A New Creation

I love the WashPost; it's a great source of opposition research, and a much more interesting read, generally, than the Washington Times. Check out this quote from this article talking about the impact of the recent Massachusetts election:

Republican Scott Brown's victory Tuesday in a Senate special election in Massachusetts blindsided President Obama and Democratic leaders, who had nearly reached the finish line on an ambitious overhaul of the nation's health-care system and were beginning to turn their attention to other challenges, namely creating jobs and lowering the deficit.

There's plenty I could discuss in just that sentence, but I just wanted to point out the author's use of a term that, despite having no basis in reality, gets bandied about by straight-faced politicians constantly. I'm talking about "job creation."

Here's the theory: A politician drafts a bill granting so many millions of dollars for the construction of some public works project. Jobs now exist for the folks working on this project, and they didn't exist there before. Job created, right?

Wrong! Job moved. The money (or at least the value of the money) used to "create" this job didn't appear out of thin air at the wave of a legislative wand. They took it from someone else, a taxpayer in most cases. And what would that taxpayer have done with it? They'd have spent it, bringing jobs about just as certainly as any legislator would have done. Dave Barry sums this up better than I ever could:

See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.

There are two significant differences, however, between the kind of job "creation" that comes about legislatively, as opposed to the kind that comes about naturally.

First, the kind that comes about naturally is spread out over a large area, whereas the job "creation" that comes about legislatively tends to be focused in one area. That lends itself to good PR for the legislator; he can point to 500 jobs on a project in a particular area that weren't there before, whereas the 600 or so that would have happened without his help (but are now lost) wouldn't have been as easy to spot. He gets bonus points if the money that was used for those projects came largely from a constituency other than his own.

Next, the jobs that come about naturally are the jobs that people actually need to be done, whereas those that happen as a result of legislative decisions aren't the kind of jobs that people really need. This is always a pretty safe bet, because if folks did need these jobs to be done, they'd already have been paying folks to do them. Instead of Joe Citizen being able to use his own money to pay for the projects he actually wants, legislators help him out by building stuff like the bridge to nowhere and the Rock and Roll hall of fame.

It's the kind of freedom to make those choices that terrifies most legislators. Without their wisdom directing the common man, they think, who knows that kind of foolish use they'd put their money to. Just listen to John Kerry's reasoning on why tax cuts are a bad idea:

If you put a tax cut into the hands of a business or family, there's no guarantee that they're going to invest that or invest it in America. They're free to go invest anywhere that they want if they choose to invest.

Next time you hear someone tell you that they, or someone else, are about to "create" a job by taking money from someone (probably you) and giving it to someone else, put that person on your mental list of folks that you don't trust. Odds are they know that what they are saying is patent nonsense, but they hope you're dumb enough to buy into it.

Update: Here's another one.