Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Up until now, I haven’t heard of stimulus funds directly providing jobs - about as far as it goes is once in a while you find yourself driving on an unpocked stretch of tarmac to run into one of those “Brought to you by the Recovery Act” signs and you think yay at least we’ve stimulated the sign industry.
So where had all that money been going? Can any of you tell me of one stimulus-funded project around here?
To my surprise, here is finally a program that directly creates jobs. The JobsNow program is, rather to my surprise, paying the wages minus taxes of certain private and non-profit employers to keep needy families from disaster.
This is…good…yet it was a bit shockingly socialist for me. Subsidizing the wages for private companies is kind of odd. I guess it already happens in agriculture and academic research and god knows what else (I mean direct funding rather than tax-benefit subsidies). What kind of companies are these? I couldn’t find any lists of employers JobsNow is benefiting, other than a cursory mention of green and tech jobs. Which would be good to fulfill the Administration’s promise of subsidizing green jobs, it’d just be a little bothersome for tax money to be spent for Target to have an extra clerk.
Anyway, I guess I’m happy to see government programs providing real results, but I also think that they failed to be as transparent about this as they could - it would certainly do the government good PR if they better broadcasted programs like this one.
