Women, children, minoritiesMen hit hardest:
The senior economists listened attentively as Gandy and Smeal and other advocates argued for a stimulus package that would add jobs for nurses, social workers, teachers, and librarians in our crumbling “human infrastructure” (they had found their testosterone-free slogan). Did Furman mention that jobs in the “human infrastructure”–health, education, and government–had increased by more than half a million since December 2007?
One could pardon him for not being argumentative. His boss at the economic council, Lawrence Summers, had become a national symbol of the consequences of offending feminist sensibilities and had been opposed by feminists in his appointment to the top White House post. Gandy and Smeal found their circle partners to be engaged and curious and were delighted that they stayed longer than scheduled: “We left feeling that all our preparation would bear fruit in the form of more inclusion of women’s needs, and we were right.”
They were right indeed. Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan.
No one will ever accuse him of being a strong man. Or a sensible one, actually.
No one will ever accuse him of being a strong man.
Ouch. That’s harsh.
True, but harsh.
Insanity. Pure Insanity.
There are two ways we could go. Ann Coulter says take the vote away from women (it’s not like they wouldn’t remain the largest lobbying group.) Or we could just implement universal castration to keep men happy at home raising their women’s children (from artificially inseminated surrogates of course. Angelina and Madonna have shown the way.)
Of course, once their are no longer any balls to twist, women should be universally issued Klingon pain sticks so they can keep everything orderly at home. There is a possibility that some men might still complain, so removing their voicebox would be the next logical step.
Eventually we will have utopia once men are no longer able to screw it up.
To be fair to Obama, the heavy infrastructure projects that favor employment of men take years and years to get approval before construction can even begin. Most highway and urban rail projects take 8-10 years just to make their way through all of the EPA paper work and eminent domain lawsuits before construction can commence. This is longer than two presidential terms, not to mention the fact that the economy will have long since recovered by then.
It was obvious to people like Steve Sailor and myself even during the election that. once in office, Obama would have no choice but to shift the stimulus emphasis into “human infrastructure”.
I have many issues with Obama. However, it is unfair to say that he gave into the feminists on this one.
Wasn’t the stimulus money supposed to go to “shovel-ready” projects that had already been given the greenlight from the EPA and other associated BANANA-ists, but simply lacked the cash on hand from State governments to pay for them?
That’s how it was sold to us, anyway.
Why on earth would I want to be fair to Obama??? He’s doing his best to destroy this country and his best is pretty damned good.
the heavy infrastructure projects that favor employment of men take years and years to get approval before construction can even begin.
A strawman, perhaps not complete but significantly. Facts are stubborn things and the article points out what influence woman’s groups had. Being ‘fair’ to Obama changes that not one bit.
The left doesn’t play fair and is out to destroy the principals this country was founded on and the people that still hold them today, doing a particularly good job at it in the last century. I am sick to death of so called conservatives rehabilitating the scoundrels on the left. I don’t totally dislike the Clintons, but they should have been destroyed during the impeachment and other trials. Now with the Obama’s we have much worse. We didn’t learn the lesson from FDR. We didn’t learn the lesson from Carter. Stop being fair to those that would destroy this country. Stop being fair to any that think ‘destroy this country’ is overstatement.
We are at war with an ideology that will take away most all of our freedom and being fair is just another tactic they use against us.
R Anderson,
Yes, it is true that the stimulus money was supposed to go to “shovel-ready” projects. The problem is that there are simply too few such projects available. Hence, Obama’s emphasis on “human infrastructure”. I remember reading about this specific issue on Steve Sailors blog back in December or January. In fact, I think he coined the expression “human infrastructure” himself.
Ken Anthony,
I agree with you about Obama. But lets blame Obama where he deserves the blame. We don’t help ourselves by lowering our moral standards to the same level as the left.
I don’t believe I’m suggesting we lower standards… we’re the ones that run the riff-raff out of our own (perhaps not my own) while the others circle the wagons. I just don’t think we should be doing their dirty work for them and certainly not apologizing for them.
We can turn the heat up and still be civil, but at no time compromising. Actually that’s the key… compromise is between honorable people. Lieberman, while misguided, is honorable. Gore, never was. Obama has fooled a lot of people that he is. People are mesmerized by his speech and pay no attention to his actions. That’s very old school politics and he seems to be getting away with it like nobody I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.
This is not politics as usual. People operating under that assumption are going to be blindsided.
“No one will ever accuse him of being a strong man.”
