QUOTABLE

“However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector -- not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.”
Thomas Sowell, “Jobs … or Snow Jobs?” OneNewsNow.com, Dec. 8, 2009

People with low skills or little experience usually get paid low wages. Passing a minimum wage law does not make them any more valuable. At a higher wage, it can just make them expendable. Raising the minimum wage in the midst of a recession was guaranteed to increase unemployment among the young -- and it has. None of this is peculiar to the current administration. The Roosevelt administration created huge numbers of government jobs during the 1930s -- and yet unemployment remained in double digits throughout FDR's first two terms.
Thomas Sowell, “Jobs … or Snow Jobs?” OneNewsNow.com, Dec. 8, 2009

"The fact is there is no pile of TARP money sitting there unused that would be essentially free to use for new programs," he explains.  "Any dollar spent on a new jobless program is one dollar less that the taxpayer has, and one dollar less that could be used for deficit reduction."
Jim Brown, “Democratic Jobs Bill – Unlawful, Expensive,” OneNewsNow, Dec. 8, 2009.

There is another way of reducing the cost of government-imposed mandates. That is by hiring temporary workers, to whom the mandates do not apply. The number of temporary workers hired has increased for the fourth consecutive month, even though there are millions of unemployed people who could be hired for regular jobs, if it were not for the mandates that politicians have imposed.
Thomas Sowell, “Jobs … or Snow Jobs?” OneNewsNow.com, Dec. 8, 2009

FACTS

Unemployment shot up in 2009 from 7.7 percent in January to 10.1 percent in October before settling at 10 percent in December. Behind those percentages were more than 4.1 million people who lost their jobs during the year. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that’s the most job losses in a year since 1940.
Bureau of Labor Statistics

In its “Long Term Fiscal Outlook” report, the GAO states that “absent policy actions aimed at reforming the key drivers of our structural deficits – health spending and Social Security – the federal government faces unsustainable growth in debt. The longer that action to deal with the federal government’s long-term fiscal outlook is delayed, the greater the risk that the eventual changes will be disruptive and destabilizing.”
Nicholas Ballasy, "Government ‘Can’t Continue To Exist’ With This ‘Irresponsible’ Federal Spending, Boehner Says, CNSNews, Dec. 18, 2009

The Federal Reserve's role in the housing bust cannot be exaggerated. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates repeatedly from January 2001 to June of 2003, from 6.5 percent to 1 percent. This led to inflation, so the Federal Reserve began to steadily raise interest rates, up to 5.25 percent by June of 2006. When the Federal Reserve abandoned its role as steward of the monetary system and used interest rates to artificially and inappropriately manipulate the housing market, it interfered with normal market conditions and contributed to the destabilization of the economy.
Robert Murphy, "The Fed's Role in the Housing Bubble," Pacific Research Institute.