Government Workers

One more rant, just a sidebar.  Yes, we all know that government workers don’t do much work.  We waste everything, really, and just go to meetings and eat donuts.  Fair enough.  It’s all true.

But most of you work at jobs where people want your services rather than avoid them. You go to a restaurant because you want food, or shop online because you are seeking something.  You prepare a report that someone wants.  You repair something or install something that was requested. You entertain.  You heal or alleviate.  You steer someone to the person who can help them, you defend them in court, you evaluate how they might best manage their money.  Sales can be a bit different, because sometimes you are handling something that people really don’t think they need, or know they would like, so you have that hurdle to get over.  But usually they want something, and sales difficulty is that they get it from you instead of the next guy.  Or the objection is often not that they don’t want it, but they can’t afford it.

Everyone likes the idea of an orderly, well-run, fair-play society, but policemen and courts spend a lot of time delivering a service to people who are uh, actively resisting and not very grateful. Teachers certainly get some kids glad to be there, but they also put a lot of energy into getting them to do things they would rather not.  When you head to a government agency to get something and stand in line, it is often not for something that you wanted, but something you have to have because this agency says so – a registration or a permission or a license. 

Who thanks a prison guard?

This is in the background of size-of-government discussions, I suspect.  Government workers bring you services you don’t want.  Oh, you want them in theory, because you know what it would be like if all those other people didn’t have zoning laws or traffic laws.  But at the point of delivery, really, you’d rather not be seeing me, thank you very much, let me go now and I’m not taking your fucking meds. (Damn cops should be out catching real criminals instead of…what the hell do they do down at that school all day, anyway?)

Even when it’s a necessary intrusion, a good intrusion, it’s still us horning in and stopping everyone from running next to the pool.  We get used to ignoring you when you complain, because the last five people also complained about the same thing.

Guns

I’ve worked for years in emergency psychiatric care.  People come to me because they have been dangerous due to mental illness.  That can mean dangerous to themselves or to others, and sometimes “dangerousness” stretches as far as self-care: wandering in the street, not eating.  But in both the first two categories, harming self or harming others, guns are often involved.

I’ve met a lot of people who have threatened to shoot someone, and some who actually have.  It is sometimes part of my job to call family, police, or neighbors and try to figure out whether there was actually a gun to start with, whether someone has removed it, whether the police have taken custody of it.  I am very familiar with that sickening feeling, hearing someone’s story and thinking “Oh crap.  This person should absolutely never be allowed near guns.”

One category of people I work with are seldom gun-people.  Social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the various rehab groups don’t hunt and don’t tend to have been in the military. They are more likely to come from urban or suburban backgrounds.  Whether they got their deer this year never comes up. The other hospital staff, the nurses and psych techs, the environmental services and dietary folks, the medical records and administrative people are more like the general population, some hunters, some not.  The professional staff think that gun ownership is itself a worrisome sign.  They say they don’t, and many go out of their way to be understanding and recognising cultural differences and forcing themselves back from passing judgement.  But it’s clear what they think.  They say stuff that offends the others, but the others are pretty used to it by now and shrug it off

So yes, mental health professionals might be too quick to pathologise gun ownership, but it’s not like they don’t have lots of personal examples of people who shouldn’t own guns. They do look down on gun-owners, though many see the cultural aspect and try very hard (and some quite successfully) not to. Plus, confirmation bias being what it is, you can’t realistically expect them to change that.  I support gun rights, but I sure see some folks that make you think we’ve got to find some way to get the guns away – and there’s not always a law covering it.

Here are the (somewhat random) parts most people don’t know:

You should be more worried about what mentally ill people in crisis are going to do with their cars than their guns. A lot more.  Some of that is greater availability, and that people spend many more hours holding a steering wheel than a pistol.  But greater safety per minute used isn’t really the point, because that increased time is part of everyday life and isn’t going to change.  Given that greater danger, what do you want to do about that?  Remember that you want people who have been in crisis to be able to resume normal lives, going to work and visiting relatives, getting themselves to appointments, living where they like. So sketch out a mental-health/dangerous driving statute if you can, just to see the possible obstacles and difficulties.

Now understand that it’s much the same for guns.

