of us, he says, but it’s hard to explain why anyone would choose life under a nanny.
In the subsequent segments, Professor Rahe ranges through Tocqueville, soft despotism and its roots in America, and discusses the inevitably of the all-encompassing welfare state. And then takes up the question of whether we can recover our liberty.
Each segment is only about 7 minutes long, not much time even in a busy day; but if you are like me, you will find the conversation so fascinating that you can’t stop.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Incompetence, Unemployment, Creating or Saving Jobs
The government’s Web site, recovery.com, that is supposed to be the administration’s effort at transparency in informing taxpayers just how their stimulus dollars are being spent — and which spends $84 million to do so — shows that $6.4 billion has been spent to create jobs in 440 congressional districts that do not exist.
For example, the 15th Congressional District of Arizona, where 30 jobs were saved with $761,420 in spending, according to Recovery.gov, the official government Web site. ABC News reports:”There is no 15th Congressional District in Arizona, the state has only eight districts.”
The site reports that North Dakota”s 99th district received $2 million in stimulus funding. North Dakota has only one congressional district. Washington D.C. supposedly contained 35 congressional districts according to the Web site.
Phantom Congressional districts are only part of the problem. The administration wants to laugh the whole thing off as ordinary human mistakes. Republicans in Congress warned that the hastily passed stimulus bill would be subject to massive fraud. Though creating non-existent districts is a little over-the-top. It didn’t even take an Inspector General to find this fraud.
There have been reports, long before the fake districts surfaced, of pretend jobs, of pay raises called new jobs, of stimulus funds going to supporters, and even simple confusion about government paperwork. There are no indications that the administration will fess up, nor that anyone will get more than their hands slapped, in spite of Michael Ramirez’s wonderful cartoon from Investors Business Daily.
Jonah Goldberg reported on “Chicago Math,” November 4, in the Corner: from the AP:
President Barack Obama’s economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Some Head Start preschool programs reported that stimulus money saved the job of every staff member who received a cost-of-living pay raise, according to their filings. Some colleges and universities counted every part-time student work-study position as a full-time job, according to their reports, which are published online at recovery.gov. (…)
“Holy moly, that’s not right,” Teresa Cox, executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency in Salem, Ore., said of her organization’s report. It indicated that 205 jobs were created or saved with the agency’s $397,761 federal grant. The money, she said, was used for pay raises.
Economist Veronique de Rugy noted in The American that stimulus funds did not target high-unemployment states, and has a lovely chart to plot the number of “jobs created” for each 100,000 people in every state’s labor force and the corresponding unemployment rate in that state.
Now that the real unemployment rate — the one that includes people who have quit looking, those who are working part-time while wanting full-time employment — has climbed to over 17 percent, the administration is going to have a symposium on trying to figure out how to create jobs. The problem is that they have no idea, no idea at all.
ADDENDUM: Watchdog.org has posted a guide to the Stimulus, District by (Phantom) District. Learn to what non-existent districts in your state, real funds have supposedly gone. According to the list, Washington state’s (phantom) 39th district got $300,000, but didn’t create a single job. The OO district created three jobs for only $2.25 million. Since the districts don’t exist, where oh where has the money gone?
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Environment, History | Tags: Al Gore, Czech Republic, The Cold War, The Free Market
I have often recommended the videos of the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge. Each is about 7 minutes long, presented one each day, for a week. Peter Robinson interviews serious people with serious ideas about current events and history.
This week’s guest is Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic. He was born in Prague in 1941 during WWII, grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. After earning a doctorate in economics he pursued a career in academia and at the Czechoslovak State Bank. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Klaus entered politics. A founder of the Civic Democratic Party, he served 1992 to 1997 as prime minister of the Czech Republic. In 2003 he was elected president, a position to which he was reelected in 2008.
The first segment concerns the events of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. The second segment is about the parallels to be drawn between a united Europe and the late Warsaw Pact. In the third, Mr. Klaus takes on Al Gore and points out the similarities in ideology between communism and environmentalism. And the Thursday segment is about how he became an advocate for the free market while studying economics under communism.
The previous interview was with Victor Davis Hanson, classical scholar and military historian and Robert Baer, former CIA agent who served in the Middle East, discussing with Peter Robinson the problem of Iraq. It is a stunning conversation.
