NC Division of Water Resources awarded $829,078 for some mumbledy-jumbo. Needless to say, many North Carolinians could use better water pressure, and Asheville has a reputation for having leaky lines all over the place. No, that’s not the kind of water we’re talking about. The General Assembly has so very little money, we needed to beg our national legislators to save 5700 teacher jobs, while Buncombe County takes state money for an educational “stormwater harvesting and bioretention system.” Other projects benefiting from the grant include “determining the location for a repositioned harbor line by developing a master plan, “identifying and evaluating stormater drainage problems,” “stabilizing a streambank,” and creating foot trails to connect parks.
This is well and good we suspend our disbelief enough to agree on three things: that before humankind messed up the planet, all the rivers flowed in siltless streams with concrete beds, since children can no longer play in the mud without intensive stormwater mitigation they will need to have educational centers to teach them what happens when things get wet, and a paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson would read, “He governs best who governs stormwater.”
To make matters worse, the article in the Citizen-Times ran ads next to it as follows:
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“No, no!” you cry. That’s not the point. The point is we’re creating jobs. Well, the latest reports say a total of 131,000 jobs were lost in July taking into consideration the following from the New York Times:
The Labor Department greatly revised its headline number for June, widening the job loss figure for that month to 221,000 jobs, from 125,000. Private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000, was lowered to 31,000.
If you would enjoy a moment of sanity in the pretzel-logic of public policy, I would highly refer you to a somewhat dated article in Reason.
As if to give me a reason to keep blogging, I read earlier today in a book on electronics instrumentation by Ralph Morrison
To teach is to use words.
And so, I will make another attempt. Conservative think tanks have been writing about conservation laws for decades, but the belief that there are no repercussions from government gimmes won’t die. A corollary of that, since logic is out the window, is that aimless government profligacy will boost the economy. The people that supported the creation of the Fed acknowledged the cyclical nature of macroeconomics in a capitalist society and figured an oversight agency could soften the blows. Many disagree, but those who can tolerate the Fed have some expectation that those making the decisions understand economics. It would be nice if the folks running the Fed, crunching (operative word) numbers in the CBO, and the president’s financial advisers could at least acknowledge basic concepts like (1) debts are to be repaid, (2) it is unlikely anybody is going to forgive the US’ debt, (3) people expected to pay for expanding government programs and jobs are already refraining from spending and slowing the economy, (4) short-term infusions of public dollars into the economy are not going to sustain jobs once the money runs out, (5) creating jobs that don’t do anything but spin weasel-words are not getting food and shelter to those who would like to earn some, (6) making people who work spend their money (through taxes) on rewards for those who don’t encourages people not to work and markets to slow, (6) government can outcompete the private sector because the former can rely on taxing power to survive whereas the latter relies on customer satisfaction, (7) history has repeatedly played out what can be forecast about inefficiencies associated with centralized remote control of large projects, etc.
In my limited experience, I’ve never found a progressive who was willing to explain how his math creates something out of nothing. Suffice it to say, government can play favorites and give tax collections to good grant writers or cronies considered pass-offable as good grant writers. That’s good for the economy and saving jobs. And so we need more government stimulation of the economy to create excessive debt and deflated currency to fund short-term jobs. Some claim a B.S. In math is not enough to understand the complex math. Others say math is garbage. Build it and they will come.
Actually, the only time I’ve heard of the something-from-nothing routine outside of political rhetoric and bad science was in reports about some guy, around 30AD, going around feeding thousands of people with just a few loaves and a few tiny fish. This same dude is believed by many to be God. So preposterous is the notion of a miracle-worker to others, they wish to ban any mention of his name from public. If we could re-invoke logic, we would conclude either those in government fancy themselves to be the true Messiahs, capable of overriding the laws of physics if the masses will only believe in them, or a more [fill in the blank] prospect.
If free speech meant it was as easy to quote a religious leader as it is to quote an electrical engineer or a newspaper man, I’d say the only take on the tangled web that makes any sense reminds me of a quote in St. John 8:43-45. But since the ACLU has owned my speech going back years before is became isn’t, I must backpedal. Some people have now convinced me they’re working too hard to have any inclination to apply what developmental psychologists used to call space-relations skills – but the president’s advisers?!