Hell, I won’t even accuse him of being a man. š
I see this as a signal that the Obama stimulus is less about stimulating and more about placating special interests. Of course, if we use certain peoples’ definition of Keynesian stimulus, even tossing a few hundred billion into the hands of your kronies and allies is just as good as any other use of the money.
Yeah, but they didn’t, Karl. They said it matters very much where the money goes. If, for example, there was merely a whomping big tax cut, that money would just be collected by Scrooge McDucks to go into their big money vault, wouldn’t do a speck of good. It had to go into the right hands.
kurt9, I’m so not buying it. Look, if the recession in these male-dominated industries happened suddenly, it’s because things that potentially have a short turn-around time went wahooni-shaped. You’re not telling me a whole bunch of projects with 8-10 year lead times all ended simultaneously early this year, and there was, surprise! no follow up work for any of them?
That’s nuts. If the only place these construction he-men could be employed was on such projects then, first, they’d not have all screeched to a halt at the same time early this year. Nobody stops building a $150 million bridge all of a sudden, recession or no recession. You finish it. Furthermore, if the only next work possible was another massive Hoover dam project, then they’d have known months in advance that it wasn’t available, and, again, there would have been no sudden dip in employment.
No, that’s not how it happened. It’s simple, actually. I live in the middle of one of the hardest-hit places, Southern California. What happened is that developers were building houses at an unsustainable pace, and then the bottom dropped out of the real estate market. Nobody was going to buy the houses at prices the developers wanted to sell. Now, they could, in principle, have cut the prices on those houses and kept building them. But they don’t want to. They hope the dip is short-lived, and they can go back to making piles of money. So they’re waiting, as long as they can.
Meanwhile, however, they don’t need more houses, and the fastest way to save on cash expenses is to not hire the contractors to build more houses. So they didn’t. Meanwhile, all the renovation work taking place with second-mortgage money equally dried up.
It’s not men building bridges and Interstates that are out of work. It’s plumbers and electricians and framers working on houses, mostly. These are are very short turn-around time projects. They can start up tomorrow, if necessary.
So could Team Obama have saved their jobs? Sure. It would have been ultimately stupid, perhaps, because the ugly fact is there were too many houses being built, and prices were too optimistic, and too many people were workign in construction. But, the Feds could easily have done so. Simply go into the home-buying business, for example. If the Feds offered to buy 100,000 new tract homes in California at the price developers wanted to sell them for (way above market), they could have kept the
shovels going just fine.
What would they have done with all those houses? Who knows? If the point of the stimulus is to lose money usefully, as it seems, then they could just have sold them at the market price, i.e. at a loss. Or if it’s all about “investment” then the government could keep them until the price rises again. This would have the weird doubly stimulating effect in that it would remove the houses from the market, so when the demand rebounded, there’d be no excess supply to delay the demand-drive recovery. It would be very much like the way they used to buy crops and plow them under to prop up the price.
Does any of this crap make sense? Of course not. No screwing around with the economy makes sense. But it was certainly perfectly possible to target the government’s action towards the industries actually in trouble. If they had wanted to. Which they didn’t.
What would they have done with all those houses? Who knows? If the point of the stimulus is to lose money usefully, as it seems, then they could just have sold them at the market price, i.e. at a loss. Or if itās all about āinvestmentā then the government could keep them until the price rises again. This would have the weird doubly stimulating effect in that it would remove the houses from the market, so when the demand rebounded, thereād be no excess supply to delay the demand-drive recovery. It would be very much like the way they used to buy crops and plow them under to prop up the price.
Or, they could’ve combined the ideas by buying the houses and then tearing them down just as they plowed under those crops. You would’ve even had to hire people to tear down the houses, a bonus for employment. That makes about as much sense (none) as so many of the other stimulus ideas and attempts to manipulate market prices.
There ya go. You’ve hit on the solution. Make it a law that anything non military the government buys it must destroy. That will eliminate the confusion as to what the governments role in the economy is.
Carl Pham, you’re right about the housing and construction industry. Yes, lots of men are out of work because the housing and construction bubbles have popped. However, I was not talking about that. I was talking about the fact that Obama talked about starting lots of NEW infrastructure projects during his campaign last year, much like the infrastructure projects that FDR had in the 30’s. My point was that you just can’t just start such projects from scratch because of the enormous delays resulting from red tape and the courts. The infrastructure construction that is on-going will continue unabated. However, there are not enough NEW “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects to absorb all of the men laid off from the residential construction trades.