Obama & Progressives Really
ARE More Concerned About
Public Sector Job Losses
The Old Media can try it's damndest, but there really IS no way for Obama to walk back what he said:
He wasn't 'misunderstood'. There is nothing to 'clarify' about what he said there. Let me set the stage for Obama's monumental gaffe.
Last year as the recovery stalled for it's 2nd straight year Harry Reid decided to come right out and say the private sector was doing fine, & and he thought what Congress should focus on was spending more stimulus money shoring up public sector jobs:
Then Paul Krugman made the same point in his column in the New York Times:
For the Bush era didn’t just end in catastrophe; it started off badly, too. Yes,Mr. Obama’s jobs record has been disappointing — but it has been unambiguously better than Mr. Bush’s over the comparable period of his administration.
This is especially true if you focus on private-sector jobs. Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees. But private-sector employment has recovered almost all the ground lost in the administration’s early months. That compares favorably with the Bush era: as of March 2004, private employment was still 2.4 million below its level when Mr. Bush took office.
Brief comment on Krugman's duplicity there: note he says the private sector employment had 'recovered almost all the ground lost in the administrations early months'. That's a fancy way of saying after almost an entire year in office, under Obama private sector employment dropped by a significant margin in the first few months, and then crawled slowly right back to where it had been when Obama assumed office.
Over 7 million private sector jobs were lost between 2007 and 2009. But Krugman wants to focus on where the jobs mark was when Obama took office, noting that the private sector employment continued to dip as Obama took office, but then after several months it climbed back up to exactly where it had been when Obama entered the White House.
Yes folks, THIS is what Obama, Reid & Krugman call 'doing fine'.
Progressives want people to forget that Federal, State & Local Government - what we refer to as 'public sector jobs' - are all paid for with tax money extracted from the private sector - businesses that are run by capitalists for profit.
When you have a HUGE DROP in the number of people in the private sector that are paying taxes, this means the amount of tax money you have available to pay your public sector workers DROPS as well.
While private sector businesses have struggled to meet payrolls and keep from shedding even MORE employees since 2007, Obama & Co. embarked on a program of what they called 'shoring up public sector jobs' by passing 'Stimulus Bills'.
Let me rephrase that to really draw out what happened: As private business struggled to make enough profits from providing goods & services to willing customers in order to stay afloat and avoid being forced to shrink any further, the bureaucrats up there in Washington took billions of dollars in tax money taken from those same private businesses & used them to protect public sector jobs so as to minimize any job losses.
Anybody who understood what Washington was doing with our tax money in 2009 & 2010 knows it's not exactly a NEWSFLASH that the bureaucrats up there place much, MUCH more value on public sector jobs than they do on private sector jobs. They've already spent BILLIONS of our tax dollars proving that.
Here's the problem: they managed to shield the public sector from the brunt of the recession in 2009 and 2010 by spending billions of tax dollars to protect jobs that otherwise would have had to be cut. While private business owners would have LOVED to get billions of dollars given to them to keep from having to fire employees, state & local governments got billions to spend to ward off the effects of the recession. Gov't got to keep most of it's employees; the private sector had to keep shrinking.
When they call this a 'historic' recession they aren't kidding you.
And then the stimulus money ran out. And Washington realized the political climate has shifted, and the public will no longer go along with yearly stimulus bills shoveling billions to state & local governments so they could continue shielding their valuable public employees from fiscal reality.
The result? After staving it off for two years by spending all that 'free' federal tax money, state & local governments were finally forced to either cut their spending & balance their budgets, or engage in large layoffs of public employees.
Now you know why we got all that excitement up in Wisconsin.
It's a fact our economy would have to be adding around 150,000 jobs a month just for us to keep up with population growth. In other words, to simply be running in place, the monthly job report would have to show the country adding 150,000 jobs or more.
Didn't Obama just get a jobs report that showed only 69,000 jobs were added in May?
We've either been running in place or sliding backwards since 2007. That brief spike 2009 was from the census hiring & brief hiring surge from the launch of all that more than 1.5 trillion in stimulus spending. That brief spike has now been more than negated by the failure to keep up with the population growth in the subsequent months.
It is nothing short of blind ideology that with the private sector struggling like it is, the folks up there in Washington want everybody to know just how darn concerned they are that government employees are suddenly starting to lose jobs.
They shielded these public employees with 100's of billions of our tax dollars from 2009-2010, and when the stimulus money ran out, the layoffs began [or states had to get serious about their finances] and all of a sudden we get Progressive politicians telling us the private sector is doing ok, what they'd REALLY like to do now is pony up another couple hundred billion of our tax dollars to spend another year or two walling the public sector off again from fiscal reality.
It's time to put our foot down and not just say 'No', but 'HELL NO!'
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