Economy Alarm: Boston Herald Editorial: “Obama’s Math Leaves Us Broke”
Excessive Spending, Taxing and Borrowing Doesn’t Add Up to Economic Recovery
Obama Promised to Restore Fiscal Discipline and Tame Exploding Deficits
“With the recovery package, we not only created jobs – about 2 million saved or created with more being rolled out – but pulled us back from the brink of even deeper recession. In his [President Obama’s] budget, which we passed one hundred days after his swearing-in, he had a blueprint for how we go into the future, create jobs, stabilize the economy [and] do so as we reduce the deficit – [it’s] very central to everything we do – reduce the deficit.” (Matt Cover, “Pelosi Says Jobs ‘Permeated’ Congressional Actions in Year of 10 Percent Unemployment,” CNSnews.com, 1/25/2010)
“The only thing certain is that Obama is on track to boost a federal debt that stands at $10.7 trillion. Clearly mindful of that, Obama said: ‘We will need to do everything in the short term to get our economy moving again’ as well as ‘begin restoring fiscal discipline and taming our exploding deficits over the long term.’” (“Obama: Stimulus lets Americans claim destiny,”Associated Press, 2/17/2009)
Credibility Crash: Boston Herald Editorial: “How Do You Spend So Much and End Up With So Few Jobs to Show for it?”
“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future,” Barack Obama swore to us during the health care debate. Some 2.5 trillion dimes later, it’s clear the president had no idea what he was talking about.
The latest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office project that Obamacare will drive up deficits by $250 billion in the first 10 years. Then again, the CBO also predicted that the original Medicare program would only cost $12 billion by 1990. Its actual price tag was $110 billion.
Missed it by that much.
—
You know about Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan? The one the White House promised would keep unemployment below 8 percent? Today’s rate is 9.5 percent – and that number is artificially low because people who’ve simply given up hope and stopped looking for work aren’t counted.
The New York Times [NYT] reported last week that “real” unemployment for 18 to 29-year-olds is 37 percent – “a rate reminiscent of the 1930s.”
What you probably don’t know is that Obama and the Democrats actually passed another multi-billion dollar stimulus last year and are trying to push through a third one now. In fact, according to Stephen Spruiell in National Review magazine, if you go back to late 2008, we’ve spent $1.085 trillion on “stimulus” already – more than we’ve spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Every new “borrow-and-spend” stimulus dollar dump came with a politician’s promise that it would create jobs. And yet the jobless rate has hardly budged.
You’d think that pouring a trillion into the economy – not to mention the trillions more poured into the money supply by the Fed – would have some impact. How do you spend so much and end up with so few jobs to show for it?
By letting the government spend it, that’s how. The Daily Caller reports that, over the July 4th weekend, Obama announced $2 billion in loan guarantees to solar panel companies to create new green jobs.
“Abengoa Solar, which received $1.45 billion from the Department of Energy, admits on its Web site that it will use the money to build a plant in Arizona that will create only 85 permanent jobs,” notes the Daily Caller. Assuming I’m slightly better at math than the president, that’s more than $17 million per job.
Now just imagine how much your hip replacement is going to cost once Obamacare is fully enacted. That is, assuming the Obamacare Rationing Board lets you have one.
The trillions of new debt-powered spending should have had a major impact on our economy. Instead, we had the worst private-sector job growth for June since the Eisenhower administration, and the stock market swings from tentative hope to full-blown terror.
No wonder a new Rasmussen poll finds that 75 percent of Americans blame budget problems on politicians spending too much rather than taxing too little. Taxing: Giving politicians more money to spend on solar job boondoggles and thousands of other government scams.
The number Obama could use to save the economy is zero. No new taxes, no new policies, no new government initiatives.
The job market would turn around overnight. Alas, zero is the one amount the government just can’t spend. (Michael Graham, “President Obama’s math leaves us broke,” Boston Herald, 7/13/2010)
To read the full article, click here.