See if you can spot the flaw in Senator Tarryl Clark's latest press release?

Our state is like a car stalled on a cold winter morning. We have the jumper cables out, but the governor is choosing to just drive by and wave.

How is it that there are two cars? What car is the governor driving?

Any government spending must be paid for by taxes. Any additional employment created by the government is offset by the loss of income to those workers who used to receive the money now collected by the government in taxes.

There's only one car, and Clark, Pawlenty, and you and I are all in it. To use her metaphor you would have to connect your cable from your own to battery to your own battery. I'm dumb enough to have tried that once. The car did not start.

h/t: Larry Schumacher

UPDATE: My further thoughts on the DFL plan to "create" jobs at the Minnesota Free Market Institute. Craig Westover notes as well,

�Clark�s government job creation proposal is interesting in that just two paragraphs earlier, she writes � �Small business and a strong middle class are the real engines that drive and sustain job creation and retention. It�s the aspiration (emphasis hers) to acquire wealth to pay for college, vacations or retirement by building a business or working hard at a job that spins the economic engine.�

�Well, okay � What better argument for a progressive tax scheme that takes more of the marginal dollar as a person acquires wealth and moves into higher tax brackets, not to mention the benefits to our aspiring, wealthy wannabe of state government raising taxes and taking investment money he or she could use to expand a business and using it to compete in the labor pool with our guy or gal by building tourist centers and hockey arenas when he or she could be using the investment capital and labor to build a factory and �spin the economic engine.�

Labels: economics, legislature, Minnesota, Pawlenty