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Posts Tagged ‘obama’

Obama’s dangerous fantasies

Posted by Richard on February 6, 2012

In an interview with the Today Show’s Matt Lauer, President Obama reiterated what he’s maintained for the past 3 years, that we can dissuade Iran from building nuclear weapons (and using them against Israel) by persuading them that they don’t really want any (emphasis added):

The president elaborated on Iran’s nuclear capability — and how he plans to prevent it. “My goal is to try to resolve this diplomatically, mainly because the only way over the long term we can assure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon is by getting them to understand it’s not in their interest,” Obama told Lauer.

The Washington Times quotes the President as also claiming that Iran’s goals are a mystery:

Mr. Obama also said in an interview that the U.S. has “a very good estimate” of the state of Iran’s nuclear development, but is having a more difficult time assessing its leadership’s intentions, as well as the political dynamics within the Islamic Republic.

Here’s a hint — this is what they’re saying right now in Iranian media outlets (government-controlled and thus with at least tacit approval):

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of its people.

The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.

Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a “‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, an analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.

Does the Obama administration really think that Hillary Clinton (a mere female) or even the silver-tongued Obama himself can somehow persuade this genocidal and tyrannical regime that having nukes is not in its interests, when its interests include killing every Jew on the planet??

Meanwhile, Bashir Assad, whom Hillary defended as a “reformer,” continues to slaughter civilians in growing numbers, and in the same interview Lauer asked why the U.S. and U.N. would act to stop such slaughter in one case, but not another:

“I said at the time with respect to Libya that we would be making these decisions…on a case by case basis based on how unified the international community was,” Obama said. …

The repressive regimes of Russia and China have blocked a U.N. resolution merely condemning the brutal repression in Syria, so I guess the Obama administration will shrug and say the international community isn’t sufficiently unified.

As for the home front, for the umpteenth time the President bemoaned the fact that he can’t just impose his will on the nation:

“What’s frustrated people is that I have not be able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008,” he said.

This man is full of dangerous fantasies, foreign and domestic. In the former case, 60s peace-and-love generation fantasies; in the latter case, fantasies of autocracy.

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SOTUS in a nutshell

Posted by Richard on January 24, 2012

For those who missed it, here’s my summary of the State of the Union speech:

We need to spend more on teachers, spend more on schools, spend more on infrastructure, spend more on teachers (did I mention teachers?), spend more on innovative technology companies like Solyndra, spend more on subsidies for other things I favor … and reduce the national debt.

We need to provide tax credits for job creation, tax preferences for alternative energy, tax breaks for education … and we need to simplify the tax code.

We need to punish achievement with higher taxes, reward failure with more subsidies, and regulate the hell out of everything … that’s how we’ll save our free-enterprise system.

We have a great military (isn’t it terrific how I got bin Laden?). We should emulate them more in the private sector and throughout society. Everyone must be made to work together for a common purpose, as decreed by those in command (me). Everyone must march in lockstep and follow orders. That’s how we’ll preserve this country’s great heritage of liberty.

Vodkapundit summed it up more succinctly: “nothing but promises to spend more, to regulate more, and to tax more. ”

I should be shocked, outraged, and disgusted — but honestly, it’s just about what I expected. So my reaction was basically “ho hum, what else is new?”

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Make SOTUS bearable with Vodkapundit

Posted by Richard on January 24, 2012

I understand that the President will be delivering his re-election campaign kickoff speech tonight. If, like me, you find the idea of watching almost unbearable, I suggest you drop by Vodkapundit and take in the event through the filter of Stephen Green’s drunkblogging. I can guarantee it will be more entertaining (and more enlightening) than watching it live. You might want to have a few adult beverages handy, too.

UPDATE: Go here for the drunkblogging.

And afterwards, watch Herman Cain deliver the Tea Party response here.

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Canada, Keystone XL, and national insanity

Posted by Richard on January 23, 2012

When President Obama nixed the Keystone XL pipeline project, Robert Samuelson called it “an act of national insanity.” Besides the several reasons Samuelson cites for why this decision was idiotic, there’s the fact that it isn’t even going to stop the project.

