We’re No. 1
Nevada’s official unemployment rate became the highest in the nation Friday, jumping to 14 percent.
Nevada’s senior senator — and the ramrod of President Obama’s statist agenda — Harry Reid responded from the Senate floor Friday that things would be even worse if Democrats had not acted to create or save jobs through their bailout and “economic stimulus” spending packages.
Sen. Reid bragged the $787 billion stimulus act “has created or saved more than 4,000 jobs in just the past four months alone” in Nevada. The highway bill that Congress extended earlier this year saved “hundreds and hundreds of jobs” in the state, he said.
Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., offered a different conclusion. “Since the passage of the stimulus, Nevada’s economy has continued to decline. ... It does not appear that jobs are being saved or created under the current economic plan.”
In fact, the kind of bailouts of failed enterprises and “shovel more tax money to our buddies” stimulus slush funds that Sen. Reid and the Washington big spenders have been pushing for the past two years really have only made things worse, just as heavy-handed government interventions — under both a Republican and a Democratic president — made unemployment worse every year throughout the 1930s.
(“We have tried spending money,” FDR Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. said in 1939. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And an enormous debt to boot!”)
Washington can’t create private-sector jobs directly, but it can slash taxes and regulations, while removing the swords of Damocles that hang over Nevada’s employers and would-be employers today, leading them to wonder, “What will ObamaCare cost me? What could a ‘cap-and-trade’ carbon tax cost me?”
Sen. Reid’s election slogan now appears to be “No one could do more.” More than one Nevadan must now be tempted to say, “Please, senator, stop doing us so many favors.”
