Shovel Ready Is As Shovel Ready Does

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I get a [usually] daily newsletter called WordSpy. It’s about new words emerging into the lexicon and I find it interesting. Yesterday’s word was “Shovel-Ready” and I found it interesting not as a writer who enjoys words, but because of the example the newsletter cited of its usage:

Nearly every economist who spoke here agreed that a dollar invested in, say, a new transit system or in bridge repair is spent and respent more efficiently than a dollar that comes to a household in a tax cut. A bigger percentage of the latter is saved, they said. There was concern, however, that the nation lacked enough ’shovel ready’ projects that could be ramped up quickly, generating jobs.
—Louis Uchitelle, “Economists Warm to Government Spending but Debate Its Form,” The New York Times, January 7, 2009

Forget “shovel-ready”. That quote is appalling! Poor stupid citizenry, spending their money how they want, when there are bridges to nowhere to build.

Sadly, this is the mindset that we face in 2009. With Barack Obama promising more filthy jobs for the borderline retarded, those of us who have actually escaped manual labor because we’re smart, we’re engineers, entrepreneurs, doctors, nurses, and Hooters Girls, are now being told that our patriotic duty entails throwing away our incomes on the people who didn’t bother to be educated or at least find a way out of manual labor.

If I were an economist quoted in the New York Times, I’d kill myself. Or maybe, if I were intellectually consistent, I would emerge from my maisonette and pick up a shovel.

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Tags: Socialism