Charity Doesn't Work

I don't like Obama's idea to give $3000 credits for every employee a business doesn't lay off -- what a short-sighted and horrible idea! If a business doesn't need you anymore, then it's best for everyone that you go and do something more useful. No one benefits from bloated inefficient employees who are only there for charity.

I'm also a little concerned about Obama's predilection for star power... he just reaches for the big names instead of really looking for some talent and fresh ideas. Apparently Sanjay Gupta has even been approached for the surgeon general's spot... come on! Why not just appoint Alan Alda, the guy who played Dr. Pierce on MASH?

And finally, I don't like that Obama has made the economy his top priority. The economy mostly dances to its own drum, and anyway swings in cycles, so it will right itself in time willy nilly. Honestly I think people are a little exhausted and need this recession now to regain some feeling, to get away from seeing houses as something to be flipped and get back to seeing houses as something you can actually live and raise a family in. Obama should focus on longterm objectives rather than silly short-term patches like job credits. Forget the economy, let it sink! Focus your energy instead on making this a better country in the long run -- work on energy efficiency, promote less meat consumption, reduce our prison population, build more mass transit, and if you're gonna subsidize something, subsidize the arts, not failed business practices!

If he really is intent on spending his way out of a recession, the New Deal blueprint had some nice elements -- much of America's early folk music only survived because New Deal writers traveled to the South to interview and record American folk musicians as part of a Library of Congress initiative to document these oral traditions before they went extinct. In short, the very roots of the most popular music on earth, American jazz and rock' n roll, were saved -- what a great investment!

Compare that to giving $3000 to P&G to keep overpaying some employee to do data entry at 3x the rate someone in India could do it for and 500x the rate that OCR scanning software could do it for... who benefits from this? Is that the great vision for the future to aspire to, a corps of unneeded workers whose jobs are mandated by the government?