Second, there is a federal law that prohibits any person who has been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution from acquiring a firearm. Two problems.  There is no enforcement mechanism set up, because no one wants to give gun sellers or local police access to confidential medical information, for good reasons of privacy.  It gets sticky, and there is no national registry of the involuntarily committed.  Next, that word “acquiring” looms large.  What about guns already owned?  What about borrowing your brother’s rifle to hunt or target shoot? What do you do when Sam says he wants to shoot someone and has access to a gun, but next day says he was lying, that he’s never owned one and has no friends who have them? Where do you search?  How were you planning on wording that warrant when it’s not illegal to own that gun?

Third.  People who had a suicidal crisis are often extremely willing to turn in their guns and have already done so by the time they talk to us.  They are relieved.  “I called my wife and told her to get both guns out of the house - give ‘em to anyone.  I never want to go through that again.”  People who were threatening others are less likely to do this.

Fourth, even with all those people who scare the bejeesus out of me, we have very little gun crime in NH – and a lot of what we do have is coming up out of Lynn, Lawrence, Lowell, and Haverhill, MA.  That caught me by surprise when a friend who went to become one of the prison psychologists told me that a lot of our prison population were not NH residents. He said almost half, though I can’t back that up.  So even our low rate of gun crime is inflated.  Yet NH is a high gun-owning state.  The words of Howard Dean come to mind, when he was explaining his state to national Democrats. “You have to understand that this is Vermont, where even liberals own 2-3 guns.”  There’s some other reason – something other than legislative strictness and mere possession – that drives actual violence.  I have my theories.

Fifth, some gun owners are yahoos.  So what? Give me measurables.  It does strike me as weird that people would want more advanced weaponry.  I immediately grasp the argument that “they really don’t need that.”  But you can also hear people say “They really don’t need those big SUV’s.” “They really don’t need…” those  jetskis, more miles of hiking trails, expensive cars, hundred choices of shampoo, video games, free condoms – you get the picture.  You have to be able to show, not just hypothesize or imagine, that there is some ill effect that requires intervention.  As far as I know, that isn’t there.  Gun laws don’t seem to move the dial much one way or the other.

Sixth, based on no knowledge other than history, I predict that the Obama administration will (perhaps already has) propose sweeping legislation that includes the entire wish-list of gun control advocates. He’s not an incrementalist.  (Washington in general prefers comprehensive solutions for several reasons, all of them bad.)  Using a crisis to manipulate people’s emotions is SOP.*  It will be called reasonable, so that opposnents can be accused of opposing even reasonable measures. I may even approve of portions of it myself or at least, approve of the intent while remaining suspicious of the execution - and actual, not-always-unintended, real world result.

*It will be argued that Republicans sometimes do the same thing.  Yes, and especially those who have worked for the government a long time.

Some Other Things To Know

The statewide news is full of stories about the mental health system.  Newspapers being what they are, they try to find an individual story that is particularly wrenching, to make it real for the reader.  Different newspapers are picking different stories.

But I know most of them; one is even my case.  It would be easy to dwell on how the newspapers get the individual stories wrong – that this patient is more drug-seeking than mentally ill, or that one has parents who are refusing to allow the specific treatment most likely to work, or this hospital doesn’t understand the IEA law on sending people here.  But that’s rather beside the point, because the stories are essentially true.  The mental health system is being sued to provide better services, and I greatly fear the unintended side effects that always comes from that approach.  Yet it is true that services do not cover the territory.  And as I have said many times, if the people who understand the system are unwilling to make the hard decisions surgically, someone who doesn’t understand the situation will come in and make them with a hatchet..

Conservatives – yeah, I read us in a lot of places around the web – automatically assume, on the basis of anecdotes, gut feelings, and wishful thinking, that this should all be easily solved without spending much more money.  The system should be managed better.  Lots of those people aren’t really that sick. Money is being wasted in la-de-dah services instead of core functions. Why, I knew a guy who pretended he was crazy…Yeah, we saw that movie too. And we’ve heard plenty of those speeches about having a positive attitude and understanding life is hard, because our supervisors tell them to us, to get us through the day.  You don’t get rid of command hallucinations by walking on the sunny side of the street.

You can find anecdotes for each of those excuses, but the problem doesn’t change.  Even if you could bring us to magic-pony land where public mental health is the best-managed system in the country, you aren’t going to get that much value added.  Or, for a different magic, you could have everyone who suffers from a mental illness understand that and want treatment, and be willing to endure twice the misery and three times the temptation you do to not use drugs, and have completely nonpathological friends and family who are also generous and patient.  And even with all that, there are still going to be holes.

