#1. The Magical Government Job Tree!
Did you know that governments don’t actually create jobs? Think of it this way: If the government wants to spend one dollar to create a job somewhere, then it has to take the dollar from somewhere else before they can spend it. It’s actually worse, because the taxpayer had to also pay the salary of the politician who taxed him, including the job that the taxpayer is being forced to create. It’s a double loss. Instead of the private employer just hiring someone directly, instead the government decides to pick the winner and the loser, instead of the free market.
Whenever a politician tells you that they’re going to create jobs for some new government infrastructure project, think of it like this. If you have a bucket and a pool, and you take the bucket and fill it up from the pool, then walk around to the other side and dump the water back in, have you increased the amount of water in the pool? Of course not. But that’s what politicians are effectively doing when they tax people to “create jobs.” They take water out of one end of the pool, and dump it in the other. And frequently that “water” (i.e. your money) goes to whoever is the most politically connected constituency that lobbied for the cash.
