The AP is reporting that President Obama is “looking at any way to create jobs”. That’s interesting. He must not be looking very hard. Or maybe he really is looking, but managed to get something in his eye. Or maybe he’s faking it. Never waste a crisis, you know. It’d be hard to imagine that Americans would be too eager to shift complete control of their lives to the federal government if unemployment was not at 10% and the housing market hadn’t collapsed. That’s got to be it, then. He’s not really interested in finding any way to create jobs because as long as we’re all unemployed, we’ll continue to be led around like sheep. That’s why all of Obama’s “fixes” all smell funny. His fingers are too deep in all of them.

Here’s more from the AP:

SPRINGFIELD, Va. (AP) – Standing at the site of a highway project funded by his massive economic stimulus plan, President Barack Obama said Wednesday he is committed to exploring all avenues to create jobs.

“Middle-class Americans are the ones who built this country,” Obama said. “They deserve leaders in Washington who are willing to work as hard as they work.”

[ . . . ]

Despite the stimulus, the national unemployment rate stands at 9.8 percent. Economists have said unemployment could continue to rise.

First—Obama is certainly not committed to “exploring all avenues to create jobs”. That’s just a lie. Note that the AP isn’t quoting Obama directly for that little nugget. If Obama were willing to explore “all” avenues, he’d think about tax cuts for small businesses. Tax cuts, after all, will permit these businesses to keep more of the money they earn…which they would of course use to…hire people. With less money left after taxes, businesses are not too motivated to employ more people.

Second—However nice it sounds to your populist disciples, America wasn’t built by Middle Class people. Not if the word “built” means anything, that is. Sure, they’re the ones that may have wielded the hammers and populated the plants, but these people were uniformly employees—hired by rich people with ideas to move technology forward. The Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts and Fords which dot our history are the ones that “built” America. Not by themselves, of course, but without their entrepreneurial spirit and capital, America doesn’t become industrialized and that’s just a fact. It’s a hard fact for the left to acknowledge, however, and it’s the reason why they see “tax cuts for the rich” as “unfairly” lining the pockets of those in least need of the extra money. The fact is that one of the primary functions in our society of rich corporations is that they hire the rest of us. They enable us all to have health insurance. To save for our retirements and the education of our children. Without rich people who make things and hire people, we’d all be poor. So unless Mr. Obama is exploring ways to incentivize rich people to hire more of us so we can make more stuff, he’s spinning his wheels. Every second he talks about taxing corporations to death, he’s making it more and more likely that unemployment will continue to rise and the recession will continue to grow. Spending billions of TAXPAYER dollars to hire people doesn’t do the trick, either. Tax dollars must first come from someone who earned that money. It is not in itself the product of any growth. That’s why this Stimulus is just a gigantic shell game. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, if you will. Eventually the bills become due. Eventually, we’ll understand that shifting money around like this without creating any new growth is a dead end.

Which brings us to that last bit of the article. Incredulously, the AP admits that “despite the stimulus” unemployment is at 9.8%! As if the stimulus would lead to any other result except higher unemployment. This is shocking? When you take money away from rich people, they have nothing left to hire new people and make new things. They contract. It’s no surprise (to anyone except the AP, that is) that economists are saying that unemployment “could” continue to rise. High taxes work as disincentives for corporations and big business to hire people and make things. THe higher taxes go, the less things are made. The less people are hired. The longer unemployment lasts.

That should be the new code name for Obama’s “Stimulus” package since it’s clear by now that nothing remotely stimulating has occurred despite his gloom and doom threats (promises?) of so many months ago. And why was the Stimulus doomed from the start? Because when you open spigots of money, people are going to rush to fill their gullets. Especially the friendly folks at the NEA who have somehow managed to convince us that a nation like the United States would suddenly “run out of art” if it we stopped the federal dollars. Does anyone really believe that Sesame Street would go out of business if PBS stopped getting money from Uncle Sam? That Americans would not have anything to listen to on the radio without NPR?

Here’s the latest dispatch from the the wasteland:

The NEA was given $80 million of the government’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill to spread around to needy artists nationwide, and most of the money is being spent to help preserve jobs in museums, orchestras, theaters and dance troupes that have been hit hard by the recession.

