Recently President Obama waxed positively orgasmic over the “creation” of 443,000 “new jobs” in the economy. De-emphasized in his glowing report was the fact that 411,000 of these “new” jobs were temporary census positions and not real jobs at all. By the way the Census department has 560,000 odd employees and roughly a full 150,000 of them are permanent employees. Since the cost of running the census this year was $14+ Billion or roughly $10 Billion more than it cost to count everybody in 2000; and since those permanent employees must logically speaking not have much to do for 9.5 years of every ten within the census cycle . . . a whole lot of waste seems to be wrapped up in this particular government department, no?
Waste in government is pervasive and all of it kills jobs. In a similar way, common sense would rule against 90+% of all government spending programs and 88% of all new laws. Without term limits for congress, the evil done by career politicians and particularly progressive Republican and Democratic career politicos feeding at the public trough has become almost fatal to the country as a whole. Perhaps they should wait two days for every ten pages of a proposed new law and cuss and discuss it thoroughly . . . . so the 3,000 page Obamacare bill finally passed would require a minimum of, say, 21 months to get the bill right . . . or better yet, pass a realistic and helpful 150 page law over a period of one month. In any case, government spending annihilates jobs and destroys the private sector. Back to the Census . . . .
In fairness, this is nothing new, President Clinton made a huge deal about a bunch of very similar “new” jobs in 2000 precisely ten years earlier and presumably President George H. W. Bush did so also in 1990 and President Jimmy Carter likewise in 1980, etc., etc. This is, of course, a big lie and the jobs in question are, of course, false entities by any reasonable understanding . . . virtually as soon as they’re “created” they disappear from the economy. Let’s delve more deeply into this matter . . . .
Because of population growth, the American economy right now requires averaging 250,000 “new” jobs to be created every single month just so our official UNemployment rate can stay the same (coming out of college or high school every June etc. we add three million new job-seekers every year . . . as we’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to matter to the politicians whether or not the jobs in question can reasonably be considered REAL jobs or not. To the more reasonable among us, a.k.a. “taxpayers,” however, it makes a huge difference. REAL jobs are permanent and they help slightly offset all the government tax-spending jobs out there which are now being created hand over fist. For now, let that definition of a “REAL job” suffice. Let’s look at government jobs and their characteristics, what are the differences between government jobs and real jobs?
Government jobs tend to be . . .
1. Artificial concepts not precisely “necessary” in the big picture. Are, for example, government census workers and government people examining bee population shifts, and government people researching “human dating behavior” strictly needed? What great loss to society would occur if they didn’t exist? How much taxpayer money would be saved if these jobs were eliminated (or if census workers asked one-third the questions)?
2. Government jobs are UNproductive. No goods or services are added to the country as a result of their existence.
3. Government jobs tend to pay more, thus putting the potentially best and most productive people into Unproductive positions.
4. Government jobs tend to have the greatest benefits adding to the overall cost and since their retirement benefits are among the greatest, that payment goes on sucking away at the country’s lifeblood long after these workers retire.
5. Government jobs tend to have the most substantial perquisites (perks). It isn’t just the President whose actual job cost cannot be calculated, but virtually all the upper echelon government employees whose perks bleed the rest of us dry.
6. Government jobs are destroyers of REAL jobs in the REAL economy. Spain was the poster-child for the European Union about a decade back with a booming economy and only 3% unemployment. Then they adopted a “green-jobs” policy. Today Spain’s unemployment is just over 20%. President Obama threatened us with the creation of five million green jobs. Since the $675,000 subsidization cost of each Spanish green job cost 2.2 jobs in the real Spanish economy, we could expect losing eleven million real jobs?
7. Jobs that create a whole artificial group (the “political class”) within our society which seeks to perpetuate itself and enlarge itself and its budgets at all costs. The “imperatives” of this new “special interest group” seem to be contrary to the interests and needs of mainstream Americans.
8. Jobs whose creation is aligned with bigger, more onerous government, more red tape and more likelihood of finding a “boot on our neck.”
9. Jobs which tend to be temporary such as the census workers’ situation. In the recent Spanish studies of their economic collapse. It was revealed that only one in ten of the green jobs they created actually lasted much beyond the original funding period. In terms of Mr. Obama’s proposal to create five million new green-tech jobs, that means that he’d only be creating 500,000 permanent jobs (at a cost of eleven million real permanent jobs, remember).
