President Obama's highly touted, and vastly oversold stimulus bill, has been an utter failure. It was sold on the basis that it's need was so crucial and immediate that it was imperative that it be signed that week. The president then waited four days to sign it while vacationing at Camp David, and Golfing at Andrews AFB, so much for it's dire need. It's need was so immediate that 60% of it's money would not be spent until the next election year, two years after it's signing.
It was sold on the promise by our prevaricator in chief that there were immediate shovel ready projects waiting on that money. These projects would create immediate jobs, 400,000 immediately, and a further 3,500,000 jobs in the next two years. This was almost immediately backpedaled to 3.5 million jobs "created or saved", a dishonest attempt to gloss over the fact that the stimulus simply transferred taxpayer money to the very same unions that got president Obama elected. Recently the CBO has adjusted their numbers dramatically downward, as ends up happening with ALL of President Obama's claims. Now they are claiming 638,000 private sector jobs created. So lets do the math...
The stimulus bill ended up costing $858,000,000,000.00. Divided by 638,000 means the government spent $1,344,828.00 PER JOB! This is government efficiency at it's best. Only the government can spend $1.3 million to "create" 638,000 jobs that on average pay only $55,000/yr. Had the government simply handed that stimulus money out to the 37,000,000 people below the poverty line in America every one of them would have gotten a check for $23,189.00 which arguably would have achieved more than this boondoggle.
The problem is that the government exists not to represent you or I, but to feed itself. It exists to thrive off of OUR MONEY! Our politicians hand out other people's money to buy votes to keep their precious jobs. They have no need to exhibit any fiscal restraint because we have given them a blank check with no responsibility or accountability. This has to change.
Economics does not occur in a vacuum. It is all about incentives. If you structure a program like welfare, which discourages work, you get more people not working but collecting your money. When you call this an "entitlement" instead of "charity", it becomes the moocher's RIGHT to collect that money and your OBLIGATION to pay it. When you structure the tax code so that fewer and fewer people are paying more and more of their hard earned money for people who do not rouse themselves to one hour of effort to provide for themselves, you continue heedless towards the tipping point where those shouldering the burdens of the masses, simply refuse to do so any longer. This is the point our politicians are rushing towards.
When States are functionally bankrupt, they turn to the federal government for a bailout. When Greece, Spain, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Sudan, France, and the EU find themselves functionally bankrupt, they turn to the USA to bail them out, so who does the USA turn to to bail us out when our politicians have bankrupted us?
No comments:
Post a Comment