But some of the NEA’s grants are spicing up more than the economy. A few of their more risque choices have some taxpayer advocates hot under the collar, including a $50,000 infusion for the Frameline film house, which recently screened Thundercrack, “the world’s only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla.”

“When you spend so much money in a short amount of time … you’re going to have nonsense like this, and that’s why the stimulus should never have been done in the first place,” said David Williams, vice president for policy at Citizens Against Government Waste.

Indeed, Mr. Williams.

Has Obama rescued the economy? You very well may think that if you get your news from the NY Times or MSNBC or any one of a trillion other mouthpieces for the Democrat party, but reality (as it often does) has intervened to spoil the party.

Cast thine eyes on this from the indispensible Innocent Bystanders blog (I know, I’m late to the party on this, but well, I’m late to the party on lots of things and haven’t let that stop me before):

So Obama didn’t know what he was talking about when estimating the effects of the recession OR what he should do about it.

Do we need to trust him on anything else, particularly health care?

It’s not surprising that the much-ballyhooed “economic stimulus” hasn’t done much stimulating. President Obama and his aides argue that it’s too early to expect startling results. They have a point. A $14 trillion economy won’t revive in a nanosecond. But the defects of the $787 billion package go deeper and won’t be cured by time. The program crafted by Obama and the Democratic Congress wasn’t engineered to maximize its economic impact. It was mostly a political exercise, designed to claim credit for any recovery, shower benefits on favored constituencies and signal support for fashionable causes.

As a result, much of the stimulus’s potential benefit has been squandered. Spending increases and tax cuts are sprinkled in too many places and, all too often, are too delayed to do much good now. Nor do they concentrate on reviving the economy’s most depressed sectors: state and local governments; the housing and auto industries.

via Robert J. Samuelson – President Obama, Democratic Congress’s Squandered Stimulus – washingtonpost.com.

But then we knew all that already, didn’t we? We were told by our fawning media to disregard our natural impulses AGAINST spending our way out of a deficit (especially spending that wouldn’t even HIT until after 2010 anyway!) and admonished for not trusting the mixed race messiah with our economic well being. He was the first African-American President, don’t you know? All else be damned.

Turns out we got what everyone gets who doesn’t pay attention to details and pegs their hopes to fluffy idealism.

We got screwed.

Read the whole thing.

To a plurality of Americans, that’s the hope. According to a new Rassmussen poll:

Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the rest of the new government spending authorized in the $787-billion economic stimulus plan should now be canceled. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 36% disagree and 20% are not sure.

According to news reports, only $36 billion of the stimulus plan had been spent as of late May.

Just 20% of adults say the tax cuts included in the stimulus plan should be canceled while 55% disagree. The stimulus plan includes $288 billion in tax cuts.

While there is a wide partisan gap on the question of stimulus spending, there is little partisan disagreement on maintaining the tax cuts.

President Obama on Monday vowed to speed up the pace of stimulus spending and said the money will help “create or save” 600,000 more jobs this summer.

Ever the leader of men, Obama has vowed to spend more while the country begs for less.

Is the honeymoon over?

Had to read this headline twice.

Obama seeks fiscal responsibility mantle

He’s seeking it now? I mean, it’s nice, if it’s true, but I can’ t believe that this is about anything except Obama trying to cover his ass after his MASSIVE outlay of irresponsible spending contained in the “stimulus” package. Let’s see what you think.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama sought on Tuesday to show he was serious about improving the U.S. budget picture as he called on Congress to pass new limits on tax cuts and spending programs to avoid adding to deficits.

Obama urged passage of “pay-as-you-go” legislation that would require any new tax cut or automatic spending program to be paid for within the budget.

“The ‘pay as you go’ principle is very simple. Congress can only spend a dollar if it saves a dollar elsewhere,” Obama said in a speech at the White House attended by several Democratic members of Congress.

I guess that first sentence gives it away, doesn’t it? Reuters couldn’t help itself. Instead of saying that Obama’s plan is meant to actually IMPROVE an overtaxed economy that he himself created, they say that the move was designed to “show he was serious” about improving the economy. Is that the same thing as what I said? Not even close. I can either do something, or so something that “shows I’m serious” about doing something. If you actually had a vested interest in that thing I was supposed to be doing, would you rather I actually DID that thing or instead show merely that I was serious about doing it?