10. Jobs for which the real cost is never shown, or even ever known. How much does it cost to have a President of the United States? Obvious things like salary, upkeep of the White House and paying for the White House staff, security, Air Force One, Camp David, travel and entertaining foreign dignitaries and an extensive communications grid in place pale before the perks of the office. Look at the inaugurations, the presidential balls, bringing in of entertainers like Paul McCartney, etc, how much does it cost to have a president of the United States. Rajjpuut estimates this one employee costs us DIRECTLY at least $1 Billion. The indirect cost of Mr. Obama, personally is, of course, potentially in the hundreds of TRillions of dollars and that’s just the money cost . . . . How much does it cost to have an Environmental Protection Agency that puts 40% of some central California workers out of a job by insisting that a two-inch fish was endangered by irrigation pumps to water the vegetable basket of the nation?
11. Sometimes a job whose existence is onerous and an abomination to much of the rest of the country: IRS agents come to mind.
12. Political, often, by their very nature rather than neutral. Jobs aligned with OSHA and the EPA, for example tend to be created by liberals. Defense contracts tend to be created by actions from conservatives.
13. A situation where not only Unproductive but often actually slipshod work is done. Look at our present Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Laws were put in place in 1990 and 1994 to protect our safety. The Bush and Obama administration “signed off” on many of these safety requirements for British Petroleum (such as the need for ten fire booms on site – there were ZERO fire booms present when the explosion occurred). Indeed, the governmental regulation agency MMS was prepared to give BP its highest safety award five or six days after the explosion occurred – that notion is now on hold, and no award has been granted. One of the biggest series of pathetic and scary jokes is the notion of “Close enough for government work.”
14. Often a job where ethical considerations are routinely NOT even considered. During the Bush administration, a governmental oversight group found out that oil companies were routinely wining, dining, having sex with, and providing drugs for the governmental employees charged with oversight for the oil industry. NICE.
15. Despite the “merit system,” of exams, etc. created for civil servants a job given to political friends more often than not. Of all the stimulus funds thus far over 68% has been spent in areas that voted disproportionately for Obama over Mc Cain in 2008. Even though many more actual counties either voted for Mc Cain or slightly-favored Obama , only 31% of the total stimulus funds went there.
16. Despite the so-called merit system, a job given to certain preferred portions of society over the rest of society. Affirmative action in government hiring has been an abysmal failure. The Sotomayor fire-fighter case highlighted some of the obvious discrepancies.
17. Often a job that works at cross-purposes to the rest of society. Rajjpuut recently found himself with a suspended driver’s license courtesy of a ridiculous clerical error when a paid speeding ticket dropped through the cracks in the system. When asked how to get the matter straightened out . . . ‘you’ll have to wait 30 days that’s the requirement, can’t get around it,” no way to correct their mistake . . . . So many of burdensome errors and deliberate red tape and obstruction and waste of time in society is attributable to government officiousness. OSHA and the IRS and EPA cost of tens of billions of dollars every year. Teachers across the nation (hired by the school districts but loyal only to their union) are now teaching that the Founding Fathers were tyrants and racists and otherwise no goodniks while praising labor unions and socialism in their classes. In Los Angeles the lie that the two Arizona immigration laws are racist has been ordered taught in civics classes. One L.A. history making a "field trip" to Arizona to protest the Arizona immigration law before travelling posed before a mural in their school with Castro, Che Guevarra, Uncle Ho and Lenin. Three other L.A. social studies teachers are overtly and directly emphasizing to Hispanic students (at least 40% of them illegals) the need for a Revolution within the United States to give back lands lost by Mexico in 1946's Mexican-American War . . . . which government are these govt. employees working for?
18. Many government jobs are “make-work” creations designed to expand the empire of some muckety-muck bureaucrat. Promotions routinely come (all out of proportion to actual “production”) to those in government who command the most money . . . which usually means those who command the most subordinates. Expand the “scope” of your office (usually unnecessarily and unwisely) and get promoted to a higher position where you, of course, want to expand again. Activity is easily confused for results in government . . . .
19. Without exception, governmental regulatory jobs are absolutely dominated by the industries they supposedly oversee – remember our example of the (literally) in bed together relationship between the big oil companies and MMS. For another example, at the managerial and supervisory levels, the FDA is virtually, the best job in the world for ex-bigwig pharmaceutical workers to consider. The ethics, or lack thereof, of this incestuous relationship literally kills many Americans every year. What is the number three cause of deaths and number five cause of hospital visits in the country? Huge numbers of "iatrogenic" deaths and injuries from legally prescribed medicines result every year from FDA incompetence. The ADA and its oversight of the food industry is presumably even less compent than the FDA now, over a century since Sinclair Lewis wrote his blockbuster novel, "The Jungle" exposing corruption and uncleanliness in the American food industry.
