Full Employment for Governmental Accountants

While the asserted desire of the Obama administration to make governmental spending more "transparent" is laudable, it will not come without a hefty price tag. Under rules proposed, every recipient of taxpayer cash will be obliged to submit numerous reports.

That means that hordes of governmental bookkeepers, accountants, auditors, and such will be kept busy for the next ... century, writing reports, editing reports, reviewing reports, etc. If the purpose of this proposal was a full employment program for numbers-crunches, it may, perchance, actually succeed.

This nicely parallels governmental bidding requirements. In an effort to ensure a fair and open process, so that someone's brother-in-law doesn't get a leg up, contractual requirements are now so complex and arcane that the process becomes an end in itself, and costs so much that the benefits which might have flowed from truly competitive bidding evanesce. We'd do better, as taxpayers, if whoever needed the work done called a few contractors from the yellow pages and got their best prices.

And I will wage a year’s mortgage payment that six months do not elapse without huge incidences of fraud, waste, and abuse – of the illegal sort – making headlines. Such is the nature of government. Dangle lots of money around and, voila, instant School Construction Crisis.

But the difficulty with this undertaking, as with so many other governmental undertakings, is that which is perfectly legal represents the greatest difficulty. With "prevailing wage" laws, how many tens of billions in taxpayer dollars will be wasted, paying top dollar for projects which could have been undertaken for substantially less? Again, I will wager that, buried in all these bills and regulations are numerous set aside provisions, such that "minority" and women contractors get a certain percentage of the boodle, again inflating costs.

If one tracks the stock market averages, they began their swan dive when the polls showed Obama would win. With each new announcement of ever increasing borrowing and spending, and fearful that he will actually keep his campaign promise to hugely increase taxes, the market plunges further. This represents a massive, impartial vote of no confidence by those with money (many of whom are Democrats) in the "recovery" plan. They might be wrong, of course; it wouldn't be the first time the market predicted incorrectly. But this utter lack of confidence by the investing public in the Adminstration's policies should be sobering.

Couple this with the headlines today that unemployment levels continue to increase, and we arrive at the conclusion that this administration is simply floundering around, ideologically dedicated to increasing the size and scope of government, but without so much as a clue how a real economy actually works.

The problem we face, at this juncture, is not a want of spending, but a lack of confidence in future economic growth. People will not invest and businesses will not expand in the teeth of continued economic uncertainty. Instead of spending money, scattershot, hoping that some of it might actually help (to the extent that the people advocating this spending even care about prosperity rather than simply using this crisis as an excuse to advance an ideological agenda), why not permit those who actually employ people, provide services, and make products to keep more of their money, such that they can retain their employs, cut prices, and invest in production?

When one taxes something, one gets less of it. Subsidize it, and you get more of it. At this point, we’re providing large benefits to those who aren’t working and heavily taxing those who might actually provide work. Only in an Alice-in-Wonderland world does this make sense.

The permanent elimination of federal business taxes would provide a huge boost to the private sector (the "stimulus" program provides money to retain governmental employees, a large number of whom we would probably be better off without). It would not require spending one thin dime; instead, it would let those who actually know how to run a business put their own money to where it will do the most economic good.

In short, the "stimulus" program gets just about everything wrong. It won’t work, because it can’t. The economy will recover – it always does – and the Obamaniacs will claim wholly undeserved credit for that turn around. But while the spending they cemented in place will act as a drag, retarding future growth, and leaving out children with a multi-trillion dollar legacy of debt, it will help the economy recover not one whit.

Not exactly the "change" that most people thought their votes would support. Indeed, it sounds pretty like the irresponsible Bush spending that Obama rarely misses an opportunity to condemn. Despite his rhetoric, Obama simply represents Bush spending on steroids.