The Obama administration says the American people enthusiastically support the president's latest stimulus, which he labels a "jobs package."
But public backing for the "jobs package" seems shaky at best.
The president recently gave a speech at a fire station in Virginia in support of the new stimulus. The response was less than enthusiastic when he mentioned his so-called American Jobs Act. Only one or two of the roughly 100 people present clapped. As the Los Angeles Times reported, "[A] subdued crowd needed a bit of prompting to applaud his proposal ... ."
Literally.
Confronted with the crowd's weak response to his plan to spend an additional $447 billion and to raise taxes, the president was reduced to encouraging people to clap.
"You can go ahead and clap," he said. "Go ahead, nothing wrong with it."
Several more people in the audience joined in at that point.
But we can understand the reluctance to cheer the president's plan to increase taxes and spending in order to protect government jobs.
The earlier, $862 billion stimulus passed by Democrats in Congress and signed into law by Obama was a disaster. It was mired in waste, and it expanded our national debt, on which we are paying hundreds of billions of dollars in interest annually. Worst of all, unemployment kept climbing after the passage of the stimulus.
Why would anyone want a repeat of such a boondoggle?
If the president wants sincere applause for his ideas, he should end the talk of tax increases and give businesses and individuals the financial certainty they need to invest and to begin spending money.
As it stands now, everything from the threat of higher taxes to the uncertainty of costly new ObamaCare regulations is handcuffing spending, investment and prospects for economic growth. Yet the president seems determined to push ahead with his big-government approach.
Unfortunately, that means we are not likely to see big economic improvement anytime soon.