First, Nancy Pelosi thinks that the productive people should pay people not to work. (H/T Hot Air)

What’s wrong with that?

Ed Morrissey writes:

• “This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy” — No, it’s a net drain on the economy, although for understandable purposes.  It reroutes capital from production to non-production.  We are paying people who aren’t working by using capital that could otherwise go to creating jobs.  It’s a policy tradeoff and understandable, although not for 99 weeks, which is what Pelosi is attempting to extend further.
• “It injects demand into the economy” — Not at the rate in which the capital gets destroyed.  Remember, the money for this program gets confiscated from producers and passed through the government bureaucracy to non-producers.  What winds up back in the hands of producers is much less than what left their hands in the first place.
• “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative” — No, it doesn’t.  In fact, it depresses job creation, which is part of the policy tradeoff.  If this was right, we’d be at zero unemployment by now.  Tax cuts, especially on capital gains, creates jobs by getting capital into the hands of job creators.
• “It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country without unemployment benefits” — That’s not actually the debate.  No one is suggesting that we eliminate all unemployment benefits.  The debate is whether we will keep extending them further.

The trouble is here is that the federal government takes a cut for themselves whenever they redistribute money from one group to another. And the government doesn’t produce jobs as well as the producers they take the money from – because government is wasteful and inefficient compared to private business.

Hillary Clinton

Here’s a post from The Right Scoop showing what Hillary Clinton thinks of producers. (H/T ECM)

She says:

It’s important, too, that we look at how to promote broadly-based prosperity. One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity. It’s true in my own country where, unfortunately, economic inequality is increasing. And it’s true in Ukraine. It’s true in Europe and Asia and Africa and South America. So part of the challenge of economic growth and prosperity is to make sure it gets down and equally spread among people.

When you take money from the few, and reward the many, it also helps you to get re-elected – because you’re buying more votes. Pretty soon, you have half the population paying no federal taxes and the top half of earners paying almost all the federal taxes. Eventually, the top earners realize that they are being bled dry by the the preening wealth redistributors in government, and they scale back their production and hiring, outsource their jobs to other countries, or leave the country entirely. And that’s why unemployment is at 10%. It’s something that leftists like Pelosi and Clinton never learned – they have no concern st all about how the people they rob will respond to being robbed. And it impoverishes us all when we punish the most productive members of society. Where do you think jobs come from? The poor?

Barack Obama

The Detroit News reports on one of the reason why we all lose when government decides that they know better ways to spend money than entrepreneurs. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

The government is handing out nearly $2 billion for new solar plants that President Barack Obama says will create thousands of jobs and increase the use of renewable energy sources.

Obama announced the initiative in his weekly radio and online address Saturday, saying the money is part of his plan to bring new industries to the U.S.

“We’re going to keep competing aggressively to make sure the jobs and industries of the future are taking root right here in America,” Obama said.

The two companies that will receive the money from the president’s $862 billion economic stimulus are Abengoa Solar, which will build one of the world’s largest solar plants in Arizona, creating 1,600 construction jobs; and Abound Solar Manufacturing, which is building plants in Colorado and Indiana. The Obama administration says those projects will create more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.

That’s $1,333,333 per new permanent job.

That money could have created many more jobs in the private sector. But now it’s been wasted for politically correct solar power. And that’s why government spending prolongs recessions – it takes money away from job creators for fashionable boondoggles designed to get people elected.

UPDATE: The ONLY stimulus that counts is A JOB – or several job offers. People on unemployment are not going to spend because the future is too uncertain. What makes people spend is a current job, along with the prospect of other jobs if this one falls through. That’s what caused people to spend. You need to give tax breaks to the suppliers – suppliers stimulate demand by creating products that people actually want to buy.