By: Jason Ivey
Tea Party Tribune
Were Elvis alive today, he’d probably get on the national bandwagon with a tune called “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” All the other big acts are doing it — The O-Bamas, The Pelosis, the folk duo of Perry & Mitt, and even those spunky new kids on the scene: Bennie and the Feds. (Can’t stop thinking ‘bout those JOBS!)
This four-letter word has become so incessantly used it’s now akin to a bad pop song you can’t avoid. One can’t turn on the TV, radio, or open a newspaper without JOBS! assaulting their senses. And just like a bad overplayed pop song, one has to wonder who still finds it appealing. This tune went from “not fresh” to “garbage” sometime around the end of the last decade, but yet it still stands atop the 196-, er, 2011 charts.
What’s made J-O-B-S the most annoying four-letter word in the American political vernacular has to do with who uses it and how it’s used. Politicians of both parties and the parrots in the media long ago thought “jobs” was what the people wanted, and with unemployment hovering around 10 percent and sluggish growth as far as the eye can see, one can understand why.
Unfortunately, the people telling us they can “create jobs” don’t have any idea how jobs are actually created, or if they do, they’d rather we not figure it out. What we have instead is a politico/electorate complex where a certain segment of the population says they need a job, and those in government are happy to be the deliverers, or rather the perceived deliverers, since the only jobs government actually creates are government jobs with money taken from others.
Obama gave his umpteenth jobs speech last Thursday, although it’s not yet clear why anyone watched or what they learned. This is a man after all whose prior experience with jobs consisted of teaching revisionist constitutional law in the theoretical environment of academia and transferring and destroying wealth through ACORN. Now he’s pledged to spend another $447 billion of other people’s money to – wait for it – extend unemployment insurance and set up federal jobs training courses. This was also a man who stated during the ’08 campaign he would “solve” the economy. Apparently the real killers are still at large.
Another leading jobs expert, Nancy Pelosi, has argued unemployment checks are the fastest way to create jobs. She, in her economic wisdom, claimed unemployment checks have the “double benefit” of helping the unemployed and injecting demand into the economy. In fact, Pelosi has probably used the jobs mantra more than Obama, or anyone else in Washington. She said, “The jobs issue has permeated every major initiative we have”. Yes, it’s all about jobs, as she has repeated ad nauseum. Jobs, jobs, jobs. The health care bill, the climate bill, the stimulus bill, green jobs, green collar jobs! It’s a jobs bonanza. And if we don’t pass more bills requiring spending more hundreds of billions of dollars of other people’s money, then we could lose hundreds of millions of jobs.
The Federal Reserve was created to preserve a sound currency and economic stability, but the jobs phenomenon has proven irresistible to them as well. Everyone in Washington wants to get in on the act, and even Bernanke is not immune, as he’s competed with reckless fiscal policy by pursuing a loose monetary policy. It’s just too bad all that demand driven by a Keynesian shower of federal cash hasn’t resulted in a need to raise interest rates from near zero. Oh well, maybe QE3 will do it . . .
Sensing weakness in Obama and the Democrats’ record on job creation, the Republicans have sought to draw distinctions and tout their successes. In Monday night’s Republican debate, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry tried to out-job each other and declare themselves the greatest Creator of All Jobs. Perry said he’s created a million jobs in Texas! Do I hear two million? Anyone? Anyone? A moment of sanity finally came in the frumpy form of Newt Gingrich, whose new role as critic of Washington clichés and templates is proving a welcome relief in these gatherings. As Newt said – finally! – the government doesn’t create jobs, the American people create jobs.
Newt’s observation is like a drink of water in a desert, but what would be truly refreshing is having all of these politicians – Democrats and Republicans – as well as unelected bureaucrats — drop this horrendous word from their shtick altogether. The problem is not jobs, or lack thereof. The problem is these same people have been systematically choking and stifling the environments in which industries can flourish and thrive. What’s possibly worse, our political class has been training people how not to work for decades now.
A lack of jobs is a symptom of a greater problem brought on by years of destructive policies. On one end, the government has declared certain industries the enemy, especially those industries most important to a healthy economy. Energy, for instance, is the lifeblood of our economy, and yet is singled out and targeted for destruction more than any other. The EPA and the Obama administration have choked off our access to domestic oil, the president and his vice president have vowed to put the coal industry out of business, and this week’s jobs bill ends certain tax breaks for oil companies, and expensive new regulations have been placed on the trucking industry. Since energy is needed to produce and transport nearly everything, all of this only serves to make everything more expensive and more difficult to produce and transport. The mounting, stifling, and time-consuming regulations and costs resulting from Obamacare and Dodd-Frank are increasing costs to industry and individuals, and creating an increasingly unstable and unpredictable marketplace.
Industry exists because someone gets the idea to produce or provide something someone else wants, needs, or doesn’t yet know they want or need. They need capital investment to get started, and if they’re producing something efficiently that’s selling, they’ll make a profit, reinvest that money, expand, profit some more, keep expanding, etc. Along the way, they need certain skills and tasks involved in the goal of supply meeting demand. Hence, jobs.
In other words, Henry Ford didn’t create the automobile assembly line because he woke up one morning and decided he wanted to create jobs, he decided he wanted to create automobiles mass numbers of people could afford, and make a healthy profit doing it. Someone like Obama, on the other hand, thinks he can dictate to a company to hire more people, or use a measly bribe like a $4,000 tax credit to a company to hire someone who’s been unemployed for more than six months.
On the other end, government policies over the years have hurt work incentive, productivity, the work ethic, and skills. People have been taught over the last few decades that an upper-middle class lifestyle is attainable for a minimal amount of effort. Home ownership? Sure, we’ll give you a low-interest loan. 33 weeks of unemployment not enough? Make it 99! Free health care? Sure, somebody else should provide you with that. And if that’s not enough, join a government union, where pensions and health care are overly generous, retirement age is low, and losing your job extremely difficult, no matter how slothful you may be. This all goes swimmingly, everyone owns a smart phone and a high-definition television, and many don’t even have to work for it. That is, until you choke off the engine that moves all of this forward and then eventually run out of other people’s money.
Toward the first end, Obama has been using the power of the subsidy, the tax credit, and the regulators to mold industry to his will. On the labor end, he’s cajoling businesses to hire the least productive employees (those who have been unemployed the longest) and is proposing spending more billions of dollars on federal retraining programs that haven’t worked in the past, but where studies have shown “trainees” actually come out with worse work habits than they went in with and are just as likely to be unemployed after federal trainers have taught them valuable skills like how to shake hands firmly or teaching taxi drivers how to smile, as similar programs in the past have done.
Perhaps someone should ask Warren Buffett if the extra money he wants to fork over would be better spent on smart investments on private industry or thrown down this federal rat hole. Which is more likely to lead to more jobs? Maybe he should ask his fellow Democrat Steve Wynn. Viva Jobs Vegas!
Alas, all this hype about jobs is not really about jobs, and this latest jobs bill contains the word “tax” 235 times. This bill represents yet another attempted transfer of wealth from the productive sectors of the economy to the non-productive sectors who are dependent on people like Obama and the Democrats.
The Republicans know better, and they need to drop the jobs tune from their repertoire. They could do worse than looking to a past great who famously said, “The business of the American people is business”. The Republicans need not be the party of business, as in corporations, but the party of creating an atmosphere where entrepreneurs and innovators can thrive and grow, and create jobs as a result.
And that man was Calvin Coolidge. Not Elvis.
