Have no fear comrades, we have returned job growth to zero!

On the Organizing for America website there is a place to enter your email and zipcode, for the purpose of “joining the fight for economic recovery”.  Who exactly are we fighting?  Republican Fat Cats who want to steal money from unemployed factory workers?  Prosperity-hating racists?  Maybe global warming is attacking our economy. 

"He is to blame for the war!"

 This isn’t another senseless post about “that guy I don’t like is just like Hitler”.  It seems like every side of every political debate has found a way to compare their opponents to Hitler, most without having any understand of what they are talking about.

The point is that when your government starts encouraging you to “join the fight against unemployment/hunger/global warming/poverty/racism/conservative extremists/the Jews”, it is important to understand what is really happening.  It means the government wants to use you for its own purposes.

In the case of the US economy, where exactly is the fight?  We all want our economy to be healthy and strong.  America decided to hand both the legislative and executive branches of governemnt to the Democrats.  We let the administration spend about $800 billion on their plan to fix the economy.  Where in all of that is the struggle?  The only struggle I see is Liberal Economic Policy vs. Reality – but that’s been a nasty fight for a long time.

Conservatives believe that minimizing the tax burden and creating a stable regulatory environment allows Americans to help themselves out of hard times.  Liberals believe that deficit spending and government jobs drag an economy into prosperity.  But this is not a fight, it is a policy disagreement, and a very important one.

Our country only works because out of the marketplace of ideas, we reach a consensus that hopefully approaches an effective solution.  Right now we have a president who believes that “bipartisanship” means everyone must agree with him.  Everything is a fight these days.  Obama’s glorious vision of the future vs. George Bush and his “failed policies”.  Dick Cheney vs. Joe Biden.  Health insurance companies vs. “hardworkin’ folks”.  America is a cooperative effort, but the tactics of this administration are splitting us apart.  Maybe it’s time to stop fingerpointing and deal with $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities and a nuclear Iran.

Where is our “stimulus” money going?  What is the administration doing about rising unemployment?

Have no fear, the Magic Lawnmower is here!

This is actually from the New York Times (how bad does it have to be for the Times to report it?) via Hot Air:

In June, the federal government spent $1,047 in stimulus money to buy a rider mower from the Toro Company to cut the grass at the Fayetteville National Cemetery in Arkansas. Now, a report on the government’s stimulus Web site improbably claims that that single lawn mower sale helped save or create 50 jobs.

Exclusive footage of the Magic Lawnmower from the Missourah investigative photojournalism team:

In the United Kingdom, there are five million grown-ups – or ten per cent of the entire adult population – who have not done a day’s work since Tony Blair’s Labour Party came to power in 1997….

It would be truer to say those five million Britons are not so much without employment as without need of employment: They exist in a world in which “work” is an increasingly foreign concept. In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works….

It happens so quickly. The “abolition of want” starts with the abolition of stigma. And once you’ve done that, it’s very hard to go back, even if you wanted to, which there’s no indication Britain’s millions of non-working households wish to do. But, if, say, you happen to be the one western nation not yet fully drugged into inertia by cradle-to-grave welfarism, you might want to pause before embracing the same fate.

H/T Mike B.

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health-care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things — energy, education and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel’s Law — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste — failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

Nor has anybody adequately explained what the crash had to do with education or energy. OK, maybe the price of fuel? But why is the solution to make fuel and energy even more expensive as part of a climate bill that is nothing short of job-assasinating national self-flagellation?

You wouldn’t let me stand up and make the simplistic claim that these million jobs were saved at a cost of $787,000 per job without challenging the details of my accounting, would you? Surely, reality is more complex.