Second, he’s going to cut the deficit by removing tax cuts? Doesn’t he read the papers? Tax cuts increase revenue. By raising taxes he’s going to DECREASE the amount of money in the treasury and INCREASE deficits.

Finally, the kicker. He says that this “pay as you go” program will work by requiring that a dollar be “saved” before any new dollar can be spent. He did NOT say that a dollar of spending had to be CUT before another can be spent. He said that a dollar had to be SAVED….which is Obama-speak for….what, exactly?

Imagine the following scenario. Democrat pork-wranglers get together to propose a bill to increase spending by $100billion. According to Obama, he won’t sign it until the porkies can show that $100billion will be “saved” by the passage of that bill. What sort of proof does he need? Doesn’t say. I’d bet it’s a pretty low threshhold, what about you? The porkies would likely say that spending $100billion now will save $100billion in future costs.

And that will be that.

There’s one more piece to this ridiculous Reuters article that deserves mentioning:

Republicans have warned that programs such as the proposed health care plan would add to the budget deficit for years to come and have also criticized Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan, which was passed by Congress in February.

Obama contends that much of the budget deficit was inherited from the Bush administration, which presided over a shift from record surpluses to huge increases in the deficit fueled by the financial crisis and spending for the Iraq war.

“The reckless fiscal policies of the past have left us in a very deep hole,” Obama said. “Digging our way out will take time and patience and tough choices.”

First, Republicans have warned that a complete government takeover of our health care system would “add to the deficit for years to come”??? Are the Republicans the only ones? How about a quote from a Democrat that says it won’t add to the deficit? Does any reasonable person believe this massive spending won’t add to the deficit? Unbelievable. Obama’s position is indefensible…except by the MSM.

Second, Bush left office with the deficit at a tick over $400billion. Obama’s projected deficit for 2009 is $1.85trillion….thanks to the massive pork burger he and his Liberal buddies in Congress just stuffed down our throats. It was sort of like being waterboarded, only half as polite. Here’s a handy chart to post on your night table so that you never forget how deeply and thoroughly we’re all being f***ed by the Lord High Obama:

Obama projected deficit compared to prior administrations

NEW YORK Reuters – Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged on Tuesday that some waste is inevitable in the spending of a $787 billion economic stimulus package, in a characteristically blunt assessment.

“We know some of this money is going to be wasted,” Biden said during a roundtable discussion in New York with business leaders aimed at promoting the two-year stimulus plan.

[clip]

Biden said transparency and accountability are key to the programs success.

“There are going to be mistakes made,” said Biden. “Some people are being scammed already.”

Huh.

I wonder what his point is.

Because if it is to show how wasteful and inefficient anything run by the government tends to be, he’s doing a fantastic job.

What incentive does a gargantuan, leviathan government have to suck up the capital of its citizens in an economical fashion? Without wasting? To take only that which it needs? None. A body without regard for waste, who simply sucks more when it runs low has no incentive whatsoever to spend wisely, to track inventory or to conserve.

A private citizen with limited resources, however, is forced—FORCED—by the laws of simple economics to allocate his resources where they are most efficiently used. If a private citizen loses $500, $5,000 or $5,000,000….he feels it. Because his resources are not unlimited, and because he spilled his own sweat to create that money, he has an incentive to avoid that loss by limiting risk, enacting measured responses to events and conserving.

Not the government. If through waste, “scamming” or mistakes, it loses millions or billions of dollars, they can either print more money or simply suck up some more from taxpayers. They don’t create that money from their own effort and thus there’s no incentive for them to conserve.

No incentive to conservation.

Keep that in mind as you listen to Biden and the rest of the Obama Administration explain their takeover of American private enterprise.

They’re doing things with your money that you wouldn’t do with it yourself.

We’ve all seen the infomercials. The hucksters claiming that their extra special product “won’t last” or that their “supplies are limited” They tell us that their offer is only available “for a limited time” and as an extra incentive to get us to open our wallets, tell us that the “first 100 callers” get a free tote bag. They’re appealing to that base instinct within us not to be left behind and to avoid future teeth gnashing at having missed the greatest thing ever to have happened to mankind.

