First things first; it’s good to see Jay Reding is back to writing more regularly. He’s one of the better policy bloggers out there, and has been for years.
And he dips into a subject
I’ve been dying to write about for weeks: the idea of the “shovel ready” job:
What we need is not a bunch of make work jobs. Exactly what would Mr. Herbert’s plan look like? Should we take an unemployed financial analyst from Manhattan, hand him a shovel and have him dig a ditch or fix potholes on I-95? Is that really an effective use of his skills? Of course it isn’t- it’s a waste of human capital.
Leaving aside the undeniable Schadenfreud many would feel at the idea of Bernie Madoff pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken cement (or, to be honest, that I’d feel to watch my the guy who wrote my ARM five years ago cleaning the ape cages at the Como Zoo in July), I’ve wanted to ask – beyond the absurdity of thinking one can take unemployed auto workers and bank workers and put ’em out on the prairie fixing roads, has anyone noticed that building roads is a completely different operation than it was seventy years ago? That it doesn’t involve armies of guys with shovels and pickaxes hacking the roadbed down to size?
Here’s where the standard argument about government jobs comes in: “but you’ve built a road!” they exclaim. Great, you have a road. Does that mean anyone will use that road? Sure, that road would be nice for all the trucks that aren’t going anywhere to take all the goods that aren’t being produced, but here in the real world just building a road produces a strip of concrete that may or may not get used. “If you build it, they will come” is a line from a movie, it’s not a theory of economics.
So, what do we really need? We really do need jobs, and we really do need infrastructure fixes. But those are two different problem with two different solutions.
If we want to get out of this mess, we need to tear down walls rather than build them up. The first bill that President Obama signed into law was an act that dramatically expanded liability for employers. You want to create jobs? Try not hobbling the people who create them.
The tax holiday is looking better and better.
And the earliest shot for one of those is 2013.
Hang in there.
I want to know who Great Leader reconciles creating (or saving) 3 million jobs with raising taxes on the top earners. He has confessed that the majority of jobs are created by small business. Does he plan to penalize some rich people and not others?
He plans to create jobs by strict enforcement of the ADA, new product liability laws, give slime ball trial lawyers everything they want, enforce a new union law that has a lot worse things in it then just card check……..oh, wait, these things kill jobs. Never mind.