The boys at Power Line smell a rat. A Democratic rat. A unionized government employee rat. A money-grubbing stimulus bill fat cat commie wolf pack government cheese-eating rat. And aren’t we all sick and tired of those teacher, cop and construction worker parasites?

That’s all there is to it. Simple. Succinct. Stupid.

There are about 310 million people in the U.S. and about 160 million of those are employed, about 15 million of those are government employees and about 8 million are union members. You can see how we ended up running everything, how we got Obama elected just so we could douse the nation with gasoline and throw flares at it: pandering to 2.58% of America. Nothing much more to be said about us.

Since the recession started, almost eight million private sector jobs have been lost. But no worries if you’re a government employee; in the public sector, almost 600,000 jobs have been gained. We are experiencing a deep private sector recession, combined with a government boom:

I'd hardly call it a 'boom,' but there are more employees. And that's exactly how the graph is supposed to look, that's a good thing in a recession.

That was the whole idea behind the stimulus, duh. The government would step in to shoulder the employment load while the private sector was tanking. How's about another graph? This one shows where the $750 billion in stimulus funds were allocated:

Infrastructure and science, education and training and healthcare all increase the numbers of people on government payrolls. I’d certainly rather have people doing those things for the nation than have them sitting at home, looking for work. I don’t mind at all having my taxes spent that way.

Incidentally, did you notice how those three bubbles added together are still much smaller than the tax bubble? About 1/3 of the America-killing stimulus bill, the largest allocation by far, are Republicans’ vaunted tax cuts. Those were implemented far more quickly than the other provisions, so, if the bill’s been a failure so far, you know what to blame.

Workers of the private sector, arise! You can no longer afford to keep your public sector masters in the lavish style to which they have become accustomed.

Bow before us, the guys who build your roads and bridges!

A simple way to think about the Democratic Party is, you’re the human being, they’re the tapeworm. Yet they claim a weird sort of parasite’s moral superiority over you: if you point out that they have their hand in your pocket, you’re a “smartass.” The Democratic Party needs to be torn, root and branch, from our public life.

We should be murdered, every last nurse and fireman.

• 

George Will, what an old bag. I oughta hire a gang of giddy children to slap Grandma senseless.

Scroogenomics
by George Will

WASHINGTON — Another huge value-destroying hurricane is about to slam America, destroying billions of dollars of value. Another Katrina? No, another Christmas.

Take cover, everybody, a ‘value’ tragedy, a bruising of ‘value’, is about to blah-blah. And all the smart people in the world have already clicked something else.

But, no, not me. Why? Insomnia.

This voluntary December calamity is explained in a darkly amusing little book that is about the size of an iPhone. “Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays” comes from a distinguished publisher, Princeton University Press, and an eminent author, Joel Waldfogel of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.

This is going to be depressing, one way or another, because the title isn’t bad at all. When George Will likes it, especially if it’s ‘darkly amusing’, it’s guaranteed to be complete dog poo.

He says that the crux of Yuletide economics, which common sense suggests and research confirms, is:

Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients’ preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for gifts is usually less than what the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency of allocating value by gift-giving is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on recipients’ own purchases.

AHH, HEADACHE. Why does George Will even exist, other than to pain good people? Good lord, it’s Christmas, you douchebarrel.

By calculating the difference between the consumption of holiday goods (e.g., jewelry, but not gasoline) in December as opposed to November and January, you get a rough estimate of Christmas spending. Waldfogel’s conservative estimate is that in 2007, Americans spent $66 billion on gifts and produced $12 billion less satisfaction than would have been produced if the recipients had spent the $66 billion on themselves.

OOWWW. Yes, douchevat, gift-giving is bad science, it’s easy to ‘miss’. How it stinks of high spirits that besot accuracy. Lemme guess–this sort of behavior has societal consequences, you naked teens.

At least the Christmas stimulus strengthens the economy, right? Wrong, says Waldfogel. If all spending justified itself, we would pay people to dig holes and then refill them — or build bridges to unpopulated Alaskan islands. Spending is good if the purchaser, or the recipient of a gift, values the commodity more than he does the money it costs. Otherwise, there is a subtraction from society’s store of value.

…jeez, how pathetic is George? At this time of the year, perhaps we all should keep “society’s store of value” in mind. Hell, wouldn’t want to put a leak in that. No, not gonna give you anything you won’t ‘value’ as much as I paid for it. If only I knew exactly what you thought of all the stuff in the stores near me.

Douchetank offered a stupid example, incidentally. The ditch digger isn’t doing anything of value in the universe, digging and then filling in holes. But while some gifts may be unwanted, they still hold value elsewhere. That whole thing, goods moving about into higher ‘valuation’ sectors, is called…AN ECONOMY. The secondary value extracted is…MONEY. Wharton owes me some sort of award.

But, you say, what about sentimental value? Don’t you value the thoughtfulness of dotty Uncle Ralph who gave you the sweater? Actually, Ralph’s sentiment in selecting it was like your sentiment when you selected for him the candle shaped like Gandhi — desperate bewilderment about what he might like.

Were it not for sentimentality about sentiments, which are highly overrated, we would behave rationally, giving cash, thereby avoiding value subtraction. We almost do that with wedding registries.

Well, cold rationality is a drunken joy. And fulfilling a couple’s wedding demands for flatware is almost as fun. Get the idea that self-centered George has given a few stone gifts in his holiday history? It wasn’t his fault–he’s too smart to make mistakes. It’s stupid Christmas‘ fault, stupid day. And you’re stupid too. Don’t you know anything about the economy?

“There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.” So said Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1850… Data from 1919 concerning the retail giants of the day — mail-order companies (e.g., Sears and Montgomery Ward) and “dime stores” (e.g., Woolworth) — actually show that Christmas sales as a share of the economy is about half as large as it once was. This means proportionally less value subtraction. Hallelujah.

Cue George, on his phone:

“Hello, is this Harriet? Harriet, this is George Will. Yes, good afternoon. The holidays are upon us again, Harriet, so I thought I’d call you while I was making out here, before me, my schedule. Tell me, Harriet–in dollar terms, what sort of value would you put on a toaster?”

[Pause]

“A toaster, like perhaps a chrome one, say a Hamilton Beach. What would you hazard is its worth?”

[Pause]

“Yes, roughly, I understand. Of course, very good. Harriet, if I find one at that price, I shall gift wrap it and send it to you.”

*click*

Today:

US recession over, unemployment seen at 10 pct

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) – The worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression has ended, but weak household spending as the labor market struggles to create jobs will slow the pace of the economy’s recovery, according to a survey released on Monday.

The survey of 44 professional forecasters released by the National Association for Business Economics, also known as the NABE, found that 80 percent of the respondents believed the economy was growing again after four straight quarters of declines.

“The great recession is over,” NABE President-Elect Lynn Reaser said.

Then:

One of those rare must-reads.

Closing The Book On The Bush Legacy
Sep 11 2009, 10:41 am by Ronald Brownstein

Thursday’s annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty and access to health care-the Bureau’s principal report card on the well-being of average Americans-closes the books on the economic record of George W. Bush.

[more]

Right here in California, in our capital, there’s a recession-fueled tent city that’s big and getting bigger.

It makes you wonder if city and county governments have quietly come to accept that their most vulnerable citizens could end up on their streets. You might see a tacit acceptance on their part in providing port-a-potties and security guards or police patrols for the encampments. Gotta admit, this is rattling.