Jobs-Gate Crunches Numbers

Yesterday the announcement came from the administration that we had finally turned the corner on job creation. The symbolic barrier of ten percent unemployment had been breached in a downward trend. We were now back below the magic number at 9.7% jobless.

But, those who can add, subtract and apply reason to the discussion might want to question how you can lose jobs during the period and still have unemployment go down. The President has a vested interest in making the numbers look good for his policy positions. It is much like that bunch of pseudo-scientists in England who exhibited no compunction about finagling data to make global warming "real" despite evidence to the contrary.

If the numbers don't work, change the way you are counting.

If you stop counting people without jobs as unemployed the percentage will go down even though your economy continues to lose jobs. Those who "stopped looking for work" are simply ignored. I guess the plan is to once again increase the duration of unemployment compensation benefits. Once upon a time in a real world, it was eight weeks of stipend to help you find a new job. Now we apparently can't bear the guilt of forcing people to get hungry so that their motivation rises so we continually extend the pay out until it is now running well over a year in most places and approaching two years in some.

The scramble to make the data fit the policy continues here:

Here's $5000 To Create a $35,000 Job

The rhetoric must once again be questioned. The truism that whatever he speechifies is exactly the opposite of his meaning and intent remains in place.

He intones that small business is the engine of job creation, but he doesn't want to stand aside and provide the free market stability which would let that engine race. He wants to take some money out of that pot of gold which was authorized to save the banking industry (aka "Wall Street") and which they have largely paid back. Rather than bask in the realization that we threw some money at a problem and the problem got improved so we got the money back and we can pay some debts, he wants to keep the deficit at outrageous level and double or triple spend the money.

Small business will create jobs when market demand makes it rewarding to do so. You don't create a job without demand and you certainly don't do it to get a tax credit that is a fraction of what the job will cost you. The clearly foreseeable outcome of the deficit is a future of tax levies and fees on your business which will drive you into bankruptcy. It is only without the government interference that we can hope for the engine of job creation to run.