All of the previous Uncommon Knowledge interviews are available in the NRO archives. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Try one segment of your choice. I’ll bet you get hooked!
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: And an Unknown Future, Chrysler, Fiat, Government Motors
This picture is here because it makes me laugh. I don’t know what those things are. We once called them Pelosimobiles. From Greg Pollowitz writing in Planet Gore at NRO:
Fox News reports:
Chrysler has disbanded a team of engineers dedicated to rushing a range of electric vehicles to showrooms and dropped ambitious sales targets for battery-powered cars set as it was sliding toward bankruptcy and seeking government aid.
The move by Fiat SpA marks a major reversal for Chrysler, which had used its electric car program as part of the case for a $12.5 billion federal aid package.
As late as August, Chrysler took $70 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a test fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans, vehicles now scrapped in the sweeping turnaround plan for Chrysler announced this week by Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne.
Government Motors is still planning on producing the Chevy Volt, which GM in its day thought was not marketable. It goes 40 miles on an electric charge (in theory) and costs around $40,000. Then it turns into a regular fossil-fuel burning car with a very small engine. But somewhere in this process of the government running the car companies with union advice there must be something that works. Or then again maybe not.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Law, Progressivism., The Constitution, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Demagogues, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, President Obama
In a recent article from the blog at The American Heritage Foundation, the author quoted an excerpt from historian Thomas G. West, author of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science:
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison). The wisdom in question was the kind on display in The Federalist, which relentlessly dissected the political errors of the previous decade in terms accessible to any person of intelligence and common sense.
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. … Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing. Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. … Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
…
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s inchoate will into concrete policies.
This, the blog says, is why you have Obama’s Energy Secretary telling auto makers how they must build cars. This is why Obama’s health care plan empowers a panel of “experts” to reorganize one-sixth of our economy from the top down. Commonsense questions like “Won’t our electricity bills go up if we mandate power companies to use more expensive alternative energy sources?” and “Won’t our health insurance premiums go up if everyone is charged the same price and nobody can be refused coverage”" can’t be tolerated. People voicing such criticisms must be isolated and silenced.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Foreign Policy, National Security, Politics, The Constitution, The Elephant's Child
The office of the President of the United States has a long and complex history. Over the past 220 years, it has been occupied by just 44 different men. George Washington was the first and undoubtedly will remain the last to be elected unanimously. He came to the office reluctantly.
He had been Commander-in-Chief long before he was elected President. He was elected to that position by the Continental Congress in 1775 when he was forty-three years old. There was not yet an army for him to command, only the militias surrounding Boston. And when he said he farewell to his troops in 1783, he was fifty-one. He had only a few years as a civilian before his country called upon him again. His prudence and restraint set the country on a firm basis, and in his farewell address he said:
In the discharge of this trust, I will only say, that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious, in the outset, of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself; and every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome. Satisfied that, if any circumstances have given peculiar value to my services, they were temporary, I have the consolation to believe, that while choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene, patriotism does not forbid it.
The office of the presidency, with its obligations of duty and commitment, takes a toll on the men who temporarily occupy the position. They owe a debt to those who have held the office before them, and to the history left to them by previous occupants. Treaties and alliances have been laboriously created, relations with other countries, whether in trade or good will, carefully nurtured. A knowledge and awareness of that history is essential.
Thomas Jefferson said:
Most bad government has grown out of too much government. [and]
Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have…The course of history shows that as government grows, liberty decreases.
President James Polk remarked:
No President who performs his duties faithfully and conscientiously can have any leisure.
President Harry Truman:
I have tried my best to give the nation everything I had in me. There are probably a million people who could have done the job better than I did, but I had the job, and I always quote an epitaph on a tombstone in a cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona. “here lies Jack Williams, He done his damnest.”
Dwight Eisenhower said:
Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict on us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Conservatives, independents, pundits and even many Democrats are trying to understand President Barack Obama. There are so many questions.
He is clearly not the centrist that he portrayed during the campaign. Is he a radical leftist? He has described himself as a communitarian, for whatever that is worth.
Barack Obama has never, we have been told, had much interest in history. A knowledge of and respect for history are essential to the presidency. Without that you repeat the mistakes and failures of those who have gone before. Depression, inflation, stagflation, debt, unpreparedness or trust in the wrong adversaries. The demands of the office require humility, not hubris.
