3.3 Million Jobs Lost -- The Stimulus Works!

I was reading through various libertarian leaning blogs and found this.  The good people at Stimulatedyet.com were keeping track of the Obama administrations' attempts at creating job. I know, I know, reader, try not to laugh. Everyone that took an economics class I'm sure remembers that the government does not create jobs, the private sector creates jobs. Any job that a government employee is performing is actually an expense because it is paid for by taxes. Real jobs don't generate expenses for other people. Anyway, before I get too far off topic, this report catalogs the stimulus from Jan 2009 to Feb 2010.

Image taken from Bijenkorf.wordpress.com

Here's a tickler:

...

FEBRUARY 6, 2009
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the unemployment rate increased from 7.2 percent in December 2008 to 7.6 percent in January 2009, with a loss of
598,000 jobs.

FEBRUARY 9, 2009
When asked how soon the effects of the Democrats‘ ―stimulus will be felt when it is signed into law, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers tells
CNN ―[y]ou‘ll see the effects begin almost immediately.

...

NOVEMBER 6, 2009
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the unemployment rate increased to
10.2 percent in October 2009, with a loss of 558,000 jobs.

NOVEMBER 8, 2009
Summers tells The Washington Post that ―I think we got the Recovery Act right.

NOVEMBER 17, 2009
Vice President says in an interview on Comedy Central‘s The Daily Show that
―[w]e‘ve been in business seven, eight months. You haven‘t seen wasteful spending. No one has said we spent $2 million on things that didn‘t exist.

...

DECEMBER 4, 2009
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that the unemployment rate decreased two tenths of one percent to 10 percent in November 2009, while 11,000 more jobs are lost.

Read the rest here.

This kind of poor planning and management only reinforces libertarian arguments for a smaller government. This Keynesian stimulus begs the question...where does the money come from? It comes from taxes, which slow recovery and growth or it comes from the Federal Reserve which prints the money, or better known as inflation. Ah, inflation, the hidden tax, when the government decides to devalue the money. Only the government benefits from this; we, the people, do not. We must suffer the lesser value of our savings.

The libertarian solution for this mess would have been to do nothing, or better yet, cut the size of government and cut taxes by 50%. That extra money would have allowed businesses to continue operating. There would have been real income in people's hands to put towards savings or paying down debts. If the government had done nothing, the economy probably would have gotten worse, admittedly, but it would have recovered faster. As it is, we'll be seeing the effects of the government's failed-debt-inducing stimulus along with high unemployment for many more years.

This is the job that Democrats AND Republicans are doing. If they're doing such a great job with the stimulus, then why trust them with health care or a jobs bill.

UPDATE: A little something from Judge Napolitano...