The company behind it, TransCanada Corp., said in effect, “Just because we’ve got Canada in our name doesn’t mean the pipeline has to begin in Canada, eh?” So they’re looking at a slightly shorter version, running from Montana to the Gulf. It would carry oil from the Bakken field. And since it wouldn’t cross borders, it wouldn’t require federal approval:

The Bakken shale-rock formation is estimated to hold as much as 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in North Dakota and Montana, according to a 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report. Oil production in North Dakota surged 42 percent to 510,000 barrels a day in November, exceeding the output of Ecuador.

Production in the Bakken field may reach 750,000 barrels a day this year, Edward Morse, managing director of commodities research for Citigroup Inc., said at a conference in Calgary today.

The original Keystone XL plan was based on carrying up to 830,000 barrels a day, so the Bakken output alone may be plenty to make the project economically feasible. TransCanada can always ask for approval to extend it into Alberta later, perhaps after there is a less insane administration in Washington.

For a look at what some of our neighbors to the north think of Washington’s idiocy, check out this excellent video commentary by Ezra Levant:


[YouTube link]

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Doubling down on autocratic rule

Posted by Richard on January 5, 2012

Mere hours after making his first non-recess “recess appointment,” President Obama made three more, this time to the National Labor Relations Board. Even Sen. John McCain called it an “absolute abuse of power” and characterized the two radical pro-union appointees, Richard Griffin and Sharon Block, as “far, far left” people. When Sen. “Reach Across the Aisle” McCain calls someone “far, far left,” you can be pretty sure they’re really out there. For more about their background, check out this report (PDF) by Americans for Limited Government, which also exposed the President’s “we can’t wait for Congress to act” claim as totally bogus:

“These nominees were only submitted to the Senate by Obama on December 15,” ALG President Bill Wilson noted. “There has not even been time to hold a hearing in the Senate, let alone vote on them, and yet Obama wants to claim his extraconstitutional ‘recess’ appointments were based on some sort of extraordinary delay.”

Industry groups affected by NLRB regulations are expected to sue in federal court to overturn the appointments and any new regulations the Board issues.

“Obama and Reid have thrown out the ‘advice and consent’ clause of the Constitution so that union organizers can hang posters on their boss’ door during a union election,” Wilson joked, concluding, “And to what end? When all is said and done, the courts will nullify these appointments and their acts, meanwhile Obama will be remembered as the recess president who accomplished nothing because he was too busy violating the Constitution.”

“When all is said and done” may be a long way off. Right now, not enough is being said or done. In this matter, as in others, the Obama administration is attempting to rule by decree, a la Hugo Chavez. Where is the outrage? Why don’t I hear full-throated denunciations instead of just McCain/McConnell-style soft-spoken disapprovals?

Cartoon by William Warren, ALG

Warren Toon from NetRightDaily.com. Used with permission. Click to visit source.

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The audacity of autocracy

Posted by Richard on January 4, 2012

The Constitution gives the President the “power to fill up vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.” A plain reading of those words makes it clear that a recess appointment may be made only when a vacancy occurs during a recess. But like so many other parts of the Constitution, this restriction has been long ignored by both Democrats and Republicans. Presidents of both parties have used Congressional recesses to make appointments for which they couldn’t get (or didn’t want to ask for) Senate consent.

During the last couple of years of the Bush administration, Democrats, angered by the Bolton appointment, devised a strategy to prevent the President from making any more recess appointments: they kept Congress in session “pro forma” even when most members were out of town. It worked. Because it apparently never occurred to Bush (supposedly the architect of an “imperial presidency”) that he could simply decide by fiat that Congress was in recess.

Now we have a President who’s done exactly that:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell Wednesday condemned President Obama’s decision to make a recess appointment of Richard Cordray as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, even as the Senate is not in recess.