Here are the reasons:  Treatment is very expensive.  Taxpayers prefer to pay for services which benefit many people a little, rather than a few people a lot.  Highways, police departments, schools, parks. Lobbyists who represent small groups tend to work under the radar, trying to get things slipped in to legislation.  Lobbyists representing large groups like to go public, showing their muscle.

Legally, it’s messy.  If you want laws that make people with certain diagnoses have to do things, then you are going to suddenly be making a lot of people do things.  Get that law in place and families will herd their daughters and brothers in to make that happen, and your whole client base just grew threefold.  Not going to save money that way.  Plus, you are going to have a lot of false positives, people deprived of their liberties for very poor reasons.  Well, there are countries that do that.  Do we want to be one of them?

What about disability fraud?  We have many more people considered disabled than we used to.  That means lots of them must be cheating, right?  Not necessarily.  What if life really is more complicated, jobs really are more complicated? What if there used to be a world where they weren’t disabled, just marginal, and before that, a world where they weren’t disabled at all.  We don’t have those elevator operator jobs downtown anymore, and we renamed janitors environmental services workers because it really is more complicated than mopping floors now. There aren’t those nice boarding houses where for a small fee widow-ladies would feed you when you got back from the mills, either. A lot of my patients might have gotten by a hundred years ago.

But primarily, out and beyond all these considerations, people don’t understand how complicated cases can get – legally, medically, strategically.  In earlier generations the really difficult ones just got locked away and ignored, or they died, so there’s not much help in trying to get back to the good old days. Drugs of abuse seem to break your brain much worse than the old days – alcohol and opiates tend to ruin your personality, not your thinking, but the new synthetics do very strange things to your ability to process reality. Head trauma may be less common with increased safety, but on the other hand, we pull TBI people back from death and into a more complicated world, so it might be a net loss. Kids end up in wrong systems, families range from godsends to pathological, medications that usually work don’t always or create unendurable side effects.

Adding to this is the impression that liberals give, that funding services at “proper” levels, whatever that is, isn’t really all that expensive – because they always think that if we just fought fewer wars or didn’t give money to rich people or had the right priorities we would have just oodles left over.  We’re already out of money, long since, and this stuff doesn’t come cheap.

Gun Control

We did not allow our boys to play with guns while growing up.  I wouldn't do that now, but it made sense at the time.  Little problem for them - boys just go "All right, swords and light-sabers it is, then" and move on.

Why would parents do this?  If you follow the reasoning, there aren't many choices why.  Sometimes I like to point out the obvious, simply because it is being consistently denied.

The parent must think that the mere ownership, the mere use of a toy gun, has the potential to make his child more violent. 

There are many qualifiers here.  The parent may think it is extremely unlikely to affect his own child, but there is a greater chance it will affect other children (that's a bit superior, isn't it?).  The parent may think that the effect is small and most normal folks can master it, but a few can't. The explanation that this is less personal than cultural, an expression of being a good example of where society should go, a declaration that we shouldn't use violence to resolve our differences or whatever, is simply a dodge.  That means exactly the same thing, one is just hiding from oneself with grand language.  Other modifications may occur to you, but they all resolve to this point. Toy guns make you more violent.

One would think real guns would be even more likely to do that, correct?

So. Therefore, those who have guns are more violent, less moral, culturally inferior.  Oh, maybe not you personally, but as a group, that must be how you are viewed.  The other ways of putting this don't change that.  To say that there are better ways to resolve differences, or that people in this society believe they need to resort to violence far more often than is necessary, is again an evasion from the base point.  They think you are less moral.

Well, it may be all true.  We might be able to show that there is some moral lack, or increase in violence, that results from ownership, possession, or even handling firearms.  It's going to be hard to sort out because of selection bias, because there are three groups who buy guns: those who want to shoot someone, those who want to protect themselves, and those who have a gun hobby - hunting, target, collecting, re-enactment.  That first category does include bad characters that we'd like to keep firearms, and lots of other stuff, away from.

Culturally, I'm not a gun person.  My father's family were farmers and had guns and my mother's family were city people who worked in offices and didn't.  My parents divorced and I grew up surrounded by the latter. I can't get my mind around wanting to own anything but basic home protection (not much needed in suburban NH).  But my wanting and feelings and cultural preferences have nothing to do with the issue.

