Nobody says you have to live on one side of the political spectrum or the other. Think for yourself, and go where you choose. Here's my spectrum; what does yours look like?

"Shovel-ready" FAIL

This is a true story. One of my clients is a very large (multinational, multi-billion-dollar) construction company. I've done some video projects for them, and in fact the image accompanying this post is from a video I shot for them on the day I was told this story. I've strategically blurred parts of the image to keep from getting in hot water with the client; here's hoping that works.

It was a video & photo shoot of a large highway/bridge project, and I was escorted around all day by the site manager, a nice older guy who'd had a 30-year career managing big projects. During the hours we were together, I asked a lot of questions, including questions about whether the company had benefited from Obama's stimulus plan, the so-called "shovel-ready" projects grants. This is what he told me.

"It started out good," he said. "We bid on this big bridge project and won the bid. But to get the job, we had to agree to a whole new set of rules on who we had to hire, how many of each type of person we had to hire, what we had to pay them, etc.

"It was a big problem for us to find the workers matching the description we were given. We simply could not find enough people with the skills we needed who were also willing to work on a very hard job in tough conditions.

"There are plenty of people out there who are willing to do this job, but we couldn't use those people, we had to use the people the government wanted us to use. So we worked at it and spent a lot of money chasing down applicants until, finally, we had a full crew. And that lasted about a day. By the second day, some of the workers who had shown up the first day decided 'the hell with it, this is too hard,' and they simply did not come back. By the end of the first week, we no longer had enough manpower to get the work done."

See, this is where the so-called Obama Stimulus runs off the rails. Using public monies to create infrastructure--fine, I'm all for that. But telling the construction companies how to do the work--micromanaging their operations and saddling them with wholly unrealistic rules and using racial quotas to further a social agenda---well, now you've just taken a good premise and strangled it.

The irony is, nearly every construction worker I meet on these shoots is a member of a minority group. Usually Hispanic, but with a good mix of blacks. The government didn't need to introduce more diversity into this population of workers, because frankly, the hard-labor jobs within the construction trade are so unpleasant that people with better options tend not to take them.

But try telling that to the pointy-headed progressive do-gooders who controlled the purse strings in this particular case. No, they were out to create jobs AND make new opportunities for people of color! Only they forgot one important thing--the second part of that whole lead-a-horse-to-water parable.

You can't make the horse drink, and you can't make people work at an admittedly nasty job when the alternative is getting a small but livable allowance from the government.

Take away the allowance, though, and now those bridges get built. Is this so hard to figure out?

I wouldn't want one of those jobs. I would do almost anything to avoid it. But I wouldn't go on welfare to avoid it--I would show up, every day, and work.

As for the too many people who would go on welfare to avoid it--well, we need to stop worrying so much about those people, and spend more time worrying about bridges, schools, crooked bankers, whether or not global warming is real, and many other pressing priorities.