On the recordJune 7, 2010
It begins with this comment which caught my eye: It's too bad we can't do the Census every year, because maybe the U.S. economy would then show some jobs growth. That is pretty interesting. The reason is because of the news last week that was greeted with some degree of concern by folks on Wall Street and elsewhere. Despite the fact that we created a net total of 431,000 jobs in May, 411,000 of those were temporary Census hires. Yes, we created a lot of jobs by hiring temporary Census workers, but those are not private-sector, permanent jobs. That is what we should be doing. This article notes that: The private economy--that is, the wealth creation part, not the wealth redistribution part--gained only 41,000 jobs, down sharply from the encouraging 218,000 in April, and 158,000 in March. The point being that these temporary Census jobs are not our ticket to economic recovery. These are temporary, government, and they do not add to the employment base that produces wealth. It is interesting that those who supported the stimulus package, which cost $862 billion, said there was an economic factor here called the Keynesian multiplier effect, that somehow a dollar in government spending was supposed to produce a dollar and a half in economic output. This is truly the creation of something out of nothing or, more accurately, taking a dollar out of the private sector and somehow creating a dollar and a half worth of value. It turns out it didn't happen. It never does.
