By Staff
If our nation's political leaders are serious – really serious – about spending hundreds of billions of tax dollars on infrastructure projects to "create jobs," they can prove it by outlawing backhoes.
Also bulldozers, road graders, cranes and other heavy equipment.
We should build our "infrastructure" with our bare hands and little else, the way Egyptian pharaohs organized the construction of huge pyramids with little more than hammers, chisels, ropes, shovels, levers and fulcrums.
Surely modern Americans could build roads, bridges and sewer plants using the same rudimentary technologies that gave us one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Imagine how many more people would be employed!
We all know there is no way this would ever happen, because what matters is productivity, a fact many in government know but do not admit.
Jobs are a sign of a healthy economy, not a cause of one.
We should have learned this in the 1930s, when various jobs programs put millions of people to work but the Great Depression deepened.
Or in the "stagflation" era of the 1970s, when programs such as CETA (Comprehensive Employment Training Act) promoted the hiring and training of workers but failed to reduce sky-high unemployment or stimulate a stagnant economy.
Make-work doesn't produce anything.
We could pay people to dig holes one day and fill them the next, but doing so wouldn't add anything to the nation's wealth.
Or we can pay people to build roads and bridges and other infrastructure, and if the economy remains weak, high unemployment will return once those construction-related jobs are finished.
We could actually end up worse off, because financial resources would have to be taken from other areas of the economy to fund the infrastructure work.
Money used for that would be unavailable for other things, weakening those other sectors of the economy.
Similarly, Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 a year – the very people who have the money to spend and invest in job-creating activities.
Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also have announced a plan to keep the estate tax in place even though it is supposed to expire in 2010.
Across the country, the estates of farmers and small business owners would be subject to the tax, hurting the ability of heirs to keep the businesses going or expand them.
That, of course, will be a huge job-killer.
Democrats are also planning higher taxes on cigarettes and gasoline and a "carbon" tax that would raise the price of every carbon-based energy source -heating oil, gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, etc.
And then there is the "card check" bill, deceptively called the "Employee Free Choice Act," which would take from workers the right to a secret ballot vote over whether to join a union.
Unions spent more than $100 million helping to elect Obama and other Democrats, and they want this as their reward, because elimination of the secret ballot will make it easier for them to force unions on unwilling workers and employers.
All these measures would further burden individuals and businesses, reducing their productivity and harming the chances for long-term employment growth. Lawmakers should be lightening these burdens, not adding to them.