Obama and his apparatchiks Pelosi and Reid fail to understand that the fundamental relationship between government and the economy is that of parasite to host. Aside from essential governmental functions of adjudication of civil disputes, law enforcement and defense, the governmental social functions like Medicare, Social Security and welfare are a redistribution of wealth. They are uneconomic. They do not create wealth. The simple truth is that government cannot create wealth. It can consume wealth, as in the case of the court system or military defense, and it can redistribute it as in the case of welfare or cash for clunkers; but, it cannot create wealth! To the extent it that it engages in social functions and redistribution functions it is a parasite. It only has what it takes from the creators of wealth, the innovators, the producers and the sellers, the real economy.
Jack Kelly incisively states the case in his November 30th post in Real Clear Politics, Note to Obama: Only Private Sector Creates Wealth, Jobs. A healthy host can support a lot of parasites; a sickly host cannot, so try to keep the host healthy.
Yet Obama is hell bent for leather to milk the host dry: phony stimulus, bondholder bailout, Obamacare, cap and trade, mortgage subsidies, ad infinitum.
The unemployment rate reached 10.2 percent this month, more than two percentage points higher than Mr. Obama’s economic advisers predicted it would if his $786 billion stimulus bill were passed. The Associated Press, in reporting Tuesday on disappointing third-quarter economic numbers, noted some economists expect it to reach 11 percent by next summer. That would be the highest since the Great Depression.
The stimulus failed chiefly because it was designed more to reward the president’s political allies than to fight the recession. But the stimulus failed also because stimulus funds were used to preserve jobs state and local governments could no longer afford because of falling tax revenues. The private sector has borne more than 100 percent of the job loss because state and local governments have added 110,000 jobs, according to an August report by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.
A job’s a job, right?
Not exactly. Preserving government jobs may deepen the recession because government workers are not engaged in wealth creation and their salaries must be paid by people in the private sector who are.
So we have Obama, Reid and Pelosi with the Democratic left taking the country 180 Degrees off course-expanding government. For the economy to grow, government must shrink. Will someone please tell Obama to stop killing the host!