I'll write more, especially about the mental health angle, where I actually have some knowledge.  But for now I just want the obvious stated.  In this debate, the gun-rights people may think the gun-regulators are fools and interfering controllers.  But the regulators, whether they recognise it or not, believe the gun-owners are less moral.  How much less likely varies greatly.  But it's there.  There is no other way to get there.

Ernest In Love

I was in a production of this in college, and was always a bit ashamed of it.  It is a musical based on Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest, with words and lyrics having been done around 1960 by Lee Pockriss, better-known for his "Itsy-Bitsy-Teenie-Weenie-Yellow-Polka-Dot-Bikini," Perry Como's "Catch a Falling Star," and (still remembered at our house) "Tracy" by the Cufflinks. One thinks: Who dares write music to capture Wilde?

With the fashionable contempt that we true artistes had for such popularised efforts, I learned quickly to speak with an amused aloofness about the production in the department, even among those of us who were in the cast.  This gets doubly hard when your own contribution isn't so glamorous. About like this:



The actual song-and-dance number was "Come Raise Your Cup," which opened the show.  After which we were never seen again.

I have reconsidered my earlier snobbishness and repent.  Yes, the songs do not equal Oscar Wilde's standard, but what could?  They stand up to it, at least.  Years later I still remember most of the lyrics and chuckle at some of the lines:

(Cecily) I read in the London daily papers
That women, somewhat advanced in years
Resort to the most outrageous capers
They all seem to fancy
A younger girl's fiance

It came to mind because of the Froude post, as a subsequent verse has the line "She's far more Victorian than Edwardian" (to rhyme with guardian, of course.)

Most of the youtube offerings of the show are an untranslated Japanese production.  I have still not quite adjusted to this.  This song - not the best in the show, but clever - is from a German production, yet the song lyrics are in English. They have butchered it with obviousness.  The phrase make love was much milder in Wilde's day and even 1960, meaning flirtation, a few secret kisses.  The entire intent of the song is that the butler and ladies' maid maintain public decorum while hinting that something more is taking place.  Ah well.

References

Following through on the many references in the Froude post reminded me of an introduction by CS Lewis that I used as a handout when I taught an adult Sunday School class about him in 1994 or so.  In three short pages, he made reference to something like sixty different writers, philosophers, and historical figures.  There was nothing the least bit showy about it, it was simply a reflection of the contents of his mind on the subject.

I have been unable to find it again, leading me to suspect that it was an introduction for a particular edition of a work, which was later abandoned in favor of a preferred one.  I think it was for The Great Divorce or Screwtape, but I can't be sure. This was not long after ED Hirsch Jr's Cultural Literacy book and campaign, so I was quite alert to totting up how many of the references I "got."  Got being defined in three categories - had ever even heard of this person; could make some complete sentence about this person; was familiar with this person's work and thought.  I don't remember my score, but it wasn't good, especially in the last category.

I was thoroughly intimidated, and remain so.  But when I encounter such references put forth without obvious agenda, in entire innocence, it usually intrigues me and I follow it up.

The Froude Society

One of the links over at hbd* chick is to a blog by one Foseti explaining How to really read in 2013.  Interesting enough in itself, but what caught my eye was suggestion #3, to join the Froude Society. This particular Victorian was unknown to me, Maine was but a name, and Carlyle I have read only when quoted by someone else.  So while it is not uncharted territory for me, I have never sailed it myself.  Limiting one's reading for a time to authors before the 1920's seemed intriguing.

At their suggestion, I am reading JA Froude's The Bow of Ulysses online. (Also available at Google Books.) Quite fascinating and certainly would be controversial in our age.  Froude is quite unrepentant in defending Empire and White Man's Burden.  He assures us and gives examples that there are races which should not be governing themselves.  It doesn't take long to discover, however, that he is not only talking about blacks, or Indians, Red or Asian, but about the Irish and Spanish as well.  And frankly, he finds even the French and Germans rather unreliable in that regard.  An excellent example of the sentiment satirised by "The Wogs Begin At Calais."

To James Anthony Froude, only those citizens of what we would now call the Anglosphere have had any success at self-governance, and even they get only a passing grade.  World events in the intervening 125 years haven't disproved that claim, have they?  He was explicitly elitist, but in a form which might surprise.  (I thought most of my readers would recognise Gladstone, Cicero, Burke, and Demosthenes, but I don't know them well myself, while Rodney and Warren Hastings were entirely new to me.  I linked them all as a convenience. The occasion is a debate between Tennyson and Gladstone.)

