By Paul Lazaro

There is a lot of talk in Washington about what effect the President’s blank slate mentality will have on his first 100 days in office. We already know two things: (1) Obama promised to create jobs and (2) he vowed to stimulate the economy with a 300 billion dollar “tax cut.” If you expect this to be the article where I finally agree with Obama, guess again! Government is incapable of creating sustainable work, nor can something be called a tax cut when it gives 100 billion dollars, $100,000,000,000, to those who do not pay taxes.

The notion of Obama creating 4 million jobs is flawed in two respects. First, 200,000 of those jobs will be added to the federal bureaucracy, I mean government sector.  200,000 more unfireable bureaucrats who will be unavailable in the DMV, Post Office, and every other inefficient government office, all paid with our tax dollars.  In the last eight years, Republican leadership has brought big government to new heights.  I can’t wait to see what it will look like after Hansel (Harry Reid) and Gretel (Nancy Pelosi) get a crack at it!

Next, Obama plans to create 600,000 jobs in the private sector. How is any working American OK with this! Those jobs are not created with the snap of a finger; they are created through “incentives.” These are what the government calls funding or tax cuts given to corporations to encourage them to start hiring. These “incentives” give some corporations an unfair advantage and disrupt the free market by taking jobs from those corporations that compete with the government’s elect. In other words, it will seem that millions of jobs have been created, but only after the record is manipulated in ways that might remind you of Enron.

Ever wonder how corporations get too big to fail?  One way is to get the government involved, the policy President Obama hopes to afflict us with (remember Fannie Mae?). I can hear the economic nationalists clambering with the retort that Obama will only give incentives to companies keeping jobs at home. News flash, xenophobes: a recent report showed that overseas and multinational corporations create more jobs in America than all other entities!

Under Obama’s plan, 100 million people who do not pay taxes will get a “tax cut.” That’s 100 million people getting your money for doing nothing. The rationale is that putting checks into the their hands will jumpstart the economy. While putting the money in the bank will do more good than many admit (money deposited in the bank frees liquidity), most of these funds will not be deposited, nor will they fuel consumption. Instead, people will use this money to pay credit card debt, meaning producers have already been compensated.

Overall, the prospect of government growing, taking more of our money and of MORE corporatism makes me think we are headed for a big fall. Worst of all, it might not be long before China, which has already joined the Russians in condemning American capitalism, cuts our credit like the FUBU cashiers cut Kevin Federline’s credit card.