Nations have interests. Relations with other nations are not popularity contests. Years of carefully nurtured relationships based on fair dealing and fair trade are being discarded in the hope of deals with long-term antagonists who wish our destruction. Speeches, however charmingly delivered and meetings are unlikely to sway them from their purposes.
When a new president temporarily takes on the most important office in the world, he becomes the president of all Americans, not just the unions who supported his campaign. He must suffer criticism and mockery in the understanding that it is the right of the American people and his role to bear it.
He takes on an obligation to preserve, protect and defend the nation. The savings that represent the life’s work of its citizens cannot be spent wildly in some misguided attempt to achieve progressive goals that have been proven over and over not to work. The American people, 38 percent, want the budget deficit cut in half in the next four years. Only 23 percent think health care reform should be a top priority.
I just don’t think that Barack Obama understands the office of the presidency. Oh, he gets the prestige, and he clearly likes the perks and trappings, some of which he adopted before he was elected. He keeps reminding us that “I won!” Yet he seems not to have understood the obligation, the duty, the sacrifice of the office and the weight of the burden that a president must bear. He and Michelle keep complaining about how hard he has to work.
There’s a lot more to it than being surrounded by admirers and sycophants attending to every need, than having AirForce One at one’s beck and call. I just don’t think he gets it. What do you think?
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Energy, Law, Progressivism., The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption, EPA. Cap-and-trade, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
From the website of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website:
The IPCC’s mission is to reflect the science, not create it. As the IPCC states, its duty is:
assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human induced climate change. It does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data.
When the EPA is regulating CO2 on the basis of the IPCC”s assessments, and Congress is attempting to pass vast cap-and-trade legislation that will cripple the American economy on the basis of IPCC increasingly flawed assessments, it is interesting to learn the IPCC’s own evaluation of just what it does and what its mission is.
There has been no significant warming since 1998, and the climate has actually cooled since 2002. The temperature sources that showed alarming warming have been proven to be faulty. The major “greenhouse” gas is water vapor — clouds, fog, mist — in far, far greater quantities than CO2, that has far more influence on climate, yet clouds are poorly understood.
Yet on the basis of IPCC global warming claims, laws are being put in place to force our economy to depend for its energy needs on the portion of our energy sources that currently accounts for only 2.4 percent of our electricity needs.
Filed under: Capitalism, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Liberalism, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research 2009 Wriston Lecture, “Decline is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy” by Dr. Charles Krauthammer is a must read for conservatives. Our country is in a recession. “The weathervanes of conventional wisdom are registering another round of angst about America in decline. New theories, old slogans: Imperial overstretch. The Asian awakening. The post-American world. Inexorable forces beyond our control bringing the inevitable humbling of the world hegemon.”
If you need an antidote to the preposterous awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama — not for accomplishments, for there are none — but for the cult of personality and improbable promises of undefined hope and change, it is here. Dr. Krauthammer is very, very good.
The transcript is to be found here, and a video of the speech is here. I always prefer to read so I can underline and make notes, but others choose a video. In any case, do not miss it.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Health Care, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Democrat Corruption, Economy, Liberal lies
Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute explains in the video above, just what a Value Added Tax (VAT) is, and why it should be vigorously opposed.
Democrats believe that government does most things far better than they can be done by the private sector. As far as that goes, they don’t particularly like the private sector. They don’t like corporations, they don’t like business, they are opposed to the idea of profit which they feel is unfair. They especially don’t like business executives, who make far too much money — that is, they make more than congressmen do. They prefer to have government in charge. This allows them to control things, and especially to use taxpayer money to finance worthy causes in their own states which will help them to get reelected.
You remember the TARP money, the $787 billion Stimulus Bill, the Auto Bailout, “Cash for Clunkers”, taking over the car companies, AmeriCorps, and the yet-to-be-enacted Health Care Bill, the Climate Bill, the takeover of the Student Loan Program, the billions for Pakistan, the Smart Grid, the Amnesty Program, the high-speed rail system for the Midwest, the cash for appliances program, the second Stimulus Bill (to be called something else), new CAFE standards, and tax rebates for the folks at the bottom of the income pie who pay no taxes. I expect I am forgetting some programs.
I’m sure that you realize that the government has no money of its own. (Not everybody does). That means that all these exciting programs have to be paid for. Everything starts with getting rid of the evil Bush Tax Cuts, which is a huge tax increase in itself.
