Wanted to be sure and snag this beautiful piece of driftwood on the Internet River, before it floated any further out of sight. Valuable lesson for us all, or at least, those among us who need to learn it. Read…absorb…:

Jerry Bower, a guest blogger at CNBC, has good insight into why US companies are not hiring:

America isn’t hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they’ve been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care (being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon (pulverized)? Until you know, you don’t grow, and until you grow your market, you don’t grow your payroll.

Bowyer closes with a punchline that says it all:

Jobs aren’t languishing despite the government’s best efforts. They’re languishing because of them.

Update: And, you see where this gets ya.

Unemployment hit 9.5 percent in June, according to the Department of Labor, putting the figure 2.5 percent higher than the White House had predicted it would be if a government stimulus spending program went into place. Moreover, the new figure is nearly one percent higher than where the White House said it would be without any stimulus spending at all.

In fact, the White House never predicted that unemployment would rise above nine percent regardless of whether Congress spent the nearly $800 billion in so-called economic stimulus spending it recommended at the time.

Apologies in advance for what follows, I’m simply not a decent enough person to rise above it…

Hey all you Palin-haters. Yeah, you. Isn’t it great that we kept that know-nothing Tundra Barbie away from the seat of power? Really dodged a bullet there, huh? How many times do you think she would have used Air Force One to buzz-bomb Manhattan?