Tao Economics

Since there are plenty more folks that are more clever then me and usually write the message a bit sooner I'll first point you to Bill Bonner of the Daily Reckoning:

America’s president proposes a tax credit to businesses that take on new employees. We never met a tax cut we didn’t like. This one is no exception. It lowers the cost of labor, making it easier to hire and pay people. So far, so good.

But is Mr. Obama proposing to cut government spending also? Not really. He’s pretending that the feds can have their cake and eat it too…that they can forgo the income given up by the tax credit…and yet, still spend it.

How is that possible? It’s not. It’s the feds’ old shell game. It won’t do the economy any good because the resources represented by the tax credit can’t be in two places at once. They can’t be available to the employers and be available to the government too.

If you have been paying attention to this type of stuff you'll have noticed that when the government tries to "fix" a short term problem, they end up creating two worse problems down the road. Its like they are playing wack a mole and in order to "fix" all of these problems they need more money and more debt of course, which just creates more problems to fix and on and on it goes!

And now I turn you over to the article called "how much should a job cost?":

After the $787 billion stimulus that was appropriated last year by Congress, $100 billion seems paltry. My question is how much will it cost to save or create jobs? In the State of the Union Address, the President said, “Because of the steps we took, there are about 2 million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed.” So, taxpayers spent $787 billion to create or save 2 million jobs; that works out to be to be about $393,000 per job so far.

Yowser! Its a good thing we bailed out those banksters! If it cost that much to save a job, its sounds like all the jobs we saved were all the high paying ones on wall st. Good work Obama! I don't think I'd want to take credit for that.

Can you start to see why it would be best for the federal government to start slashing costs, get out of the way, and create an environment for business creativity?