The item by Publius, “Census Workers Blow Whistle on Hiring Fraud“, actually reminds us of one of the Obama administration’s related scams, the “green jobs” industry. That is something that sounds a little weedy but is really quite simple, a failure to homogenize the data. This practice is employed in order to make soaring claims of jobs “created” from taking taxpayer money and mandating something politically desired. The truth is that the jobs (briefly) created are a fraction of the number claimed.

Consider what we have uncovered in the latter, which I detail in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America in a discussion that reminds us as well how “green jobs” even more closely resemble census (and of course “stimulus”) jobs in that they are temporary jobs, “bubble” jobs existing only so long as the government (taxpayer) transfer of wealth continues:

“But the most glaring similarity [between 'green jobs' and 'stimulus jobs'], and indeed feature of ‘green jobs’ is that they are temporary. Before you find comfort in this, recall that the unions don’t stand for such notions, and the enactment of green jobs schemes ensures further infusions of taxpayer money into the bubble to make the make-work permanent.

We saw how some jobs supposedly created under the ’stimulus’ actually reflected funding of a position that lasted, in some cases, only a week. The reason you hear of enormous numbers of projected jobs is because those pushing them do not ‘homogenize the data.’ Homogenizing, or harmonizing, the claimed green jobs figures annualizes them, translating the thousands of days-, weeks- or months-long gigs (i.e., ‘jobs created’) into the equivalent of fulltime jobs. So a sexy claim of half a million jobs, which are sixty-day installation contracts, is homogenized at around 75,000 ‘jobs created.’

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THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

– Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

– Esther 4:14

These are interesting times. Under President Obama and the most liberal Congress since 1965, the United States government is expected to borrow a trillion dollars per year for the next decade while the size and power of our federal government will grow at the expense of our liberties. 

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AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

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