One of the most incredulously banal declarations made repeatedly by Republicans, as all of their declarations of course are made repeatedly and in fact incessantly, is that “Government doesn’t create jobs.” Unfortunately, this declaration is of such conspicuous and empirically and easily refutable asininity that its repeaters can only reasonably be regarded as liars. While the Republican Party in its present incarnation is essentially an unholy carnival uniting water-carriers for major financial institutions, corporations and the top two percent of the income brackets, with medieval ideas regarding science and culture and religion, along with a gloss of fringe conspiracy mongering, bigotry and gun-hawking mental instability, its critical operation is its supersonically money powered propaganda machine.

So, while Republicans will let this glaringly delusional untruth roll off their tongues like drops and rivulets of excess saliva the rest of us should always be reminded how incredibly stupid it is. First, the agriculture and defense-aerospace sectors, literally, would not exist without their government props. Kaput, bango, gone, baby, gone without them. Absent the overflowing Defense Department largesse funneled their way by congressional coddlers and Pentagon procurement operatives, Lockheed Martin, Boeing Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky and General Dynamics would be no more. And unless, by some latter day revelatory miracle god has taken to operating these lucrative enterprises without the utilization of employees, that is one hell of a lot of government created jobs.

American agriculture is no different. For all of its modern existence it has been entirely dependent upon tariffs, protections or direct subsidies for its very sustainment. Yes, government has created and is continuing to create many a job there. If you happen to be so fortunate as to live in a congressional district or state represented by a Republican senator or member of congress, you will know that your government representative will be making a righteously noisy fuss should any attempt be made in any budget or appropriations proposal to remove the government bacon nourishing the industries and jobs indigenous to those locales. It seems quite effortless for them to temporarily displace the lie that government doesn’t create jobs, when it comes to protecting the livelihoods of those in the areas they represent who vote. Then, by god, government sure as hell creates jobs. Of course, how Republicans carry their heads around balanced on their shoulders with brains riven with that level of cognitive dissonance remains a scientific mystery. The bountiful and shameless hypocrisy on the other hand is just another day at the office for this bunch.

One doggedly inescapable economic fact is that seventy to eighty percent of the American economy is driven by consumer spending. Therefore, no matter how rhetorically convenient or appealing it may be to pretend that a fire fighter, teacher, police officer, employee of a state, local or federal government agency isn’t holding an actual job, or that this position serves no necessary function for society at large, indeed, that person spends her paycheck just exactly like any other employee in the private sector, which means, every product or consumer item purchased, from houses to cars to refrigerators down to safety pins and Q-tips, puts money in the pockets of merchants and manufacturers, and supports the jobs of owners, managers and workers in this multifarious array of private enterprises.

A significant portion of the currently high unemployment rate is related quite directly to the dismissal of countless state and local employees, from teachers and first responders to administrative workers due to the recession and subsequent gutting of state budgets with the corresponding layoffs of state and municipal workers. Many of these jobs were temporarily spared by time-limited infusions of stimulus money, but Republicans were not in favor of stimulus money because of course government cannot create jobs. One may bet with a nearly one-hundred percent certainty, one of the surest bets, or as hedge fund managers like to call them, investments you will ever make,  that Republicans are counting those losses as job losses, and those formerly working government employees as unemployed, when they are shrieking and weeping crocodile tears over the jobless recovery and assailing the Obama Administration for the lack and loss of jobs. By golly, they’re jobs now.   

Perhaps this is too subtle a point for the conservative mind. If not, one cannot conclude other than that these Republicans either are liars, buffoons or some noxious combination of the two. You decide.