Idiocy of Carteresque proportions

CNN: The Obama disco-jobs bill

Ready for leisure suits, gold chains, Angel’s Flight skin-tight polyester pants, and the Village People? If you liked the economic policies of the Carter presidency, you’ll love Barack Obama’s new jobs bill, CNN reported yesterday:

The ghost of Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is hovering over President Obama as the Democrats try to pass a jobs bill in time for this year’s elections. So why is the centerpiece of the measure — a tax break for companies that make new hires — a play straight from Carter’s economic policy circa 1977? …

Critics of Carter’s plan — and Congress’ now — say that the problem with any jobs credit is the potential for waste. It’s estimated that of the companies that claimed the tax credit under Carter’s plan, two-thirds would have hired those employees regardless of the tax break.

This persistent Democrat idea that you can stimulate employment by, in effect, offering businesses a bounty to take on a new employee is so brain dead it shouldn't even be up for discussion.

Why would any company add an employee if there isn't already the increased demand going forward to justify the new hire? Just what is so difficult about the concept of first stimulating consumer demand that prevents it from penetrating the thick skulls of Democrats?

Do Democrats think that a new worker somehow comes with a future revenue stream magically attached? As pointed out below, the companies that actually do claim the bounty by adding new workers will be ones that are doing well enough that they would have added those workers anyway. The Government subsidy is just more taxpayer money flushed down the toilet.

It's been demonstrated repeatedly that you increase demand by cutting taxes, leaving more money in people's pockets to spend -- and that drives job creation. For post-JFK Democrats, that is an utterly incomprehensible idea, because for them it's got to be all Government, all the time. Markets baffle them, so Democrats remain fixated on a kindergarten version of command economics, providing a paradigm example of Stuck on Stupid.

Apparently, Democrats think the private sector operates like Government, where you can add new positions willy-nilly, and then just appropriate tax money to pay for them. And their fuzzy image of "market economics" seems to be based on defense contractors competing (sic) for long-term, guaranteed, risk-free, cost-plus Government contracts. You have to be suffering from a form of mental retardation to think that private businesses in general operate on anything remotely like those degenerate models.
It is positively frightening that these fools should be holding the reins of our economy.

Byron