This only was clear to me in thinking over what Mr. Gladstone was reported to have said, and in thinking of his own achievements and career, that there are two classes of men who have played and still play a prominent part in the world--those who accomplish great things, and those who talk and make speeches about them. The doers of things are for the most part silent. Those who build up empires or discover secrets of science, those who paint great pictures or write great poems, are not often to be found spouting upon platforms. The silent men do the work. The talking men cry out at what is done because it is not done as they would have had it, and afterwards take possession of it as if it was their own property. Warren Hastings wins India for us; the eloquent Burke desires and passionately tries to hang him for it. At the supreme crisis in our history when America had revolted and Ireland was defiant, when the great powers of Europe had coalesced to crush us, and we were staggering under the disaster at York Town, Rodney struck a blow in the West Indies which sounded over the world and saved for Britain her ocean sceptre. Just in time, for the popular leaders had persuaded the House of Commons that Rodney ought to be recalled and peace made on any terms.

Even in politics the names of oratorical statesmen are rarely associated with the organic growth of enduring institutions. The most distinguished of them have been conspicuous only as instruments of destruction. Institutions are the slow growths of centuries. The orator cuts them down in a day. The tree falls, and the hand that wields the axe is admired and applauded. The speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero pass into literature, and are studied as models of language. But Demosthenes and Cicero did not understand the facts of their time; their language might be beautiful, and their sentiments noble, but with their fine words and sentiments they only misled their countrymen.

The periods where the orator is supreme are marked always by confusion and disintegration. Goethe could say of Luther that he had thrown back for centuries the spiritual cultivation of mankind, by calling the passions of the multitude to judge of matters which should have been left to the thinkers. We ourselves are just now in one of those uneasy periods, and we have decided that orators are the fittest people to rule over us. The constituencies choose their members according to the fluency of their tongues. Can he make a speech? is the one test of competency for a legislator, and the most persuasive of the whole we make prime minister. We admire the man for his gifts, and we accept what he says for the manner in which it is uttered. He may contradict to-day what he asserted yesterday. No matter. He can persuade others wherever he is persuaded himself. And such is the nature of him that he can convince himself of anything which it is his interest to believe. These are the persons who are now regarded as our wisest. It was not always so. It is not so now with nations who are in a sound state of health. The Americans, when they choose a President or a Secretary of State or any functionary from whom they require wise action, do not select these famous speech-makers. Such periods do not last, for the condition which they bring about becomes always intolerable.

Interesting that the Americans have now moved into a state occupied by the British as Empire was beginning to decay. We have had always had orators in our history, of course, but it is now required, as it was not even as recently as the 1970's.

Wayfinding

hbd* chick links to a jstor article on spatial navigation that fits well with my previous series on Wayfinding.  It suggests that the sex differences are not likely to be a function of range, as is commonly hypothesised, but a hormonal side effect.  Of course, epigenetics is still genetics, right?   I will add it to that pile.

Winterfest

Posts coming, but I am too unenergetic to think with focus.  Plenty of reading suddenly came up over the horizon as well.

Kyle is safely back from youth retreat in upstate NY, with video of the body-boxing that led to the possibly-but-ultimately-not-broken collarbone and thumb.  Such things are deeply spiritual experiences for the testosterone-poisoned highschoolers.  But the legacy of Austin Schilling, who was asked to please, no longer be a chaperone for retreats a few years ago, remains intact: most boys set to hospital, two years running, still the champ. 

In discussing all this, several mothers of the church insisted that they would rather be dealing with the boys at these events, as the girls can deteriorate into weep-fest accusation weekends.  This apparently continues into early adulthood.  I have heard this but not witnessed it myself.  Yes, the men quickly deteriorate into urinating off the porch within hours of going off by themselves*, but it's still more tolerable than the women.  Apparently.

My daughter-in-law was a chaperone, so my son flew solo in parenting his daughters.  Son #2 has long been the wittier FB poster, but First-born, smells-like-a-field (see Genesis 27:27) rapidly rose to his standard with the weekend updates of the trauma.  I am proud on both counts.