The thing is, if you stop to think about it, if the product were really that valuable, these salesmen would make it available FOREVER wouldn’t they? What thing of value is there in the world that is not available to you RIGHT NOW? Are there any? Bread, water, milk, an apartment, a lawnmower, hand towels, toilet tissue, nasal spray. Whatever. Nobody needs to create false demand for these things by hyping the uncertainty of supply.

It’s the truly worthless things that you have to worry about. These are the things that nobody wants, but which salesmen convince you are invaluable due to the supposed fleetingness of their availability. We buy these things not out of need but out of fear of “missing out” and regretting it later. It’s a scam.

It is in the spirit of these hucksters and the worthless products they connive us into purchasing that I bring you (who else?) the President of our great nation. Barack “Shifty” Obama.

Seems he convinced our legislature a bit ago that unless we “acted now!” that our entire economy would be up in smoke. Remember now, any real solution of value will stand the test of time and be as valuable after everyone’s digested its contents as before. Acting now won’t make a dog turd into a gold nugget, even though Shifty may want you to believe it to be so.

This from today’s Washington Post:

YOU MAY RECALL President Obama urging Congress to pass the stimulus bill immediately because the economy so desperately needed money. The massive recovery bill was passed, and, recently, a few “green shoots” have been popping up — indicating that, perhaps, the worst may be over. Is it a result of the stimulus? Tough to say, but, given the amount of money that has actually gone out the door, probably not.

Government agencies have thus far spent $29 billion of the $787 billion stimulus package, and less than that has gone out in tax cuts. What has been spent has mostly gone to Medicaid and unemployment insurance — real “shovel-ready” programs in that they are already in place. It is true that just knowing that money has been authorized ($88 billion so far) can allow projects to get started and jobs to be created. Nonetheless, of the $20 billion approved for spending so far for the Education Department, for instance, 97.2 percent remains unspent. Of the $10 billion approved for the Transportation Department, a full 99.7 percent is still left to be spent.

The challenge of getting government money out the door fast is one reason that some economists challenge the value of Keynesian stimulus policies. By the time checks are being written, they argue, an economic recovery is often underway. The result can be an inflationary waste of money.

So let’s walk through this one together.

When left alone, thriving economies like ours have a tendency to correct themselves. I know this. You know this. Obama certainly knows this. Only Obama’s got a problem. He was elected on the crest of a populist “gimme mine” and “soak the rich” platform. He’s got buckets full of special interest groups like unions, environmentalists, the poor, and generally any of a long list of groups that produce nothing in our economy except grievances. They take what you and I make. So what does he do? Instead of getting out of the way and permitting the economy to recover from the (government induced) trauma of the housing/credit crisis, he uses the crisis as an excuse to pay off his constituency.

$787 billion is authorized by Congress to be spent even though nobody outside of kindergarten seriously believes it will actually be in anyone’s hands before the economy rights itself of its own accord, or that it will help the economy in any meaningful sense. Obama doesn’t care. The stimulus package is a payoff. It’s retribution. It’s redistribution. It’s purpose isn’t to help the economy at all. It’s only purpose is to help Obama.

And we can see from the results that Obama knew exactly what he was doing. Of the total amount authorized to be spent, only 2.5% of that actually has been spent 3 months later.

Yet we had to “act now”. We couldn’t delay one minute. Supplies were limited after all.

Had we taken the time to think about this, we’d have seen that it was nothing more than a play by Obama to use the recession as an excuse to drench his pet projects and those of the liberal democrat legislature with our hard earned money. The economy would always fix itself. But to fix his political base, Obama demanded the stimulus.

Sure, lots of people got rich off the stimulus. Too bad you and I aren’t among them.

In early January, 2 members of President Elect Obama’s economic team, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, published what Team Obama was billing as their plan for economic recovery. You can find the full text of the document here. In it, we were shown how unprecedented massive government spending was to be our ticket out of the recession. The graph below was included in the study as Figure 1. We’d spend our way to more jobs, went the logic, and here’s how much better we’ll be than if we did nothing at all.

Now, 3 months in, isn’t it time to ask (to paraphrase former NYC Mayor Ed Koch) “How are we doing?”

