George F. Will: A Clunker of a Year
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 93, was on a business trip in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Three days later he was back home in Nagasaki. He also survived 2009. Common sense did not. In Black History Month, a.k.a. February, pupils at a Burlington, N.J., public elementary school sang, “Hello Mr. President/We honor you today/For all your great accomplishments/We all do say ‘Hooray!’ ” So did a smitten Nobel committee.
For peace, not economics. For $3 billion, Cash for Clunkers moved many car sales from September to August. By law, the clunkers had to be junked, which boosted used-car prices, penalizing low-income people. Having used stimulus money to give raises to its 317 employees, Head Start in Augusta, Ga., reported 317 jobs created. A Georgia nonprofit multiplied the percentage of raises (1.84) it gave by the number of employees receiving them (508) and reported the stimulus had saved 935 jobs. What was stimulated, aside from bookkeeping nonsense, was demand for Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, a hymn to unfettered capitalism. Sales exceeded 400,000, double the total in any of the 52 years since it was published.