*Including Dartmouth med school professors, apparently, at their yearly retreat.  Though college professors of any type may not be a good sample for "adults."

Spelling Pronunciation

I posted a few years ago (hmm, six years ago, in fact) on the pronunciation of often.  I had some of the history wrong.  I had thought adding the "t" back into it was a 20th C phenomenon gaining steam, and that the "t" had fallen out about 300 years ago.  I was off by a factor of 2 in both cases. The t-sound disappeared in the 15th C, and started coming back again in the 19th, as more people became literate.  People just naturally thought it must be more correct to say off-ten, because heck, it's got a t in it, dunnit?

Well, I wasn't having any of it, because if it's a modern overcorrection it's a modern overcorrection, and that's that.

Except, as I discovered while following up another curiosity, if I apply that reasoning I have to change my pronunciation of some other words.  Pronouncing the "c" in "Arctic" was artificially added in later.  The "l" dropped out of falcon in in the 15th C and came back in in the 19th for the same reason as often's "t". Plus, in my effort to retain what I think of as older, but only recently older (and thus more correct) pronunciations by giving some indication of now-silent letters, I keep a whisper, a hint of the "th" in clothes and quite a bit of the "l" in alms.

I had waistcoat right, and knew that "Ye Olde" anything was a ridiculous visual confusion of the ancient letter thorn (pronounced "th") with the letter "y," which it maybe sorta does look like.  I knew that tsk and tut were representations of sounds, not tisk and tut.  But of the wikipedia list, I have victuals, forehead, conduit, covert, and medicine wrong.  (I'm less worried about proper names.  That seems quite separate to me. Though "Versales," Kentucky likely did come in because people read the word without having previously heard it.)  Mispronouncing words one has only encountered in print happens to frequent readers often, especially when young.  After a pronunciation is in place for a hundred years, such as three-syllable medicine, I think we have to wave off any stigma.

BTW, what started all this was discovering that the words isle and island are not from the same root.  Old English had perfectly good Germanic words ig-lond or eah-lond meaning "water-land," the ig/eah/ah related to aqua.  When the Normans ruined everything in 1066, they thought that the word must be related to the Latin "insula," as in peninsula and its French derivative isle.  So they bapped the "s" into the English word, figuring it had just gotten misplaced somewhere because Anglo-Saxons were boorish and careless like that.  Male and female are also unrelated words.

Creating Jobs

Creating jobs is easy.  All you have to do is look for the synonyms of both words in the phrase.  Make. Work.  (Macht.  Arbeiten.) Happens all the time. Is that what politicians are promising?  Could be.  We could have energy farms where citizens could go and get paid $10/hour to ride stationary bicycles to generate power, but what with the set-up and the safety features, it would cost more than the energy is is worth.  Even at $1/hour it’s a money loser. Plus, folks would be pretty insulted if that was the job the government got for them.

(Actually, that’s not a good example.  For a few hours a week people might be happy to get paid even a pittance for their exercise instead of paying for Planet Fitness, and it wouldn’t lose money at anywhere near the rate that other government jobs programs would. Maybe such work farms, oh wait, we’ll have to name it something better…Can I get back to you on this?)

Oh, you mean creating jobs that are self-sustaining and worth something, that someone is willing to pay people to do…that’s quite different.  Creating a job is actually an expense, not a benefit, when one is totting up the balance sheet.  Politicians seem to have that backward in their rhetoric.  Creating a job means creating an expense for someone, somewhere.  Everyone knows this when they stop to think about it for even a minute or two, but the electorate seems to forget this as the unemployment rate rises – particularly if you are one of the ones out of a job or vulnerable.

There’s a certain sleight-of-hand here, where the intervention of government dollars is supposed to spur, or stir, or stimulate something somewhere to encourage an industry.  I expect that it does.  With all the money we’re spending, we’d damn well better be getting some job for someone.  But how much is this costing per job created?  Whenever we see numbers on that it’s depressing, because we realise that we could have just sent $100,000 dollars to some random unemployed people and done much better. Or we find that the job created was at some other level of government.  The feds got the town addicted to a few more policemen. 

More jobs is generally an inefficiency.  People trying to save money find ways to make fewer jobs, not more.  I suspect he fear is that the jobs are going away forever, so we have to all find a seat before the music stops.  But remember that when you read about creating jobs, especially green jobs.  The most job creation isn’t likely the most efficient course.