Saturday, July 2, 2011

An Obama-Friendly Solution To Unemployment

OK, to call this a "solution" to unemployment is a bit of oversell, but it certainly will help. And it's drawn directly from Obama's own words and beliefs.

Remember the Joe The Plumber incident? If you need a reminder, here are Obama's own words expounding on his economic theories.

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance at success, too... My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. If you've got a plumbing business, you're gonna be better off [...] if you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody's so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Spread the wealth around. Share the wealth. Spread the money around. Sounds like it could work out, if done properly.

Such as, say, cutting the minimum wage.

Not by a lot. Say, about 10%, from $7.25 to $6.50. That's still pretty decent, considering the demands of most minimum-wage jobs. And if it's cut 10%, that means that for every 9 employees currently making minimum wage, we could have 10 for the same payroll.

And let's be honest -- unemployment tends to hit the people at the bottom of the economic strata hardest. Increasing the number of minimum-wage jobs at a time when unemployment is over 9% will at least help a little towards getting people back to work.

It's at least as likely to help as the infamous stimulus package. Remember those projections of what unemployment would be with and without the stimulus? When you add in the actual unemployment figures, it is well above both lines.

We've tried the best ideas the left has, and it's gone nowhere. Unless, of course, you actually buy into the "we kept things from getting so, so much worse!" argument -- that's the perfect political excuse, as it is utterly unverifiable. No, it's much more honest to look at that chart, look at what the Democrats promised would happen, and what really happened.

So why not give this one a try?

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