20. Require “emergency” spending virtually every year. To “justify their budgets, government agencies routinely find themselves spending money willy-nilly so that next year’s budget can be as large or larger.
21. Is often a necessary job, which when done rightly puts the job occupant out of work. This happens when a war is won, for example. But most of the time on the rare occasion when a government job has solved the problem it was created to end, the job is somehow made a permanent drain upon society. In fact, it’s often a job whose self-perpetuation is an actual danger to the country. Most people do not know that originally, the U.S. congress met every other year for 140 days only. Texas in its wisdom has a similar part-time legislature even today. The cost to the nation of a permanent legislature is incalculable, bad laws clearly outnumber good ones by about a 12/1 ratio. Then there’s the pork and other corruptions that occur because of the need to get re-elected of the incumbent rascals that have already hurt us . . . etc., etc., ad nauseum.
22. A government job is quite often a position whose day-to-day operating standards and procedures defy all logic. Families or small businesses who operated using the same guidelines that government routinely follows would be quickly ruined. Big businesses could survive a bit longer but who can operate successfully a) without a budget such as our present Congress is now doing even though a budget is required by law b) continually spending much more than you have c) creating set-asides such as Social Security, Medicare and the federal side of Medicaid and then never actually setting the money required by law aside so that now besides our almost $14 TRillion national debt we also have almost $110 TRillion in UNfunded obligations d) Not honoring simple common-sense, for example the new "Pay-Go" law was a good idea. It said no new spending could occur without either the generation of a new tax or the cutting in costs from elsewhere in the federal budget to pay for the proposed new project. How often has Pay-Go been followed since it was created in February? NEVER! The rascals simply call everything an "emergency" and then forget about Pay-Go.
23. When it comes to progressive job creation, there seems to an "ivory tower" approach consistently in evidence. Let's talk about the Gulf oil spill again. Rabid environmentalism stopped much of the inland drilling and pumping and all the near shore drilling and pumping. The facts are that BP screwed up monumentally; governmental regulators -- whose responsibility it was to keep BP operating safely -- screwed up monumentally; and environmentalists who pushed for exactly the deep offshore drilling we now are faced with when we didn't really have the completely safe technology to do it are also deeply at fault. Another example: in 1972, worldwide deaths from malaria amounted to fewer than 50,000. However, since the U.N. and the United States outlawed DDT, fifty million people have died around the world due to pseudo-science claims that DDT was harmful to non-insect life never proved. The president's aim to create five million green-tech@@ jobs is likewise based upon the pseudo-science of global warming^^ and is presuming that "saying it's so makes it so." If President Grant had said that we were going to create 800,000 new electric jobs in 1870 . . . his saying it's possible is NOT equivalent in reality to it being possible. 800,000 American jobs in electricity didn't come to be until about 1922 over half a century later. How many real jobs would have been lost over those fifty years if Grant and his successors had followed such an ignorant path? What would have been the economic and overall history of the country? Promising the unachievable has grown into a virtually criminal political art.
Here, in a very brief essay, is much that people need to know about how economics actually works in modern life . . . .
Liberals and Progressives do not know nor appreciate that little essay, they believe that the creative problem-solving part of human nature is actually benefitted by big government. The sad pattern is that liberals and progressives do not have even the slightest understanding of economics and therefore proselytize a utopian picture totally out of contact with the demands and conditions of the REAL world. Survival and "thrival" in the Real world is based upon surplus goods, a.k.a. profits. Liberals and progressives have a real yen for criticizing profits and business at every turn. Not realizing that prosperity means surplus, and "obscene profits," Liberals condemn the very lifeblood of modern society. REAL jobs are created by four possible motivations:
a. survival problems
b. profit/surplus problems
c. combinations of a and b
d. innovation and entreprenuerial expression
Taking things back to "basics" two million years ago . . . virtually everything that was done by humanoids other than children's play and sex during pregnancy was a necessary "job" for the individual and group's survival. In particular, the need for nomad hunter-gatherers to find adequate shelter; protect themselves from large carnivorous animals; and most importantly to secure adequate food and water was often an hour-to-hour imperative. Their eonomic system was absolutely 100% communistic.