The video above explains a Value Added Tax which is very appealing to Democrats. Daniel Mitchell lists some of the other taxes that Democrats have either enacted or are considering enacting, but the video passes by the list so quickly that you may not have time to absorb the enormity of it all.
- Raise the top income tax rates.
- Limit itemized deductions.
- Increase capital-gains taxes and dividend taxes.
- Raise the social security tax.
- Tax employer-provided health benefits.
- Tax drivers on their mileage.
- Change the rules to raise the gift tax.
- Restore the estate (death) tax to 45 percent.
- Raise the cigarette tax by 62¢ a pack.
- Raise taxes on beer, wine, liquor and soda.
- Tax employer-provided cell phones.
- Raise taxes on overseas corporate earnings.
There are a number of taxes proposed in the Baucus Bill (Senate Health Care), like taxing “Cadillac” health insurance plans; taxing medical equipment like wheelchairs, stents, dialysis machines, pacemakers and so on; but since the Baucus Bill exists only as a series of vague concepts, it’s all pretty wispy. The Congressional Budget Office stuck some numbers on the Baucus Bill, but they are meaningless since there is no legislative language.
PricewaterhouseCooper and Heritage have looked at the CBO estimate and reject the idea that the bill will save money or reduce the deficit. They say health insurance will cost more and wages will decline. The Democrats are pulling some pretty sneaky tricks like estimating costs for the decade from 2010 to 2020 although health care doesn’t come into full effect until 2015, which makes it cheaper on paper, but phony. They are also proposing to take some expensive things out of the health care bill and tack them on somewhere else or in a separate bill so it won’t add to the cost of health care. Unethical, and a cheat.
But that is what you get when you start with the idea that things must be done by the government, and then work backwards from that, nipping and tucking and taxing. It is a sleazy process.
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Statism, Taxes, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Bribing Employers, Carter Administration, Job Creation, Repeating Failed Policies
President Obama seems to have much the same view of money as some of his most ardent supporters. The government has money, and he gets to spend it, with the help of Congress. And where does the government get the money? The government takes the money from undeserving rich people, and it needs to be spread around to people who need it more.
The White House is finally beginning to realize that in spite of their well-intentioned Stimulus Plan, somehow it isn’t working. The jobless rate keeps going up. Teenage unemployment is over 50% (we told you that would happen if you insisted on raising the minimum wage). California’s great Central Valley has unemployment rates reaching 40% in some areas. Michigan has double-digit rates of joblessness. Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, White House Economists, estimated that the spending of the Stimulus plan would keep the jobless rate below 8%, but that was then and this is now.
Alarmed by the rising rates, Democrats are rushing to “do something;” after all, there are elections next year. The White House solution seems to be to bribe employers to hire new workers — only for a couple of years. The current rate is 9.8% and may well continue to rise or at least stay high well into the election campaign of 2010.
Few things so concentrate the minds of politicians as the threat of very angry voters. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The tax credit would also inevitably go to some employers already planning to hire, or reward companies that lay off some workers only to hire others to take advantage of the tax credit. And it would reward parts of the country that are growing, such as Texas, at the expense of those that aren’t, such as Michigan. In other words, it is a very inefficient business subsidy.
We know all this because a new jobs tax credit has already been tried—in the Carter Administration. In 1977 as he entered the White House, Jimmy Carter proposed a jobs credit and a Democratic Congress passed it. Its unfortunate history was recounted in 1980 by then-Treasury official Emil Sunley in a chapter of “The Economics of Taxation,” a book edited by Henry Aaron and Michael Boskin for the Brookings Institution.
The lack of job creation is a huge problem. The misconceptions of the White House about America’s small business job-engine are really quite astounding. When you keep imposing financial burdens on hiring, you are not going to get very much of it. When government is imposing new taxes, raising health care costs, raising energy costs and at the same time demonstrating government’s interest in controlling business, taking over companies, imposing new mandates and regulations that limit what a businessman may do; any desire to expand, hire, take new risks is dampened down by cold hard fear.
A small temporary bribe is really not going to help. Don’t Democrats ever learn from history?
Filed under: Capitalism, Conservatism, Economy, The Elephant's Child | Tags: Bastiat's Theorem Restated, Economics, Worth Remembering
From Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. “You can’t raise living standards by breaking windows so some people can get jobs repairing them.”
