Sunday, November 8, 2009

Projected Unemployment - with Porkulus, without Porkulus, and Reality Based

This is from Greg Mankiw's blog. Mankiw is an Economics professor at Harvard, where he teaches Econ 101 to our future elites, so they can forget everything he's taught them when they go to be our Lords And Masters in government (ahem) "service".

The light blue line shows what the Teleprompter Jesus predicted would happen if he wasn't allowed to throw $750,000,000.00 to Wall Street, the Unions, Detroit, ACORN, and various manufacturing friends. This 3/4 of a Trillion was to be spent on bridges, roads, and Turtle-Tunnels. This line blue line was generated by Team Obama prior to the bailout. At the time, this line represented the scariest unemployment number imaginable.

The dark blue unemployment line shows what the Teleprompter Jesus predicted would happen if we would just allow his buddies to get into your wallet. Or purse. Or, more accurately, your childrens' savings. This line looks a lot better than that light blue scary line, doesn't it? Once again, these were Team Obama's estimates. What a nice, soothing dark blue line.... Too bad it's as fake as....well....as fake as a thing that somebody made up to get their hands on some money.

The line composed of the red dots represents what has actually happened with unemployment in the real world, as opposed to the scenarios fabricated by The Chicago Gang. What direction do the red dots seem to be going?

Let me state this one more time, and I'll try to be brief. If you take money from taxpayers to "create" a job, it doesn't count. You're just moving money from the shallow end to the deep end of the pool. The people you're taking the money from don't get to choose which job the money is spent on. Nancy Pelosi gets to decide.

If you print money to "create" a job, that doesn't count either. It produces inflation, now or in the future. We've got a certain amount of money, and a certain amount of stuff. We use one to swap for the other.

Want to create some jobs, some great jobs? Lower the tax burden on business and individuals. Give entrepreneurs a reason to open a factory here, as opposed to, say, North Korea. Encourage the entrepreneurs to get filthy rich, Social Justice be damned. Otherwise, they're going to keep going John Galt on you, and sit on their hands until someone takes over in Washington who is slightly less full of Llama manure.

Want to create some more great jobs? Drop all this business about tax cuts for small and medium-sized businesses. Regardless of the Newspeak coming from D.C., corporations don't pay taxes. Individuals in those companies pay the taxes. Owners, investors, and employees. You don't think that the janitors at a mega-company receive less pay because of corporate taxes? Guess again. At least some of the money flushed to Washington comes out of their potential pay.

Next time some Student Council Refugee starts blathering about tax cuts for small and medium-sized business, he's talking about a tax cut for the #1,#2, and #3 people at those small companies. The #53,487th employee at the mega-corporation isn't eligible for this compassionate tax relief.

Want to create some more great jobs? De-regulate. De-regulate. De-regulate. Remember that the subprime mortgage/real estate crisis was caused by people following regulations to the letter.

Remember that employers aren't looking to hire indentured servants, dependents, or vassals who are going to be with the family for decades. Do you want to set up a business and be required to provide for the health insurance of other people? Do you want a piece of that? Well, most people don't. They also don't want to be lectured on the subject by a 3rd rate Community Organizer who couldn't organize a Chinese Fire Drill in a dead K-mart parking lot.

Let insurance companies operate anywhere in the U.S., so that changing jobs isn't such a risky endeavor. Is there anything that locks someone into a job more than insurance?

Want to do even more, especially for teenagers? End the fake "minimum wage". (The real minimum wage is Zero, and 26% of teenagers are now earning it, the most since World War II.) Let employers pay whatever they want to pay. Let workers agree to work for whatever wage they're willing to take. The teenagers would get some experience. The employers would get some help in a tough time. New businesses would take off. Next thing you know, the employers would have to pay the good workers more and more as they established themselves. It really would be "stimulative" for the economy. Millions of people would find work and make money, but we'll never do it. We're too compassionate.

Oh well. Those are the numbers. This is what we get when government must intervene. For government to do nothing would be irresponsible.

Note to the turtles: I hope you like the tunnels.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Remember that the subprime mortgage/real estate crisis was caused by people following regulations to the letter.

No really it wasn't, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=bigimage&utm_source=bigimage

I would agree that regulation can hurt small business but de-regulation has given us "Too big to fail" and helped to cause the mess that led to Bush bailing out the banks.

How can allowing insurnace companies to set up business any where and sell insurance do anything but lead to the insurance companies finding the state with the least regulations and using it against the consumer to provide the least amount of care? I think a system that covers everyone, cradle to grave, paid for with a payroll deduction that the employee is responsible for, would be the only way to make sure that, God forbid, you lose your job you would not lose your ability to acess health care. This would allow the employer to put money back into his business and compete in the global economy plus there would be new jobs created. I'm sorry, I've seen what greed and human nature does with de-regulation.

The Whited Sepulchre said...

Flee,
There was only two sets of regulations that led to "Too big to fail", and the Bush/Obama bailouts....

First were the regulations that required lenders to make subprime loans. You may have heard of the subprime loans. And why didn't lenders hesitate to make more and more of these loans? Because they could pass these loans on to the quasi-government agencies Fannie and Freddie.
And why didn't people worry about Fannie and Freddie's ability to pay? That leads me to the second group of regulations - the ones requiring Flee and Whited to bail out Fannie and Freddie if the loans went bad.

Why did Fannie and Freddie even exist? Hell if I know. I do know we'd be collectively better off if they'd never existed.

The current insurance regulations, prohibiting certain insurance companies from operating in certain states, are a wet dream for insurance companies (or any other businesses). In some states, only one or two companies have 90% of the business. You think those citizens get the best deal possible?

What would happen to prices if McDonald's had a near monopoly in certain states, and only Burger King could sell hamburgers in other states? You think hamburgers would be as cheap as they are now?

Regarding cradle to grave coverage.... Of anything. Social Security was supposed to take care of my retirement. It wasn't supposed to be an emergency fall-back supplement, as its apologists are now claiming. It was supposed to cover my retirement. Had I been allowed to invest my S.S. contributions into the evil, satanic Free Market, despite all the failures of unregulated capitalism, I coulda retired by now.

Instead, all of those dollars meant to take care of me between now and the grave are gone. The system is staring at bankruptcy. I'm afraid you're making a bad assumption when you claim that government can supply anything - mail delivery, education, V.A. Hospitals, Turtle Tunnels, etc. - more efficiently than the private sector.

Are you going to try to tell me you couldn't build a Turtle Tunnel for less money than those clowns ?