“This recess appointment represents a sharp departure from a long-standing precedent that has limited the President to recess appointments only when the Senate is in a recess of 10 days or longer,” said Sen. McConnell, who in a speech on the Senate floor December 17 pleaded with the White House for cooperation on the stalled confirmation of presidential appointments.

“Breaking from this precedent lands this appointee in uncertain legal territory, threatens the confirmation process and fundamentally endangers the Congress’s role in providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch,” he said.

Republicans have successfully blocked the Senate from going into an actual recess since Christmas to prevent Cordray’s recess appointment by Obama.

White House officials said Obama will argue these “pro forma” sessions are an artificial device with no legal standing—and that the Senate was, in fact, recessed.

In other words, “The Senate is in recess when I say it’s in recess.”

Obama’s mantra of late has been “We can’t wait for Congress to act.” Those are code words for “We don’t need no stinkin’ Congress.” This president and his staff are at heart autocrats, using executive decrees, unconfirmed czars, and sweeping regulatory actions to thumb their noses at the balance of powers and run roughshod over both the Constitution and the legislative branch. Imperial presidency, indeed.

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Obama's malaise speech

Posted by Richard on October 27, 2011

At a fundraiser in San Francisco Tuesday evening, President Obama delivered his version of Jimmy Carter’s infamous malaise speech, blaming the American people for the mess he’s created:

We’ve lost our ambition, our — our imagination, and — and — our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam and unleashed all the potential in this country.

Joe Newby has a roundup of critical reaction from Rush Limbaugh and others. Steven Birn noted that “Limbaugh and others are missing the biggest point” — that this speech reveals Obama as the socialist he is:

It’s fascinating to watch the socialist mind in action. When he declares that Americans have lost their ambition, in his mind ambition means building bi[g] government funded projects. …

Obama has America all wrong. In his mind America is great because of large, overpriced infrastructure projects. In his mind America’s jobs and prosperity come from the government. The reality is that American prosperity comes not from government but from private individuals. It isn’t the Golden Gate bridge that was a great innovation, it was the automobile and the assembly line that were great. It isn’t the Hoover Dam that made America prosperous, it was the telegraph and telephone.

Obama’s default is government. If government isn’t spending big money on infrastructure we’ve somehow lost our ambition and our imagination. Notice those two things require the collective to act. He doesn’t praise individual innovation, only collective action. The truth is the opposite. We’re prosperous not because the government runs things but precisely the opposite. Cars, airplanes, telephones, refrigerators, freezers and most recently computers are all things that were innovated for use not by the government but by private individuals with a profit motive. Steve Jobs and Apple Computers had an IPO in the late 70′s or early 80′s where Wall Street invested $120 million in their business. Jobs died worth $7 billion. That’s innovation, that’s ambition, that’s imagination. It’s the opposite of a government funded bridge.

The Carter comparison is certainly apt, as are Birn’s comments. But I was struck by something else regarding that speech: the Obama administration is allegedly chock-full of the best and the brightest, right? So how could they be so tone-deaf and stupid? Wasn’t there even one person on the White House staff who read that speech and said, “Mr. President, you don’t want to say that — it will draw unflattering comparisons with President Carter”?

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Reid: It’s government jobs we need to create

Posted by Richard on October 20, 2011

It’s obvious to anyone who looks at how the 2009 stimulus bill spent $800 billion and how this year’s so-called jobs bill would spend another $450 billion that the jobs the Obama administration wants to “create or save” are government jobs and government contractors’ jobs. The only thing surprising about today’s outrageous statement by Sen. Harry Reid is that he’d admit this — and offer an absurd justification (emphasis added):

The Senate Majority Leader dropped this stunner in the context of explaining why Congress must drop everything and spend more money we don’t have to prop up public sector jobs.  Because, Reid apparently believes, government workers are the real victims of the great recession.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Democrat Party mentality, distilled:

“It’s very clear that private sector jobs have been doing just fine.  It’s public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”

The private sector’s official unemployment rate has been stuck above 9%, and the real rate (accounting for all the people who’ve given up and left the labor force or are involuntarily working part-time) is at least 16% and maybe over 20%. Sen. Reid thinks that’s “just fine.”

