David McElroy

I didn’t watch the big presidential speech about “creating jobs” last night. Frankly, I just don’t have the stomach for that kind of thing anymore. I just wait to read the reports in cold text. At least the written news reports have the kindness to take out the most dishonestly self-congratulatory words.

I’m curious whether there’s any honest person — of any political persuasion — who believes Barack Obama’s new plan to “create” jobs is anything other than a political maneuver to buy him more time between now and the election. I wonder whether any honest and rational person believes that it has any chance of creating net jobs.

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Like competing used car salesmen who will say anything to close a deal, Democrats and Republicans are engaged this week in a shameful contest to see who can tell the biggest lie about how they’re going to create jobs for out-of-work Americans.

In a speech tonight, Barack Obama will call for spending $300 billion to build schools, retrain workers and pay teacher salaries, among other things. (A CBS News report says this morning that the package might top $400 billion.) Meanwhile, the leading hucksters angling to win the GOP nomination twisted the facts last night over which one of them had done the best in the past in “creating jobs.”

Let’s talk for a second about reality. Politicians don’t create jobs. Politicians destroy jobs. Even if the coercive state is going to exist, the best it can ever do is step out of the way and stop crippling the market with taxes, regulation and populist rhetoric.

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I have another confession to make. I hate United Way. I also hate other similar charities that try to guilt me into giving them money, but United Way has a special place on my list of hated organizations. Let me explain.

See the T-shirt on the right? I shot that picture a year or so ago when I saw the guy wearing it eating at a fast food joint where I was. I took it because of the slogan: “I gave my fair share.” It made me ill.

I know slogans such as this one are supposed to guilt us into giving more money to charities, but seeing them just makes me not want to give the organization a penny. The idea that they’ve determined my “fair” donation is offensive and paternalistic to me.

When I used to work for “civic-minded companies,” we were invariably forced to sit through a pitch for payroll giving to United Way. The boss would always talk about how he’s proud that his company has had “100 percent participation” for ages. They even had some sort of gimmick by which the real Scrooges could give a token dollar so the company could still claim that everyone was participating. But they weren’t counting on me.

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