Harry Reid, Keynesian Idiot

From FOX News:

With 1.6 million fewer private sector jobs than at the start of President Obama’s administration, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that it’s critical to pass legislation for hiring teachers and police because public sector employees are losing their jobs while “private sector jobs have been doing just fine.”

…

“The massive layoffs we have had in America today, of course, are rooted in the last administration, and it is very clear that private sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public sector jobs where we have lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” he said.

But BLS noted that while 57,000 new jobs were created in August, as the school year started back up again, 42,000 were in the private sector while 15,000 were government jobs.

This is a whole lot of failure here.  Why?  Because as Obama supporter Mort Zuckerman writes in US News & World Report:

Washington, Wall Street, and the business world were astounded and dismayed by the dismal employment statistics recently put forth by the government. We need 125,000 jobs every month just to account for people entering the workforce, but the numbers show only 18,000 more jobs in June and 25,000 in May. And the June numbers included the assumption that 131,000 net jobs were created by newly formed companies, a generous assumption that has proved to be consistently overstated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the past three years. Equally concerning is that the underlying employment numbers are even worse than Washington’s gloss.

So 57,000 new jobs doesn’t cancel out the 125,000 new workers in need of jobs.  Last I remember him mentioning it, Mike in East Texas said we needed closer to 190,000+ new jobs a month just to break even, not 125,000.

Harry Reid is yet another Keynesian idiot.  There’s no way to boost the economy by hiring more people for government.  Government doesn’t have its own money to spend – it takes money from the private citizen.  For every $120,000 a year average federal job, many average $61,000 private jobs have to be taxed to pay for it.  Assuming $10,000 in taxes, it takes 12 private workers to pay for one federal job.

Taking more money out of the private economy to fund ultimately non-producing sections of society results in a weakened economy.  Every added government job takes more from each citizen.  Every added government job takes more from every business that hires every citizen, ultimately leading to job cuts due to increased taxes.  Every added government job is ultimately a drain on the private economy – even the necessary ones like military, law and courts, etc., who do have a Constitutional and beneficial function – and especially the wholly unnecessary pork-barrel, administrator, special-project grant and regulator-bureaucrat jobs that simply force more businesses to comply with more laws and regulations, hand out “free” money taxed away from businesses to special interest groups, and so on, hampering producers even further.