Government Role in Job Creation

    With the race for President heating up between Romney and Obama, the issue of jobs is being pushed to the forefront. Obama's camp argues that we are slowly adding jobs and crowing that their policies have made it happen. Meanwhile Romney supporters point to his time in the private sector and Bain Capitol lauding his experience in creating not only wealth, but saving and growing companies (and therefore jobs).
    Is there truth in both camps? Lets take the Obama folks ... all the money spent in the last four years has saved some jobs. But the big question is, is throwing money at a company or even a state or town really "creating jobs?" If you give a million dollars to a state so they now have the money to save teacher jobs, is that creation? In a year or so when the grant runs out, the state may very well be in the same situation of needing to lay off teachers, so did you create anything? Using the White Houses' own numbers, it has been shown that this "job growth" has cost taxpayers $287,000 per job! As cited in the article, you could have sent a $100,000 check to everyone who owes their job to the stimulus and we still could have come out ahead!

     I will take that one step further ... imagine if you had given 2.4 million small business owners a check (2.4 million being the estimated number of jobs saved) for that $287,000. How many jobs would that have created? As a small business owner I can tell you I could probably hire 5-7 people for a year with that money! 

    Lets estimate low and say I only hire 3 and use the rest for capitol investments (which still helps the economy). That would mean now over 7.2 million people are employed for the same amount of money the government threw away to create a mere 2.4 million the "government way."

    Now take into account that these jobs are in small business where most job creation naturally happens so the chances of a good chunk of these jobs lasting after the government money runs out is far greater then in the public sector. 

    Obama claims the economic recovery has been slowed by the Republicans blocking of his new jobs bill. Secretary Geithner hasn't denied the price tag of this new jobs bill is $200,000 per job (admittedly a discount from their spending so far, but still pretty steep.) Obama Jobs Bill Costs? So again is throwing money for temporary fixes really job growth? Is it possible the Obama folks know this but are hoping the short term boost will help the re-election? Spend it all now and figure out how to pay for it all later is getting to be too common a theme in government and that needs to stop.

    So what about Romney, he has more experience in business there is no doubt, but is that helpful in job creation if he gets to be President? Lets look at some of his proposals.    http://www.mittromney.com/jobs 

    It seems that Romney gets it better then the Democrats that the best way for Government to "create" jobs is to not try to create them at all, but to simply create an environment for the private sector to create jobs and get the hell out of the way. Some would argue that that is what led to the banking crisis ... lack of regulation, and they would have a point. But I also believe in true Capitalism where the government doesn't pick winners. I lean more towards Ron Paul's views (http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul486.html) that there is no such thing as "too big too fail." I think government shouldn't bail out bad business decisions, or bail out car companies that are overburdened with Union obligations. 

    Where Romney stands on bail-out seems still up for debate ... but either way, I think job creation is not up to the government and until a true fiscal Conservative can be elected, we will have to make due with Romney.