I’d like to tell you the difference between work and jobs. In the form of a story.
Once, a small software company, let’s call it “Ken’s Company’, got a couple million dollars of government money to do some work… let’s call it “software infrastructure spending”.
Ken’s Company labored 3 years building that infrastructure. New engineers were hired, Ken’s Company even invested hundreds of thousands of its own money in this infrastructure. The government liked it. They promised even more money.
Then the Iraq war cost more than expected. Budgets became tight. The government sponsor of Ken’s Company’s work lost their funding, and thus Ken’s Company lost its funding for the work.
And then a strong recession hit.
Ken’s Company had a choice to make… it had workers on staff that had been doing government work. But work is not a job.
Times were tough, but the other people at Ken’s Company were good people. And they sacrificed. And eventually, things came together and through cleverness, sacrifice, and sweat, those workers now had jobs because ultimately the purpose of Ken’s Company wasn’t government work, but creating products that help other people so much they buy them even in a recession.
The moral of this story is that government work ALWAYS has a calendar on it. “Jobs” building bridges end when the bridge is built.
The “4” million “jobs”, costing $200,000K each to create are temporary work.
All Obama and company are doing is kicking a can of worms down the road, but making it more rotten for the next group that has to pay for it.
They don’t care as long as it happens to some other politician.