Cowboy Confessional

economist, n. An expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.

When a politician tells you that targeted government spending will revive an economy, grab your wallet and your shotgun.

When Obama’s economic experts (if I may abuse the phrase) said last spring that His stimulus plan was targeted, I saw it for what it was – political payoff to election supporters, people who suckle on Uncle Sam’s sagging nipples (if that mental image did not horrify you to the point of setting your PC on fire, then you may be strong enough to stand the rest of this missive).

The recent jobs report is a study in clarity and calculation – the private sector lost jobs while government hired more people. Obama, who claimed during the campaign that his objective was to make “government cool again”, certainly has made having a government job cool. Government workers voted for Obama in droves because he intended to use federal tax dollars to inflate the state. It you run a store, style hair, program computers, generate electricity, manufacture anything or in some way add to our gross domestic product (GDP), Obama’s message is “Tough. The people at the Department of Motor Vehicles are more important than you.”

While the U.S. economy dumped 11,000 non-farm jobs, 7,000 of those people became wards of the state (i.e., your non-resident and non-tax deductable dependants). This does not bode well for the economy going forward. People in government – with only very rare exception – add nothing to economic activity. They do not convent raw materials into component parts. They do not assemble component parts into products. They do not drive trucks that get those products to your local store. They don’t even make boring infomercials to sell the products. In terms of real GDP and wealth, government workers individually produce bubkes, and collectively produce less.

Construction is still suffering (-27,000 jobs) because only public employees can afford houses, and government already has all the office buildings it needs. People who manufacture products (41,000 fewer than before) can only sell them to people with jobs, which includes fewer construction workers these days. This lack of potential market explains why wholesales (-11,700 jobs) and retailers (-14,500 jobs) aren’t eating as well as they once did. In fact, one of the only bright spots in the private sector is health services (+28,000 folks), because someone needs to treat all of us who are feeling ill from Obama’s incompetency.

Worrying is warranted. Economies are amazingly complex. Cost-to-coast and border-to-border economic revival requires more than a faux preacher in the White House chautauqua tent. Because we are all economically interconnected, everybody must get goosed. Every sector, every job classification, every income level and in every county needs a bump. Because every person saves, spends and invests differently, the only way to get all the cogs of the economic machine turning is to structurally reduce the burden people carry. Since taxes suck away more than 28% of America’s GDP (i.e., everything non-government workers produce), across the board tax cuts are necessary.

Which is amazingly difficult when you are trying to spend an extra trillion greenbacks.

The good news is that unemployed people understand that government workers got the gold mine (you know what you got). Some will conclude Obama is incompetent (he is) on matters of economics. Others will surmise he is corrupt (he is) by using tax money to bribe governments and their workers. Others will concluded he is clueless (not quite, but this may be splitting semantic hairs). The net effect is that people’s various perceptions accelerate Obama’s drive to be a one term president.

On January 20, 20012 the government sector unemployment rate will rise by one, and the rest of us can get back to work.

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