{"id":4278,"date":"2009-02-25T08:40:26","date_gmt":"2009-02-25T13:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4278"},"modified":"2009-02-25T08:40:26","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T13:40:26","slug":"youll-need-that-shovel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4278","title":{"rendered":"You’ll Need That Shovel"},"content":{"rendered":"

First things first;\u00a0 it’s good to see Jay Reding is back to writing more regularly.\u00a0 He’s one of the better policy bloggers out there, and has been for years.<\/p>\n

And he dips into a subject<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been dying to write about for weeks:\u00a0 the idea of the “shovel ready” job:<\/p>\n

What we need is not a bunch of make work jobs. Exactly what would Mr. Herbert\u2019s 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\u2019t- it\u2019s a waste of human capital.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Leaving aside the undeniable Schadenfreud <\/em>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?\u00a0 That it doesn’t involve armies of guys with shovels and pickaxes hacking the roadbed down to size?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where the standard argument about government jobs comes in: \u201cbut you\u2019ve built a road!\u201d 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\u2019t going anywhere to take all the goods that aren\u2019t being produced, but here in the real world just building a road produces a strip of concrete that may or may not get used. \u201cIf you build it, they will come\u201d is a line from a movie, it\u2019s not a theory of economics.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The tax holiday is looking better and better.<\/p>\n

And the earliest shot for one of those is 2013.<\/p>\n

Hang in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First things first;\u00a0 it’s good to see Jay Reding is back to writing more regularly.\u00a0 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:\u00a0 the idea of the “shovel ready” job: What we need is not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}