Once of the reasons that conservatives distrust government incentives is because of the law of unintended consequences. What is desirable in moderation can often, in excess, lead to exactly the opposite result from what we intend to do. So we think long and hard and, when we do act, we do so slowly and incrementally. [...]
The March employment numbers are out, so let us cry forth a resounding…meh. On one hand, payroll employment is up by about 162,000 jobs. Most of those jobs are government jobs or temp jobs (48,000 are Census jobs, which are both), but they’re jobs, which is much better than nothing at all. On the other [...]
Tad DeHaven, writing at the Cato Institute’s blog, has an interesting post on fiscal hypocrisy and the Republican Party. The Washington Times gained access to some letters written by GOP lawmakers to the Department of Agriculture in which they tried to get money from the very Stimulus Bill they castigated juse weeks or months before. DeHaven [...]
Mark Steyn has drilled down to the real reason we’re still stuck in a recession we should have been climbing out of months ago. Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go [...]
There seems to be a lack of alacrity in the Obama administration over the fact that its means of telling us where it spent our trillion dollars’ worth of stimulus money is slightly less rigorous than room full of blind, insane gibbons flinging darts marked “stimulus money” toward a map of the United States. When asked about [...]
Good eeeeevening… Episode 12 of The Delivery is available for all you discerning podcast connoisseurs. As usual, you can listen to it here, download it directly with this link, or drink deeply from the iTunes river. This week’s show is easily one of the two best shows I’ve done so far. The first half hour [...]
Apropos of my post yesterday on the phantom “saved or created” jobs here in Maryland (and Eddiebear’s national scoop!), I notice that other folks have found that the administration has stowed a few extra congressional districts in their states, too. Dafydd Ab Hugh discovered that California is actually 44 Congressional Districts larger than he thought [...]
Eddiebear over at Doubleplussundead found something quite interesting on the Recovery.org website. In an effort to figure out how many jobs had been “created or saved” in Missouri, he found that the administration is claiming quite a lot of job saving mojo for the Stimulus Bill, including in the 10th, 14th, 16th, 29th, and 31st [...]
I’m going to try something a little bit new with this post. I’ll present a story containing a ridiculous comment from an Obama staffer, then I’ll rebut it with comment from another Obama staffer. This should be fun. Seven months into the massive federal stimulus program, the vast majority of government grants, contracts and loans [...]
Good news, everyone! The Vice President says that the millions of people drawing unemployment checks since the Stimulus Bill passed is proof positive that the administration’s plans are working. I guess by that measure we should be commissioning new versions of “Happy Days Are Here Again” because, according to the chart Duane Lester found, we’re [...]
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