The Rant – Tax Cut Extension Creates Jobs, Solves Employment Problem

Feb 21, 2012

The Rant – Tax Cut Extension Creates Jobs, Solves Employment Problem

by Mike McCune –

Numbers mean nothing to Washington politicians and bureaucrats. The difference between white and black carries much more weight in our national capitol and that is why everything seems to be a similar shade of gray when it comes from the heart of the country.

Today’s point is the way Congress almost unaimously passed the extension of the payroll tax cuts, 2% off the workers’ mandatory contribution to Social Security, and then announced the large number of Americans affected by the extension. The announcement touted “the 160 million workers and jobless benefits for millions more…” while backing President Barack Obama’s faulty jobs agenda in a burst of bipartisanship not seen in Washington since the Patriot Act bill went through in the aftermath of 9-11.

The troublesome part is the number of workers claimed to be beneficiaries of this action. America’s economy, at its peak performance, was able to generate no more than 153 million jobs by the Bureau of Labor’s own reports. Today the number of jobs, per the same source, is no more than 142 million (if you disregard the fact the agency adds 48,000 jobs to the submitted state counts each monthly “as a routine adjustment basis” as leaked by a BLS insider.) So how could there be 7 to 18 million more “workers” affected by this action than what the economy is actually utilizing or has ever had utilized at one time? Quite simply, it is Washington math.

You have a job but it is over at the end of February either through retirement or you are hired for another position. That is one job but the person filling your old position is counted also and you are also counted in your new job. The rotation creates the illusion of more “employment” than is actually there at any given moment in time. The elected officials merely used Internal Revenue sources to show how many people filed W-2s for last year. If an individual had more than one W-2, each was counted as a separately employed “person”.

So you can readily see the politicians didn’t really lie, they merely used inflated numbers to make it appear that their action helped more people than it really does.

By the same token those receiving jobless benefits and are thus the beneficiaries of the action are also double, triple or quadruple counted by the Washington bureaucracy. If you go from unemployment to a job and back to unemployed, you show up three times of the count register, not once. Thus Washington’s compassionate politicians can show how much they truly care about the average Joe on Main Street.

Washington’s bureaucrats need the expanded numbers to “demonstrate the organization’s worthiness” every year when budget time rolls around so the agency gets its necessary funding. Except there is one slight problem with that premise as well. The Senate hasn’t passed a budget is over 1,000 days, almost three full years. So why do the agencies feel it is necessary to continue the deluge of phony numbers when there is no budget process to justify such a blatant lie?

This is why the debt continues to grow. There are millions more who need the aid than can be justified by any insipid action Washington officialdom can conjure up. But it has to “justify its existence” somehow and by passing these meaningless, useless measures that merely add to the mounting debt problem is how it seems best suited for the job.

This is how the middle class continues to vanish in America. Its future was borrowed during the economy’s hey-day in the 50s and 60s when now dead generation was receiving benefits it hadn’t earned. Thus to keep the illusion of wealth, borrowing (debt) had to be employed from the future for the next 40 years. Now we are borrowing from generations not yet conceived who will be created by people not yet conceived in fact but merely in Washington’s fertile imagination.

To understand this fact, ask yourself why a person newly born is now required to be registered with the Social Security Administration–thus being immediately eligible for benefits–when he won’t start paying anything into the system for at least 18 years if indeed Social Security is merely “insurance” as FDR stated when he sold the scam to America.

That’s what the touted “rare bipartisanship” vote today signified. More of the same illogical math will be forthcoming from Washington’s puppets. Apparently is is working…the United State’s unemployment headcount rate, as Obama promised when pushing his 2009 stimulus package, is dropping inexorably towards the 8% figure.

Washington’s finest have started nothing new however; Hitler’s inner core deployed non-existent military units in key positions towards the end of WWII. We all know how well that worked out.

Michael McCune spent 16 years as a government tax auditor and then operated a consulting/accounting business for 14 years. For 11 years he wrote a biweekly opinion column for the local paper (1981-1992).

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