Obama's Stimulus Package: Saving Face by Creating a Myth

Recently, an AP story described how the White House grossly overstated how many jobs it "created or saved" ('saved' is not really the right word - more like 'subsidized failure' for those of us economic literates).

Obama counterattacked the AP by claiming that the Democrats directly created some 620,000 jobs and stimulated a total of about 1,000,000 jobs - a conveniently round figure that should be interpreted to mean "we have no freaking idea."

The White House's funny math ("fuzzy" doesn't even begin to describe it") is made even more ridiculous when we consider that it predicted the stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs. Instead, the country has lost a net 2.7 million jobs since the stimulus bill was passed, and 49 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia (of all places) have seen unemployment increase unabated.

Why has the "stimulus" failed? Let us demolish the White House's argument for those interested in prosperity and freedom:

The White House claims it can reallocate finite resources and "save" jobs. But how do you save jobs? By preventing them from being eliminated. Why are jobs eliminated? Because they are unneeded by employers or unwanted in the market.

So if the White House take capital and "reinvests" it using coercion (using any justification) they are de facto taking money from where it may be employed productively and putting it where it has been shown to be unwanted or unneeded by "saving" jobs. Alternatively, when the government claims it is "creating" jobs, it must be qualified that they are jobs without accountability to the consumer; these jobs are often permanently subsidized by taxpayers and lead to government dependency for those job-holders. In both cases, the government is engaging in what is called by real economists as "malinvestment."

Malinvestment leads to structural economic instability and unsustainability in the long run; this justifies further government spending to "create or save" jobs until the entire free enterprise system collapses (quite similar to the left's Cloward-Piven strategy of overwhelming the system with welfare recipients). Market collapse is what the Democrats really want, and an insight comes from a statement in Forbes magazine by a Treasury Department spokeswoman: "[The number $700 billion dollars] (Is) not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number."

The Socialist Worker, when reached for comment, said "the stimulus did not go far enough."

Yet even Time magazine (for the love of Obama) gets that the White House's stimulus package has failed by it's own standards!

Those who claim Keynesian economics are a way to "stimulate" countries out of recessions and depressions need to realize that Keynes was a Fabian socialist sympathetic with Soviet-style communism.

Socialism is incompatible with freedom in any meaningful sense, and it is the death knell for prosperity and job creation in every country where it is tried.