Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Crowdsourcing Request

17 Comments

I’d guess that all of Obama’s speeches are archived somewhere. Could someone do a search on them and compare the number of times he’s used the phrase “create jobs” compares to the number of times he’s used the phrase “create wealth”? I’m guessing the number of uses of the latter is approximately, or exactly zero. If so, it will be fodder for a rant on his Marxist tendencies. You can guess the theme. In fact, here’s the Twitter version: You can create jobs without creating wealth, but it’s very hard to do the latter.

17 thoughts on “A Crowdsourcing Request”

  1. You can create jobs without creating wealth, but it’s very hard to do the latter.

    You can certainly capture wealth without creating jobs, in fact you can do it while destroying jobs. Just ask the people who formerly worked at Ampad, DDI, Details, and other Bain takeovers that went bankrupt while making Romney rich.

    3. Jim, you increasingly seem to be channeling the latest campaign ads. I hope you get a little more creative at some point over the next 4 months.

    4. You neglect all the people who would have lost their jobs if the ailing companies hadn’t been saved by cutting the fat. Saving a business from oblivion, allowing it to continue productively, sounds like creating wealth to me.

    5. Jim, how many of those people stayed unemployed? Merely losing your job, doesn’t mean you can’t get another. But in my view, they wouldn’t have been fired in the first place, if they were doing valuable work relative to how much they were paid.

    6. So the folks that worked at Bain, they weren’t employees?

      A better example of creating wealth without creating jobs is Al Gore’s income from carbon offset scams.

      1. That’s not wealth creation. It’s wealth destruction and wealth transfer. The problem is that people don’t know what the word “wealth” means.

        1. I’d say more like wealth destruction, if you use Adam Smith’s definition of wealth. If you use a definition of wealth, when what is really meant “monetary instruments”, then what Gore did was create a fake commodity to absorb such instruments and transfer them to a few like himself. Some would call it wealth redistribution, but as the economy that propped up the monetary instruments fell, so did the value of those instruments. After all, a certain percentage of the value of the economy and those instruments was based on Gore’s fake commodity, which has long since vaporized as the truth has come out. So wealth wasn’t so much redistributed as simply destroyed by Gore which, based on “An Inconvenient Truth”, was his intent all along.

          I guess we can next talk about the prospects of $6 a watt solar panels as a seemingly more realistic commodity that also ended up vaporizing with plenty of people claiming not to have seen it coming.

    1. You’ve verified that? That is, you’ve searched all available speeches, and found zero instances of “create wealth”? It’s not surprising, of course — it’s exactly what I suspected. The same thing would happen if you searched for “win the war” as opposed to “end the war.”

      1. No, sorry. It’s my prediction, not a exhaustive analysis of his speeches.

        I don’t think his world view actually allows the concept.

        One can make -money-. One can -be- wealthy. But I’ve never seen the slightest indication he realizes the pie -can- grow, and that that is -creating- wealth.

        A couple of the comments below this one highlight at least one speech where he’s -accusing- Romney on focusing on ‘creating wealth’. But note that it is -not- in the sense of “growing the pie”. It is in the sense of “getting filthy stinking rich”.

  3. Well, I found one reference, in http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/25/obama-compares-romneys-rhetoric-to-cow-pie-of-distortion/ (I know, not comprehensive, just an early hit googling obama “create wealth” speech).

    From the ‘article’:
    “The main goal of a financial firm like Gov. Romney’s is not to create jobs…. Their main goal is to create wealth for themselves and their investors,” Obama told a crowd of nearly 2000 on the fairgrounds.

    It is used as an attack on Romney’s time at Bain, not in a positive light, and is directly contrasted with creating jobs. It pretty much proves your thesis.

    1. “The main goal of a financial firm like Gov. Romney’s is not to create jobs…. Their main goal is to create wealth for themselves and their investors,” Obama told a crowd of nearly 2000 on the fairgrounds.

      Which proves Obama’s economic ignorance. The main goal of any private sector company is to create wealth, not jobs. For most companies, you have to create jobs in order to create wealth, but creating jobs isn’t the goal of successful companies. If they can increase efficiency and produce the same amount with fewer people, they’ll do so whenever possible.

      Government can not be a net creator of private sector jobs. When the government gives money to someone (say Solyndra) to “create jobs”, they must first either collect taxes from the private sector or borrow. Either of those actions tends to destroy private sector jobs, and since nothing is 100% efficient (government is VERY inefficient), you’ll always destroy more jobs than your “stimulus” creates.

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