Joblessness and ‘Shuttlyndra’

Joblessness

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims that joblessness in the private sector isn’t as much of a problem as joblessness in the public sector.

Senior Counsel Hans Bader comments.

“This nonsense could only come from someone like Reid, who has been a government official for decades, and is supported by liberal government employee unions. […] Reid was defending Obama’s costly American Jobs Act proposals, which would spend billions more on state government employees, who are already much better compensated than the average American worker, and who have generous pension benefits that have resulted in trillions in unfunded pension benefits at taxpayer expense.”

Shuttlyndra

Newly uncovered correspondence suggests that the Senate Launch System is truly “Shuttlyndra”—nothing but a “pork rocket to nowhere.”

Adjunct Scholar Rand Simberg comments.

“How long will the Shuttlyndra charade continue? If Congressman Rohrabacher was chairman of the House Space, Science and Technology Committee, it’s likely that he would have had hearings on it long ago and Shuttlyndra would have been exposed and perhaps on its way to the dustbin of history. Unfortunately, he’s not, because the current chairman, 88-year-old Ralph Hall of Texas and a supporter of Shuttlyndra, switched parties in 2004 in exchange for an offer from the Republicans to keep his seniority, and outranks Rohrabacher, so don’t expect hearings on this any time soon. But don’t expect it to go away, particularly in the coming fiscal maelstrom, as NASA is forced to choose between saving the Webb telescope and saving the congressional pork rocket. The former will allow us to see all the way to the beginning of the universe, while the latter is so short sighted, it can’t see beyond an election.”