What Are We Stimulating?

I heard today that the eighteen million jobs that are supposed to be created by the Obama Over-Stimulating Bill are to be paid at union wage. It is a small detail. Apparently it was in the fine print that nobody had the time to read because if the bill wasn’t passed quickly global warming, excuse me, climate change was going to gobble up the middle class which would collapse the banking industry and lead to the collapse of the American car industry. Who wants to be stuck driving a Honda made in Tennessee that might run flawlessly for three or four hundred thousand miles when you could get a Buick that will probably be dead before you finish paying for it?

So now that these jobs have to be paid at union wage instead of prevailing wage we know two things. First, there won’t be as many jobs created as predicted. The Obama administration has revised the number down to 346. Second, we know how the AFL-CIO could afford the Fontainebleau for a week. So much for unions not getting any money from the bailout as we have heard so many leftists claim. While I’m on the subject of jobs … exactly how do you tell if you “saved” a job?” Is there an objective standard like when a pitcher saves a game in baseball or can the administration simply say that any job which didn’t disappear was saved? I can see the headline now in whatever dinosaur newspaper still exists in a year or two: “Obama Saves Thirty-Six Million Jobs.”

Doubtlessly, we will soon hear the squawking from the left about raising the minimum wage again. There is a whole army of soft headed folks in government and in the community organizing business who believe that if you squandered your educational opportunities, made bad life decisions and feel that having cable and an iPhone is more important than buying health insurance you should still live the easy life. Let the person who busted his backside starting a McDonalds pay you $83 an hour. They call it “living wage.”

Here is how the theory goes; if these greedy people who own businesses would pay more soon poverty would disappear. Of course so would the McDonalds but let’s not let that little fact get in the way of a good redistribution of wealth scheme. The McDonalds owner could just raise the price of the dollar menu to sixteen dollars and see what happens.

I know what happens. The guy who runs the garage and Jiffy Lube down the street comes by for lunch and has a cheeseburger and fries and pays the 32 dollars, so far so good. The next morning the newly un-poor burger flipper takes his car in for an oil change and what do you know an oil change is now four hundred dollars. Keep raising the minimum wage, you do it often enough it could work but I don’t think so.

It reminds me of the old joke about the guy who invests $100,000 in mutual funds and then gets cryogenically frozen for two hundred years. He gets warmed up and runs to the nearest Internet café orders a coffee and goes to his account online, his balance; 300 million dollars! Overjoyed that his plan has turned out so well he get up to pay and the clerk says, “Latte and ten minutes of Internet time, that’s six million.” Or as the punch line to one of my favorite hillbilly jokes goes, “We gotta get a bigger truck!”