Seven moons above, seven moons for love

Aided by the Senate's two Maine RINOs, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (and I surely hope future primary challenges are being readied, there), Democrats Tuesday managed to push through a bill that will hand extra federal money to unemployed Americans whose unemployment insurance has run out, so they won't have to take less attractive jobs at lower pay than their old jobs -- a hardship which might make them angry enough to stop voting Democratic.

Some say the "benefits" are now extended to 99 weeks, some 129. But it's a distinction without a difference. Current policy, clearly, is that the federal government -- rather than slashing taxes and regulations and thus allowing the frozen free-market economy to begin to thaw -- will tax the productive classes in order to pay people to be unemployed essentially forever, kind of like a baby sitter who keeps the kids quiet by dosing them with opium.

The Republican Senate leadership blocked the bill for weeks because Democrats refused to obey their own "pay-as-you-go" rules, which would have required them to cut porkulus spending elsewhere to free up the required $33 billion.

Instead, Democrats will either tax the productive class to raise the required $33 billion, or else borrow the money from China, at which point the productive class will end up being taxed to pay both the principal and the interest.
 
But now to our point: On the night before the vote, Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid said something very interesting. First he said "I don't understand" why Republicans were refusing to vote for his vast new welfare handout. (It's welfare because the "insurance premiums" employers were required to pay on these workers were assessed at rates set by actuaries assuming 13 or 26 weeks of benefits. The benefits which were funded are gone. They cannot be "extended." The bags of loot now contemplated are nothing more nor less than redistribution payments seized from the employed.) Then he said they should understand that such money, once handed to the unemployed, have a "two-to-one multiplier effect" in benefits to the nation's economy.

First, if Sen. Reid couldn't hear the Republican leadership continually repeating that they'd back his bill if only he would cut real spending elsewhere to "pay for it," rather than just saying, "We'll either tax or borrow the money after Nov. 2," perhaps we have to add a hearing impairment to the 70-year-old majority leader's growing list of frailties.

But this misses the more important point. If taxing money from the productive classes and handing it to the unemployed has a beneficial "two-to-one multiplier effect," Sen. Reid may have stumbled on the answer to all our economic woes!

Why not just increase all tax rates to 100 percent? Income tax? 100 percent. Property tax? 100 percent. The government simply taxes EVERYTHING, so it OWNS everything.

Then, take ALL the assets seized from the productive class, and dole them out to the weak, the sick, the poor, the unemployed, the drunken, the doped up, the lazy and the elderly, the lame, the halt and the addled, the unwed and the fruits of their loins, not forgetting vast new expenditures to lock up America's snarling youth for even longer periods in the mandatory youth propaganda camps, where they're trained to be good little socialists, even if the spelling and arithmetic stuff seem to have pretty much fallen by the wayside.

The result, according to Sen. Reid's newly discovered "two-to-one multiplier effect"? The economy will almost immediately be twice as large, twice as healthy, twice as robust and productive as it was before!

It's the two-for-one multiplier! Yay!

Unfortunately, for those of us not lucky enough to be orbiting the planet Beta Lyrae, Robert J. Barro (a professor of economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution) and Charles J. Redlick looked into these reported "multiplier effects" in the  sadly down-to-earth Wall Street Journal last October, and found them about as reliable as most alien encounter reports, whether they involve sexy moon maidens or not.

"The bottom line is this," Messrs. Barro and Redlick wrote: "The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. ... However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP."

Oh dear.