Thursday, December 03, 2009

A good column from John Lott

Here. In it, he points out that the Obama administration's measure of "jobs created or saved" more or less means that if a dollar is spent to employ someone, it is a "job created or saved"--whether or not the person's employment depended on that program.

Of course, the little detail that each job "created or saved" is costing a cool million dollars or more doesn't seem to faze Dear Leader, but that isn't the important point; the important point is that honest accounting (as opposed to the government kind) wouldn't find anywhere near the 640,000 jobs claimed by the President.

Rather, the data seem to be indicating that taking eight hundred billion dollars out of the private sector has actually put about three million people out of work--a drastic example of what Bastiat noted as "that which is not seen." Had only Lott seen fit to reference that great work in his column, it might have helped many clue in to the true damage being done by Dear Leader.

Regarding that damage, I'd also like to point my readers (all five of you?) to some great posts by my friend "ColdFusionGuy" on the subjects of excessive debt and the decline of nations. Dear Leader may think that the nation can weather the debt burden he is imposing, but reality is that when debt exceeds income by a certain amount, merely paying the interest puts a serious crimp on one's economy.

Finally, I have a touch of pride in my alma mater, which appears to be one of very few colleges and universities which do not ban students and visitors from lawfully carrying a pistol. So people there are marginally safer from being attacked.

Of course, it does NOT protect students from the trauma of cheering for a football team that drops games to Central, from the stench wafting from Cedar Village, or from the fact that too many there are not terribly interested in obtaining an education. The sad news is that students will still need to deal with these hazards of being a Spartan.

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