Wiseacre
Retired USAF Chief
I hear the left saying it all the time around here - increasing consumer demand leads to economic growth and more jobs. It's just that simple they say, except it isn't the whole story. I think more demand is a primary driver, without that nobody hires more people. But then the question becomes how do you create more demand and then how do you create more jobs to satisfy it, jobs that do not disappear in 6 months.
The liberal approach is to redistribute the wealth - take money from those who earned it and give it to those who haven't, specifically the lower income folks. Sounds great, they'll spend the money and create demand and we get more jobs. Except for one thing, it doesn't work. Tax rebates have been tried, big stimulus has been tried, but it never works because it's temporary. I remember getting a couple of tax rebates during the Bush years, but IMHO it never moved the needle.
That's because these things are temporary, and everyone knows it. You get a short-lived bump in the economy and then everything goes right back down to where it was before, except now you have another trillion dollars or so of new debt.
Apparently Obama is about to come out with a new jobs program next month (Sept) which I believe will consist of more spending on infrastructure construction jobs. Sounds great, except it's still a temporary fix, a bandaid that does nothing long term except maybe get him re-elected. So we fix some roads and bridges, which is needed but again those jobs won't be permanent. When the projects are over, so are the jobs.
Why? Because the underlying problems with this economy have not yet been addressed. Too high taxes, over-regulating, rapidly rising healthcare costs with or without ObamaCare, rising energy costs with no national plan to fix the problem outside of ridiculous ideas of renewable energy sources that are not financially feasible. And a miserable housing sector, most people consider their home to be the foundation of their wealth. And then there's the EPA and NLRB and who knows what else, government is supposed to work with the business community to compete with the rest of the world, but our government is in opposition to businesses instead.
Until all of that changes there will be no real recovery that can last very long. Increasing demand is not enough, it ain't that simple. That increase has to be permanent and sustainable, there has to be a change in attitude that no gov't program can provide by itself. People have to believe that the future can be better, right now such is not the case.
The liberal approach is to redistribute the wealth - take money from those who earned it and give it to those who haven't, specifically the lower income folks. Sounds great, they'll spend the money and create demand and we get more jobs. Except for one thing, it doesn't work. Tax rebates have been tried, big stimulus has been tried, but it never works because it's temporary. I remember getting a couple of tax rebates during the Bush years, but IMHO it never moved the needle.
That's because these things are temporary, and everyone knows it. You get a short-lived bump in the economy and then everything goes right back down to where it was before, except now you have another trillion dollars or so of new debt.
Apparently Obama is about to come out with a new jobs program next month (Sept) which I believe will consist of more spending on infrastructure construction jobs. Sounds great, except it's still a temporary fix, a bandaid that does nothing long term except maybe get him re-elected. So we fix some roads and bridges, which is needed but again those jobs won't be permanent. When the projects are over, so are the jobs.
Why? Because the underlying problems with this economy have not yet been addressed. Too high taxes, over-regulating, rapidly rising healthcare costs with or without ObamaCare, rising energy costs with no national plan to fix the problem outside of ridiculous ideas of renewable energy sources that are not financially feasible. And a miserable housing sector, most people consider their home to be the foundation of their wealth. And then there's the EPA and NLRB and who knows what else, government is supposed to work with the business community to compete with the rest of the world, but our government is in opposition to businesses instead.
Until all of that changes there will be no real recovery that can last very long. Increasing demand is not enough, it ain't that simple. That increase has to be permanent and sustainable, there has to be a change in attitude that no gov't program can provide by itself. People have to believe that the future can be better, right now such is not the case.