Who Won the Budget Deal?

The recent budget deal has been characterized as a victory for Republicans because there were budget cuts and no tax increases.

It is questionable whether the Democrats really lost the debate. The government gets to keep spending like Greeks. The national debt is scheduled to increase by some 8 trillion dollars over the next 10 years, and it is a certainty there will be a lot of additional spending added bring the deficit way higher.

The Republicans got a small amount of spending cuts over 10 years – most of which are so covered in smoke and mirrors we will never see them. The only meaningful budget cuts are a few billion over the next two years.

In the mean time how many more times will the debt limit have to be raised over the same 10 years so the spending can increase? The deficit is scheduled to continue to grow at nearly a trillion a year, so several increases are inevitable. The only thing the Democrats didn’t get was a tax hike…yet. The so-called super committee has yet to unveil its work.

Creating Jobs

It is tiresome to hear of statists and media types talking about politicians creating jobs. The only way a politician can create a job is by taking money from someone and giving it to someone else, usually to push paper.  This type of
job is not a real job in that it produces nothing. It is a net drain on the productive sector of the economy.

In the last couple of days the news has been full of glowing reports of how Rick Perry has created so many thousands of jobs in Texas, and Scott Walker his responsible for a resurgence in jobs on Wisconsin. The fact is neither Perry,
Walker nor the government that created them. The jobs were created by the private sector.

The only way the government can take credit for these jobs is by showing how it got out of the way of the true engine of growth, the private sector. Texas is a right to work state. Instead of making things easier for lawyers to destroy
business with their suits, Texas enacted tort reform.  Texas has no personal income tax, though it manages to raise revenues in other ways. Most cities try to have minimal regulations on business. And so on.

In other words Texas has produced its jobs miracle not by what the government has done to create them. It produced them by what the government has not done. Giving credit for the Texas miracle to politicians is an insult to the true jobs creators, the unimpeded private sector. It would be nice to see the talking heads get it right for a change.