This morning the editors of the Wall Street Journal have produced one of the best and certainly the most amusing economic recovery proposal: adjourn Congress until 2011.
The November jobs report was greeted yesterday with smiles and sighs of relief, which speaks volumes about how rotten the job market has been for a long time. Only 11,000 lost jobs! Praise heaven.
The report is hopeful if not yet happy news, in that it shows employment finally catching up with the economic recovery that has been building since the summer. Economic expansions always lead to some job creation, especially when the downturn and layoffs have been as steep as what the U.S. has endured in the last year.
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The news of a better job market couldn’t have come at a better time politically given that Congress seems ready to waste more money on more government job creation. The same folks who planned the last stimulus now want to spend a few hundred billion on public works jobs, more aid to states, and another round job of jobless benefits. In some states, workers can now get paid for 18 months for not working. This will give many of them an incentive to postpone a job search even as their hiring prospects improve.
Meanwhile, the White House is thinking about paying home owners to weatherize their homes. Cash for caulkers, we suppose. Now, that’ll put millions back to work.
The real message of the November report is that the job market is healing on its own, if Washington will simply let it happen. If Democrats want faster job creation by next November, they’ll do nothing at all. Stop imposing new taxes on estates, payrolls, insurance, device makers, drug makers, small business, you name it. Start over on health care. Adjourn for the year, spend December with the family, come back in 2011. And watch Congress’s approval rating rise.
The editorial also touches on a point that’s been a theme around here for some time. The sectors of the economy that are growing are government, education, and healthcare, all areas that are dependent wholly or in the majority on tax dollars. That’s hardly good news. It is clearly not sustainable unless you believe in the cat and rat farm that I’ve mentioned here before. As government and its handmaiden industries increase their share of the economic pie over time and other sectors shrink, not just relatively but absolutely, the economic situation becomes increasingly serious.
The tone of concern I’ve expressed around here is centered on this. Not only do government and its handmaiden industries require more and more tax dollars to thrive, since they’re seen as less risky they draw an increasing amount of the investment that the sectors that produce the revenue these sectors need to maintain their growth themselves require to prosper.
I think we passed this tipping point some time ago. Note that during much of the Bush Administration the only economic sectors that were growing were government, education, healthcare, finance, and construction. We’ve seen what’s happened with finance and construction, haven’t we?
These checks average, what, $300-400 a week? That’s not much of an incentive to stay unemployed – a single person might get by if they lived a spartan lifestyle, but a family would be stretching it considerably. I’d love to know what their alternative is, too – cut people off and let them beg or go live in the homeless shelters?
Brett —
This is totally anecdotal, so you have to take it for what it is……but…
I have a black sheep in my family. I suspect you have read at least some of my posts. I’m sort of the uber-capitalist. Well, let’s just say one of my siblings is not.
This sibling would take the attitude that an unemployment check of that magnitude, plus maybe some disability (back’s been hurtin’, you know) is just dandy.
I don’t get it. It makes for trouble at family gatherings. But its a fact. They are out there.
The Democrats have a name for these people: “votes.”
I’m not discounting that there are some parasites out there who are willing to live a poor, crappy lifestyle in exchange for never working. I just don’t think they’re a major factor in the way the WSJ article seems to be hinting (meaning they’re not significant enough to make it not worthwhile to extend unemployment benefits).
Of course, if they wanted, they could just be selective about granting the extensions – young, single men and women without children don’t get the extension (or get a smaller one), while single parents or families with children do.