We would like for everyone who really wants a job and who can perform some useful service to have a job and earn a paycheck.
While we are glad that most of our people who want jobs are employed, we are distressed that nearly 10 percent of our people who want and need jobs are unemployed – and many more have only part-time work.
We should make every sound economic effort to create jobs for eager, willing workers in constructive enterprises that are desirable to our people and can create enough salable goods and services to support them.
But all of us should be seriously concerned that Congress is proposing to spend vast amounts of money that the government doesn’t have, despite high taxes, to continue a program that creates make-work jobs such as were common in the New Deal of the 1930s.
The federal program in question is using borrowed money to temporarily pay for some jobs in government, at certain businesses and at some nonprofit organizations.
But that does nothing to encourage free enterprises to create more “real” jobs. And meanwhile, taxes are burdening free-enterprise companies, making it difficult for them to create real jobs.
We feel sorry for anyone who wants to work and needs to work but can’t get a job. But is it a real “solution” to force taxpayers to pay tax money to private employers on temporary terms?
Where does the money come from? “The government.” But “the government” is already borrowing billions of dollars to finance current operations – many of which are terribly wasteful if not outright unconstitutional.
What we need, of course, is an economy that hires productive workers to perform services and make products that are needed, at prices that are attractive to voluntary buyers. But among the reasons we have too few jobs is that there are so many artificial cost-raisers and regulations that depress employment.
What will happen to the people who are given artificial jobs at taxpayer expense when the government programs run out?
There will be higher taxes or bigger national debt and higher interest charges to the taxpayers to continue the programs, or there will be lost jobs. Neither prospect is very inviting.
We as a nation are doing too many things in defiance of economic realities and too few things that could be really constructive. We are reaping painful consequences and no real solutions.