Tuesday, March 31, 2009

A Living Hell

Please, let's not lose sight of this--our initial objective was job creation, supposedly a few million just to replace those we've lost. Will we get what we're paying for? And will we run out of money before we get there? Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, Forbes, "Government Gone Wild":
But all of this is just a pipe dream. Government spending does not cause a net increase in jobs over the long run; it costs jobs. Every dollar the government spends is either taxed or borrowed from the private sector, which means it "crowds out" private sector job creation. And because government spending is less efficient than private sector spending, the economy actually grows more slowly in the long run as the government gets bigger.
Wesbury and Stein take the press to task for little pushback, given their recent complaints about $200 billion deficits, and warn about the Obama administration's perilous path that makes those numbers look like chump change:
The new massive government spending plans are especially frightening with the U.S. now facing $1 trillion deficits. President Obama says that this is all OK, and that he is cutting the deficit in half (to $533 billion using administration math, or $672 billion according to the CBO) in just four years. What he doesn't say, and what no one seems willing to say, is that without his new budget the deficit would have been cut by 75% in four years to about $250 billion. The budget deficit and the size of the government are exploding and no one seems to care.
Emphasis mine. Call your Congressman, call your Senators--give them hell. Because that's what we and our kids and grandkids face if we don't tackle this disaster in the making now.

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