Can President Obama honestly believe that a repackaging of his stale, big-spending policies suddenly will start turning around the U.S. economy, nearly four years into his failed administration?
“We’re still fighting our way back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” he says in a recent campaign ad — alluding again to his “It’s Bush’s fault” mantra. The ad then goes on to promote more government hiring via more federal “stimulus” spending — paid for, we are assured, only by “asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more.” Translation: Raise taxes. In the midst of a crippled economy. No, really. He thinks that’ll do the trick.
But if that’s such a nifty idea, then why was the original, $862 billion stimulus such an unmitigated flop? It propped up countless government jobs, at the cost of a vastly greater national debt. But when the cash ran dry, those jobs hadn’t primed the economic pump as predicted. Unemployment remained high — certainly above the 8 percent mark that Obama said it would stay below if only Congress approved the first stimulus. Given that track record, what is the rationale behind seeking a new stimulus to fix things?
Oh, and don’t let Obama downplay the painful realities: Things certainly need fixing.
“We’re still not creating [jobs] as fast as we want,” he said in a remarkable understatement. That little gem issued forth around the same time that he bizarrely declared to a nation with 8.2 percent unemployment — and millions of people who are jobless but for various technical reasons aren’t counted as officially unemployed — that “the private sector is doing fine.” And no, he was not taken out of context, as so many in the news media claimed in rushing predictably to his defense. If anything, his fuller comments were even more alarming than the “doing fine” remark because they were couched in his ceaseless call for bigger government — in a nation roughly $16 trillion in debt and with no visible prospects for repaying it.