You may remember that when President Barack Obama was pushing Congress to pass the $787 billion jobs “stimulus” bill – which has now grown to $862 billion – he promised that “90 percent of these jobs will be created in the private sector.”
And yet time and again we’ve seen stimulus funds mainly propping up government jobs – at the expense of the private-sector employees whose taxes will fund the stimulus. Most recently, for example, Congress raised taxes on some U.S. companies to pay for $26 billion in federal aid to prop up still more government jobs around the country.
That is ironic because it is the private sector – certainly not government – where the worst layoffs have hit. At the federal level in particular, there has been no effort to economize in the recession, and a $13.2 trillion national debt is the result. Federal jobs are growing explosively even as the private sector has been cutting back.
Republican U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, of Chattanooga, lamented this latest wasteful spending, which was approved mostly by Democrats in Congress.
“I commend Governor Bredesen and the state of Tennessee for balancing the state budget without relying on this additional funding and lament that the federal government is raising taxes to prop up other states that did not do the same,” he stated in a news release.