Shortly after the coming of CroMagnon man roughly 35,000 years ago, earlier patterns of nomadic hunting became culturally locked in and tied to technological innovations (like taming of the dog; making of spear-chuckers, bows and arrows, spears and hand tools, domestic tools, tents, clothing, sewing tools, water bladders, leather bags, and later even baskets) and for the first time ever . . . occasional surpluses were possible. The necessity of constant travel made it impossible to carry much in the way of surplus clothing, tools, weapons, etc. -- even heavy tents were a huge problem . . . but food and water surpluses were absolutely necessary for Cro-Magnon's. Virtually every culture gathered vine-dried fruits equivalent to raisins and learned to dry meat. A well-known example, during the late Cro-Magnon years, the American Indians' pemmican was one of the greatest such innovations: a fat-dense**, calorie-rich, nutritious, easily carried food surplus. Virtually every family had their own "spiced-up" pemmican recipes passed down from mother to daughter. Because each family was largely responsible for its own survival and creation of surpluses a cross between communism and light "capitalism" say 98% communistic. (We exaggerate some in calling any part of this system "capitalistic" because until the adaptation of money in many cultures roughly 7,000 years ago, very little "specialization of labor " beyond gender and age specialization which had been going on for almost two million years actually existed.) Again, we're talking 98% communistic or socialistic society.
When natural "Edens," such as in coastal situations in the Mediterranean and California and Egypt, existed greater surpluses were possible and less travelling was necessary. Soon rudimentary agriculture became possible and domestication of the horse, goat, sheep, cattle and semi-domestication of the cat (feral cats loved "amber waves of grain" and the mice, rats and other rodents that fed upon the crops) provided the possibility of "permanent villages" existing. And what exactly made this all possible? SURPLUS a.k.a. PROFIT. Specialized labor like carpentry, pottery, basket-weaving, farming, fishing, metalworking and even soldiering first appeared during this era in these Edens. No longer was it necessary for the full range of hunter-gatherer skills to be practiced by virtually every single member of the tribe. At first a strictly barter economy existed but soon money was created. After the initial idea of surplus (storing up some of the excess food against "rainy days" which operated over two million years to ensure mankind's survival and advancement) money was the greatest single innovation for mankind's survival and advancement of all. Money was, in effect, nothing less than "stored surplus work." While this might sound to most of us today like pretty much a 100% capitalistic society . . . reality was considerably different since forcible tax collection (of grain and goods and coin) by tyrannical rulers was pretty much the order of the day. Later as "nobility by direct bloodline from God" became a normal part of the ruling class's rationale for existence, various sorts of feudal-type arrangements became the norm in virtually every "civilized country" or duchy in the world with a trifling few short-lived Republics thrown in among all the ordinary despotic states and semi-benevolent monarchies.
The economic system known as capitalism was found almost purely among guild-craftsman and folks like independent black smiths and cottage industries like weaving particularly in England and until about 1750 that's the way it was. The "most capitalistic" country in the world with its merchants, craftsman, cottage industries and independent farmers was perhaps 40% capitalistic. The feudal system with all the British lords and ladies was still deeply tied into the overall economic picture. Then came James Watt and the Industrial Revolution. Although the Luddites (cottage weavers put out of work by the water and steam power looms and other textile innovations) rebelled, the benefits to all British society of cheap cloth was among the most shocking and positive things that had ever happened in all of history.
Without the expansion of nobility into the American colonies, rugged individualism prevailed and this nation quickly became the most capitalistic society the Earth has ever seen, perhaps 99.7% so in 1787. The last burst of capitalism released upon America occurred during the Reagan years 1981-1989 when 21 million jobs were created. However, because Republican Reagan was faced with Democratic control of the House and Senate and needed to compromise with Dems to pass his own pet projects . . . the National Debt skyrocketed.
The single-most Capitalistic period in American history was the Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge era sandwiched between progressive presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover. The "Unknown Depression" of 1921-22 was met steadfastly by Harding and Coolidge (after Harding's Death) by cutting taxes 50% and spending 49%. The Roaring Twenties that ensued was the single most transformational decade in history as the Unknown Depression ended in late 1922. Little known by most people is that Democratic progressive Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran constantly and was elected for promising he would return to the Harding-Coolidge tax-reduction and spending- reduction paradigm as he succeeded progressive Republican Hoover. He obviously lied and did the opposite and America suffered under a dozen-year Great Depression extended by his socialistic efforts while the rest of the world had a fairly short "little 'd' depression." Ultimately, the facts of economic life are this: as in so many other ways, when it comes to jobs and the economy: "that government is best which governs least."
Ya'all live long, strong and ornery,
Rajjpuut
** should you ever find yourself in an extended survival situation, it isn't only getting enough calories and traditional nutrients that matters, you could actually get 3,500 calories a day and die malnourished if you can't supply the body's need for fat from the ultra-lean rabbits, fish and birds you're most likely to catch.
@@the Spanish green-tech economic debacle is clearly pertinent
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