Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Nothing stimulating here..

According to Jake Tapper at ABCNEWS.com Obama's stimulus plan will add 600,000 employees to the federal payroll. I have no problem with federal employees, they are probably as hard working by ratio as those in the private sector. My main problem with this is it's 600,000 people making nothing tangible or exportable. All federal jobs are service jobs, hell they don't even make license plates - prisoners do that.

Therefore we make no movement forward on the trade deficit which could bring us out of the recession faster. Make-work, particularly the kind that makes nothing that can be sold is a dead end.

Take the money for the 600,000 jobs and create Alternative Energy subdivisions of current companies, or create new private companies that make the world's best, most efficient, solar cells, windmill blades, algae to energy plants etc. Pay quality engineers to invest themselves in making things that can be sold internationally. Maybe we get half the money to create the machines that create the products, with the other half used to hire 300,000 private sector employees who will own shares in their companies. This would stimulate efficiency in the product development making the products more likely to sell worldwide. Taxpayers would save hundreds of billions of dollars in pension building monies that would have had to go to the federal employees.

License any unique technologies derived from the research so that other countries can not rip off our intellectual property. And while you're at it give tax credits to Americans who buy American and increase tariffs on imports to stimulate American company growth. Other countries tariff our exports at draconian levels to make our products difficult to sell.

Chickens, roost up.

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