Meanwhile, the government worker unemployment rate is 4.7%. And that’s where Reid and the Obama administration want to “create or save” more jobs, by spending another few hundred billion dollars we have to borrow from the Chinese — or take away from people whose spending and investments might otherwise create private sector jobs.

I’ve tried in the past to remember Hanlon’s (or Heinlein’s) Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”). But the Socialist Democrats have demonstrated through both their words and their actions that their purpose is to create more jobs in government, where unemployment is at 4.7% (effectively full employment), and that they don’t give a rat’s ass about the 9-16% (or higher) unemployment in the private sector.

In fact, their massive new regulatory schemes can only make private sector unemployment worse.

Shrinking the private sector while growing government: The sum total of the evidence strongly suggests that this isn’t stupidity or happenstance — it’s their intent.

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Obama mail scavenger hunt

Posted by Richard on October 14, 2011

Apparently, President Obama is not too popular in Virginia. His only announced Virginia appearance during next week's bus tour is in a state senate district where the Democratic candidate has no Republican challenger in next month's election. Four previously reported stops in districts where the Democrat faces a challenger have apparently been dropped.

The Republican Party of Virginia says it's hard to find a Democratic candidate eager to be associated with the President. So they're having a contest, the "Proud to Stand with Obama" Direct Mail Scavenger Hunt (emphasis in original): 

Find any general election direct mail piece from a Virginia Democrat running for the state Senate – or one from a Democrat committee – that uses a picture of President Obama in a positive light, i.e. "Supported/Endorsed by Barack Obama" or "Supports Obama's policies."  (Note: Democratic primary mail pieces do not count!)

Then scan it and email it to contest@RPV.org  or fax it to us at: (804) 343-1060. The first qualifying mail piece in the door wins the prize, an autographed copy of Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequences," and a "Not Again!" bumper sticker.

If no qualifying entry is submitted by Oct. 28, they'll award the prize to the first person to submit a direct mail piece from any of 10 Democratic state senate candidates "that proudly identifies them as the Democratic candidate." 

The original contest idea, which involved the state's popular Republican governor, had to be scrapped:

The initial idea for this contest was to see how many different pieces of direct mail we could find in which Democrats running for the state Senate used the phase "worked with Governor McDonnell," or included a picture of themselves with Governor McDonnell… but we've seen several of those piece already, so that wouldn't have made for a very challenging scavenger hunt.

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Pass this bill instead

Posted by Richard on September 15, 2011

When the President addressed Congress a week ago and exhorted them 17 or 18 times to "Pass this bill!" there was no bill to pass. No actual written legislation. Nothing at all on paper, only talking points on his teleprompter. After that was pointed out, staffers hastily drafted a bill, and the President has been waving the 150-page document ever since as he endlessly repeats "Pass this bill!"

The title of that belatedly drafted bill is the "American Jobs Act of 2011." But here's the funny thing: A dozen or two times a day, the Prez calls on the House (where it must originate) to pass that bill — now, not later! — and exhorts his followers to call their congresscritters and tell them to pass that bill. But no Democrat ever introduced the bill. The Prez keeps urging the House to pass a bill they can't pass. 

Yesterday, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-1) decided to rectify that situation. He introduced his own bill, only two pages long, named the "American Jobs Act of 2011." It changes the corporate tax rate (and alternative minimum tax) to 0%. 

Brilliant. I love it. Call or email your congresscritters and urge them to pass Rep. Gohmert's "American Jobs Act of 2011" (H.R. 2911). It would create far, far more jobs than the President's amalgam of recycled tax increases, tax incentives for favored groups/behaviors, and "stimulus" spending. 

