Posted by
Playful Walrus on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 1:15:35 PM
Something is wrong with this headline from David Morgan's Reuters article:
U.S. Labor Group Unveils Plan to Tackle Joblessness
You know how to really tackle joblessness? 1. Encourage people to work; 2) Let the marketplace create jobs.
Usually, Big Labor does plenty that works against those two things.
The head of the largest U.S. labor federation urged President Barack Obama on Tuesday to use the $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund to help cash-starved small businesses as a way to stem rising joblessness.
So – take money from taxpayers and hand it out to businesses? I have a better idea. Let people, including business owners, keep more of the money they earn instead of sending it to D.C. as taxes, and we'll use that money to create jobs. One-time payouts by the government do not create lasting jobs.
In a preview of labor's contribution to Obama's December jobs summit, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program could be lent directly to small- and medium-sized businesses at commercial rates.
"Lent". Like the money that was "lent" to pay off the autoworker unions via GM?
The AFL-CIO jobs plan also calls for extended unemployment benefits, food assistance and healthcare for the unemployed, more money for infrastructure projects and state and local governments, and job creation aimed at distressed communities.
Ah, yes. Pay people not to work using money from people who do work, and throw money at failing neighborhoods.
Rising unemployment poses a political danger to Obama as his fellow Democrats in Congress approach the 2010 election with voters increasingly dissatisfied with incumbents.
I'm surprised they don’t make it simpler and call for a "Jobs Corps", where people are "employed" in a government job that involves watching their own stuff, in which they simply issued a regular "paycheck", and thus those people are no longer "unemployed". Problem solved!
"If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs. And we need jobs now," Trumka said in a speech to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank.
If small business can do more of what they want to do with their own resources, and keep more of their own resources to begin with, they will add jobs as the market creates them. But that would mean that the Big Labor leaders wouldn't have as much power, so we can’t have that.