Ben Powell on The American Jobs Act

Powell writes:

After wasting three years and more than a trillion dollars of "stimulus" money, the President has announced he has a new plan for creating jobs.

The problem is: Government doesn't create jobs that add value to the economy; companies and entrepreneurs do. Through taxes, mandates and regulation the government typically discourages hiring and destroys jobs. What Washington should do right now is step aside...

Entrepreneurs create jobs only when they expect the price they will receive for their product or service will exceed the price they pay for labor and other inputs, such as raw materials and equipment. This ensures that the jobs they create make society wealthier.

In contrast, government jobs add little if anything to the economy. They drain resources rather than increase them.

Truth be told, the government easily could solve unemployment tomorrow if our only objective is to say that everyone who wants a job has one. It could do this simply by hiring half of all unemployed workers to dig ditches and the other half to fill them in. Everyone would work. But no net value would be created.

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Peter Schiff on The American Jobs Act

Schiff writes:

Although it was labeled and hyped as a "jobs plan," the new $447 billion initiative announced last night by President Obama is merely another government stimulus program in disguise. But semantics are of supreme importance in American politics...some could argue that word choice is the only thing that matters. As a result, despite the fact that this plan bears no substantive difference from previous stimulus bills...

In the meantime money to fund the stimulus has to come from somewhere. Either the government will borrow it legitimately, or the Federal Reserve will print. Either way, the adverse consequences will damage economic growth and job creation, and lower the living standards of Americans...

The truth of course is that no real economic growth or job creation is going to occur until the failed policies of both Obama and Bush are reversed. In his speech the President mourned the death of the American dream. Obama should stop killing it. To revive that dream we need to revive the American spirit that produced it in the first place. That means returning to our traditional values of limited government and sound money. Unfortunately we are still headed in the wrong direction.

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Anthony Wile on the American Jobs Act

Wile writes:

I've noticed that an old and misleading dominant social theme has taken center stage in America lately. It's the idea that politicians and the political process itself can create jobs.

Of course, government can't create jobs. Government can make things worse, but it can rarely if ever make things better...

Government doesn't create anything of value. It merely taxes and spends. It is impossible for the government to "create" jobs – and the Keynesian nostrums claiming that government can "stimulate" the economy by creating make-work employment are not feasible – and never really were.

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Adrian Krieg on The American Jobs Act

Krieg writes:

The president's speech on the evening of September 8 was without question
not a speech about the economy or how to fix it; it was another campaign speech
for Obama's reelection. The plan as announced is called "The American Jobs Act" – very long on vocalization and very short on substance. The same old class warfare of "tax the rich" was repeated often. I lost count on, "You Must Pass This Bill." There
are, according to White House sources, $447 billion required for implementation
of this Act (Stimulus 4, one would suspect), although the president never once
mentioned any dollar amount.

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Tibor Machan on the American Job Creation Act

Machan writes:

Jobs are created when people who have earned an honest buck go to the market and purchase goods and services that other people need to produce. If a good many go to the market to do this, there will be many jobs; if only a few, there will be few jobs. Moreover, only if the people get to choose what purchases they make in the market will the resulting jobs be more than make-believe or artificial jobs, like digging holes and filling them up again...

The entire plan of the jobs bill amounts to nothing more than artificially manufacturing jobs, from phony money, creating phony demand. And this doesn't even address the issue of Mr. Obama's favorite superstition, namely, his idea that he can somehow turn America into a showcase of green life without incurring massive expenses for this, expenses the country cannot afford.

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American Jobs Act

Bailing out state governments, extending jobless benefits, etc. all seem to presume that, somehow, the U.S. economy is going to return to its pre-2008 growth track and that all we need to do is give it a little help along the way. With each passing month, that seems more unlikely and it might be a good idea to begin adjusting to a more sustainable economy (i.e., one less dependent on credit, finance, and rising asset prices) sooner rather than later.

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My thoughts: The cost is being reported as $447 billion. This includes $253 billion in tax cuts. Allowing people to keep money that they have earned is NOT a cost. Spending is a cost. The national debt crisis is a result of of overspending, not under taxation.