Another Post On Federal Stimulus Jobs

I happened upon the blog post, Pity the Poor Private-Sector Workers, by Robert Higgs of The Independent Institute and I thought I'd post it here because it covers the same theme as my most recent article but from more of a macro perspective.

Are Increased Government Jobs Really The Answer?

HARBESON: With jobs, sometimes less really is more

Last month, I wrote a flippant column about the information on the federal government’s stimulus Web site. It should be obvious now why I chose not to dig deeper — I was waiting for this paper to send a reporter out to do the work for me.

I’m glad I waited because it took him six articles to report on the local impact. If I had continued to study the Web site, my hourly rate would have surely dipped further into negative numbers. Let’s use the time he saved me to discuss the jobs created.

I noticed that many of the reported jobs created are government jobs. I don’t understand how this helps. A government job is not productive in the sense that any new wealth occurs, so the private sector has the burden of supporting yet another government employee.

This means less money is available for private businesses to hire the productive labor which pays for the government job. So how does adding another government job stimulate the economy?

I’m puzzled when people applaud these jobs. If we see a couple struggling to support their kids who suddenly decide to solve their problem by creating more kids, would we applaud this?

Some of the stimulus funds spent on new local government jobs will be paying salary costs for the first three years. This is bad enough because in three years the money will have to come from somewhere else. But what’s even worse is the government-mandated requirement that these jobs can’t be eliminated for at least 10 years!

By creating these government jobs, citizens have just been forced to pay for them for seven more years after the stimulus funds run out. It doesn’t matter if our local community decides something else is more important in a few years. We’ve just been completely handcuffed by the decisions of a few politicians.

I’m particularly interested in these jobs because this is exactly what Clark County government has done in the past. The time period involved in these requirements makes it easy for these jobs to get so embedded in the system that everyone conveniently forgets what happened. Then when future budget problems occur like we are seeing at the county level currently, we are told they don’t have enough money for all the “government services” and that we “must maintain them.”

This is how government grows.

Some of the reported jobs were in the private sector and upon first thought this sounds better. However, looking closer, these jobs created are completely dependent on the government funding to exist. So is this any improvement over the government jobs? Is it helping to build an economy able to sustain itself?

I also noticed that stimulus money was spent locally on giving raises to people who already have government jobs. This “stimulus” only increased future costs for those jobs that already existed before the stimulus at a cheaper price. How does this help the unemployed?

There was another example of stimulus funds being spent locally on people who already had the government jobs before the stimulus package. Stimulus funds paid for these employees to get training for certifications. However, these certifications were not needed at all for their job. Can someone tell me how this helps? Is it because a person was paid to give them the needless certifications?

Finally, a local politician actually rationalized stimulus spending because it created work for the reporter. But if we want to create work for reporters, it’s much more stimulating, not to mention cheaper for the taxpayer, when famous married people just get caught having flings.

SIGLINE: Sellersburg resident Debbie Harbeson thinks it’s very stimulating when other people do the work for her.

Recovering From Recovery.gov

COLUMN NOTES: In reality, I found a lot of information on this site. But it only brought up about 1000 more questions so I just decided to have a little fun with it. It did generate several comments on the newspaper's website though which you can read here.

HARBESON: The bumpy road to Recovery.gov

In my continuing effort to help my readers learn about government, I often get myself into really scary situations. Last week, when I read that entire government-issued press release and found myself deep within the bowels of the Indiana Code, was only the latest example of how far I’m willing to go.

Fortunately, after a nice long shower and a bit of debriefing with the son-in-law, I was able to come out of that experience feeling strong. As a matter of fact, I felt especially full of courage this week. Son-in-law apparently agrees, because he did confirm that I was full of it.

Anyway, I felt so good that I decided it was time to tackle the big one. Of course, I’m referring to Recovery.gov, the Web site that lists in detail everything you never wanted to know about the federal stimulus plan.

I was a bit leery about doing this though. I heard reports of people visiting the site who soon became so overloaded with detail that they just ran away screaming, never again to utter a single coherent word of complaint about the federal stimulus funds.

Yes, it is a scary Web site. The first thing I noticed upon entering was lots of numbers — ID numbers, award numbers, code numbers, order numbers and numbers referring to the other numbers.

Oh, and of course plenty of “dollars awarded” numbers. I suspect the dollars awarded are what scares most people away because hardly any of us learned to count that high in math class.

The site has so many numbers, there’s a special link called Clarification of Codes just to, well, clarify the codes. I bravely opened the huge “Clarification of Codes” page and it sent shivers up my spine.

I decided that maybe I really didn’t need to read up on the meaning of phrases like “IDV Procurement Instrument ID.” I hope you don’t think less of me.

I will say that there was one particularly pleasing part of this page which was the pronouncement of the phrase, “Principal Place of Performance.” But that’s only because I like alliteration.

I was about to just give up gathering anything useful for this column when I saw an interesting link at the top of the page. It was a link to the Google Translate page.

Yes! I knew Google could rescue me because Google always helps me out of sticky situations when I need information. So I clicked the link.

Once on the Google translator, though, I immediately became confused again. Oh sure, I had many languages I could click on for the “translate from” field, but all I could see were actual meaningful languages developed from humans throughout history. I looked down the list at least five times and could not find the selection I was looking for. “Government Gobbledygook” was simply not there.

I do not understand that at all. I mean, they had languages like Estonian and Swahili; Maltese and Persian. Oy vey, they even had Yiddish! I hate to kvetch but that really takes some chutzpah not to include Government Gobbledygook, doesn’t’ it?

Maybe the site was just broken that day.

I was ready to leave Recovery.gov, but I felt responsible for sharing something useful in this column, so I took one more look and saw a tab titled “Where is the Money Going.” Now, of course I didn’t fall for that one. I knew that if I clicked on that link, I’d get sent down a big black hole.

Listen, I’m willing to do a lot for you people, but I’m not going to go that far.

SIGLINE:
Sellersburg resident Debbie Harbeson is slowly recovering from her Recovery.gov research ordeal. She hopes to be back to her old self next week.