I'm not feeling stimulated, Redux (Adventures in Job Hunting, Episode 3)

As a "due diligence"-type followup to my earlier post, I offer the following Star Tribune article: Jobs for teens get needed jump-start in Dakota County:

His is one of about 300 teen and young adult jobs created this summer in Dakota County with $410,802 from the federal stimulus package. That's the local share of the $17.8 million sent to the state to generate jobs for disadvantaged teens and young adults ages 15 to 24.

The infusion of youth job funding more than doubles the usual 180 jobs that the Workforce Service of Dakota County funds annually through a state program. The jobs at five public and nonprofit agencies are available to teens and young adults who meet limited-income requirements or have developmental disabilities.

And it includes the surprisingly pertinent note:

The Dakota County libraries saw 33 applications in four days when they posted the library shelving assistant jobs. They plan to hire 18 teens to put books back on the shelves this summer, two for each of the nine branch libraries, likely starting next week.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this. As the first commenter on the Strib article noted:

WOW! 300 part time jobs created at tax payer expense and only 3,000 permanent jobs lost daily in Dakota County. Now that's change you can believe in. What do these 300 jobs entail, checking tire pressure on cars at stop lights?

I'm not feeling stimulated: Adventures in Job Hunting, Episode 1

"These positions are funded with stimulus funds and are available to youth who live in Dakota County, are between the ages of 15-24 and have a low family income, special needs or other risk factors."

Check, check, ch-- Oh.

As Philip Fry once said, "The underprivileged get all the breaks."

"Nation ready to be lied to about economy again"

Satirical paper The Onion publishes another winner.

WASHINGTON—After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system. [...]

"I thought I wanted a new era of transparency and accountability, but honestly, I just can't handle it," Ohio resident Nathan Pletcher said. "All I ever hear about now is how my retirement has been pushed back 15 years and how I won't be able to afford my daughter's tuition when she grows up."

"From now on, just tell me the bullshit I want to hear," Pletcher added. "Tell me my savings are okay, everybody has a job, and we're No. 1 again. Please, just lie to my face." [...]

"I know when he's telling the truth, and it bothers me," recently laid-off schoolteacher Mary Hanover said of Obama. "He gets this serious expression on his face and says things like, 'This is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.' Who needs to hear that? For Christ's sake, smile a bit and say we just found a diamond mine under Montana that's going to pay for everything. I'll believe you."

Socialism hits home for students in "Texas Tech" morality play

Here's one of those email forwards that boils an extremely complex issue into a little parable, so enjoy the message but take it with the grain of salt that it merits. This one makes an economic point that will resonate with students and anyone who has ever been a student (i.e. basically everyone).

An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said ok, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. But, as the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too; so they studied little.. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great; but when government takes all the reward away; no one will try or want to succeed.

Could not be any simpler than that....

It's quite clearly a fabrication, largely obvious from the lack of specifics as well as the fact that no college administration would allow such an experiment to continue once they got wind of it. Still, despite the obvious hyperbole in the last line, it possesses a kernel of truth that we all recognize.

The piece surfaced in March and has been making the rounds of blogs and conservative mailing lists, hitting my inbox from a Libertarian Party Yahoo group I belong to. You may even have seen it already. The piece even got a writeup on Snopes, who add that the tale is at least as old as 1994.