Funny you should ask.

Of course the left will howl that it could have been “even worse” without the $1trillion, and of course they “could” be right…except that by accepting that premise, they’d be forced to concede the fact that their expert forecast of merely 3 short months ago (you know, the one which they relied on to steal nearly $1trillion in taxpayer money) was GROSSLY inaccurate. And if we accept that premise, doesn’t it follow that we’re now at square 1 and have absolutely no way of knowing (from the data provided from the administration) HOW or IF the stimulus did anything except flush $1trillion down the toilet? Sure it COULD have been worse, but we don’t know that based on the info in that chart (which has been proven to be amateurishly inept). Only if we accept as a matter of faith that ANYTHING Obama does makes the world a happier place can we also accept that the economy COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE without that spending. But since the chart itself is a turkey, doesn’t that mean that Obama is fallible? And if he’s fallible, then how can we accept on faith that this could all have been a lot worse?

What I’d like to see now are some CONSERVATIVE principles being engaged by the federal government to help reverse this recession. I’d like to see taxes lowered and incentives to growth encouraged, and end to bailouts, more bankruptcies with a resulting reapportionment of capital which will place it where it is most needed and most productive. If anything is clear from the table above it is that Obama certainly doesn’t have a clue. And since his gaffe cost us $1trillion dollars, perhaps the conservatives might be afforded the opportunity to fix things at absolutely no cost to the taxpayer.

Look at that chart again, if you can bear it. Obama said that if we spent $1trillion, that our unemployment rate would be around 8% today. We spent that $1trillion. Our unemployment rate is 9%. Which happens to be exactly what he said the rate would be if we spent nothing.

Governments don’t fix economies, people do. By getting out of the way and encouraging businesses to hire people and make things, governments foster an environment conducive to economic recovery. By confiscating the profits of our top producers and burdening our future generations with mountains of unprecedented debt, Obama is doing the opposite of that.

And surprise of surprises, our economy limps on bleeding.

OK.

Imagine you own a business. Your object of course is to produce lots of quality stuff that people want to buy at prices that will permit you to make a profit. This profit will permit you to keep making these things, and keep selling them to people who want to buy them. If you were breaking even on these sales or losing money, there’d be little incentive to be productive. You’d cut back. You’d hire less. You’d make and sell less.

Quick, what is your overhead?

Among other things like rent and raw materials, 2 significant “costs” will be employee salaries and taxes. These are 2 expenses that you have to subtract from the gross price received from the goods you sell in order to determine your profit. The higher these expenses are, the less profit you make. The less profit you make, the less likely you are to continue producing. The less productive you are, the more likely you are to layoff workers.

So.

What do the highest unemployment states in the nation have in common?

High taxes and high union membership.

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy has the details.

The six states with the highest unemployment rates are:

• 12.6% Michigan
• 12.1% Oregon
• 11.4% South Carolina
• 11.2% California
• 10.8% North Carolina
• 10.5% Rhode Island

In the six states with the highest unemployment rates, the average top state income tax bracket is 8.05%. All but Michigan have marginal tax rates of at least 7% (and Michigan has a very high unionization rate).

[ . . . ]

Further, union representation averages 14.1% in the six high unemployment states, with a median of 17.4%. All but the Carolinas are among the most unionized states in the nation (and the Carolinas have relatively high marginal income tax rates of 7% and 7.75%).

Putting this together, 3 of the 6 states with the highest unemployment (California, Oregon, and Rhode Island) have both high marginal income tax rates and high union representation. Michigan has high unionization but moderate marginal income tax rates, and the Carolinas have high marginal income taxes, but low unionization rates.

[ . . . ]

As with so many of the reforms contemplated in the budget passed a few weeks ago, we can’t know that they will be counter-productive, but the stated goals and the means to achieve those goals do seem to point in opposite directions.

Fascinating.

When you increase the percentage of a business’s profits that go to the government in the form of taxes, and you federally mandate that businesses must negotiate CBA’s with unions that result in their paying their workers more than their productivity is worth, you’re eroding the profitability of those businesses.

And unprofitable businesses, as we all should know by now, tend to lay off workers.

Why is this so hard?