Bad Bad Math
It’s becoming more and more obvious that numbers not adding up doesn’t matter anymore.
In this new age of trillion-speak nobody seems to be able to do the addition anyway. And when I say nobody I am speaking of the huddled masses yearning to breathe hope and change as well as the news media that is selling the fiction regardless of the facts.
The absolute absurdity of the comments coming out of Washington DC and the placid acceptance of every duplicitous word by the supposed defenders of truth in the media, while currently increasing the false sense of jocund, will only serve to multiply the height from which those who hold this evanescent hope plummet. With almost every comment defending the non-stimulus spending package the American public is treated to even more pabulum by the dutiful liberals reporting on it.
One example of this vagary is reported out of the small town of North Manchester, Indiana, where $3.8 million of the non-stimulus money is going to be spent building a new water treatment facility. While the town will have a new facility and some temporary construction jobs, this project will create only 24 jobs in total and none of them will be from North Manchester. For that matter better than half of them won’t even be from Indiana. Democrats are pointing to the fact that these workers will be staying at hotels and eating in restaurants as providing stimulus. Nobody covering this story has bothered to question this salubrious claptrap and instead the press is descending on The Treeway Inn to interview the owner of this aged 24 room hotel. While it is true that The Treeway and the local Mr. Dave’s restaurant will indeed have some short term cash influx it will hardly be stimulus for the economy. You see these 24 workers, who will be on t he job at various times over the course of this project, would be eating in their home town if they weren’t in North Manchester. The influx of new business at Mr. Dave’s will have an exact opposite reduction in spending in the laborers home town eatery and gin mill.
Granted the job will employ 24 workers for a short period of time, but at $3.8 million it works out to almost $160,000 per job. This project is only one of a proposed dozen projects with a total price tag of $36 million. If the other projects run in the same cost factors that will mean 240 people will have a temporary job for as long as the projects last. This area in Indiana has lost more than twice that amount recently with the loss of several small manufacturing plants, and this so called stimulus is doing nothing to bring those permanent jobs back.
Instead of spending money on water treatment plants that would have had to been replaced anyway and calling it stimulus, develop a plan that attracts businesses and industry that will create real jobs that last longer than the 6 months you can actually pour concrete in Indiana.
Instead the Obama administration is punishing investment by small business owners by raising their taxes and making it less likely that they will venture into new operations.
For the time being North Manchester, Indiana will bask in the new found wealth of half a dozen ditch diggers buying Italian hoagies from the CITGO station.
You almost have to admire how Democrats can make that add up to fiscal salvation.
Almost.