Warner Todd Huston thinks either Obama is incredibly incompetent or cynical and duplicitous: 

If Obama were an effective president Rep. Gohmert would never have been able to appropriate Obama’s bill name for his own. If Obama was effective he’d have crafted his jobs bill, delivered his speech that night, and lined up at least one Democrat, if not the whole Democrat Party, to introduce his bill the very next morning after the speech.

But Obama did no such thing. Not only was there no bill when he delivered the speech, even this many days after the speech the bill has never been introduced in the House of Representatives where such bills might begin the legislative process.

Of course, it is also possible that President Obama never intended to submit any bill named the “American Jobs Act of 2011″ in the first place. It is possible he never wanted such a bill debated for real because all he was doing was using it as a political ploy for his reelection campaign.

Whichever is the case, the best defense is a good offense, and Rep. Gohmert has mounted a marvelous offense. Let's help him out by talking up his "American Jobs Act of 2011" (H.R. 2911) as a sensible alternative to the President's as-yet unintroduced, as-yet unnamed "Son of Stimulus" bill. Contact Congress!

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More shovel-ready spending

Posted by Richard on September 9, 2011

I got home just a bit ago from a wonderful Stock Show sponsors dinner, which beat the heck out of watching the President's jobs infomercial. On the way back, I heard the bottom-line on the radio: another $450 billion for all the stuff that he spent $800 billion on already — infrastructure, teachers, high-speed trains — only to enventually admit that "those shovel-ready jobs weren't so shovel-ready." But this time, it'll work. Really!

Vodkapundit's drunk-blogging of the event provided more detail, and certainly more entertainment than the actual speech. Obama promised that all those new shovels-full of spending would be paid for. Stephen summarized how: 

4:23PM It will be paid for by future, unspecified spending cuts, that the GOP congress will have to come up with.

4:24PM And it will be paid for by tax increases “on the wealthiest Americans.”

So he's going to create jobs with more of the same profligate spending that has utterly failed to create jobs, and he's going to pay for it by penalizing the people who could, if unshackled, really create jobs.

And those unspecified spending cuts that the House Republicans are expected to come up with? I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that, during the election campaign, the Dems will berate the Republicans endlessly over every dime of those spending cuts, trotting out the geezers eating dog food, the children with no shoes, the lepers who can't afford their medicine, etc., etc., etc. 

Aw, to hell with politics. There's a football game on. 

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It’s the spending, stupid!

Posted by Richard on July 11, 2011

So far, John Boehner is hanging tough on his "no new taxes" pledge. But can we count on him and the GOP establishment to continue to do so? I certainly hope so, but I think it depends on people like you and me keeping the pressure on.

The President is arguing that trillions of dollars in tax increases must be part of a "compromise" solution to the deficit problem, along with a significant bump in the debt ceiling. So he's basically arguing that the government must be allowed to borrow more, tax more, and spend more. That's irresponsible, immoral, and outrageous. 

The Fiscal Year 2007 budget (the last budget before the Democrats took over Congress, and subsequently stopped passing actual budgets at all) was about $2.7 trillion. FY 2011 spending will be about $3.8 trillion, with a deficit of about $1.6 trillion. So about $1.1 trillion of this year's deficit is due to the massive spending increase, and about $0.5 trillion is due to the drop in revenue. 

Or to put it another way, for more than 50 years, with rare exceptions and regardless of tax rates, federal revenue has remained around 17-19% of Gross Domestic Product, and spending has been about 18-20% of GDP (see here for historical data). But the Obama administration (with a kick-start from Bush, when his Treasury secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, threw him into a panic in late 2008) has exploded federal spending to more than 25% of GDP. And he now wants to claim that that's the new normal, and raise revenues to match. 

It will never happen. The 17-19% of GDP revenue number has persisted regardless of whether the top marginal tax rate was 28%, 39%, 50%, or 70%. Contrary to the wishful thinking of the left, tax rates affect people's behavior, and if tax rates go up, they just adjust their affairs to reduce the bite.

Right now, due to the recession, the revenue rate is unusually low, at around 15%. Personally, as a libertarian, I think that's more than enough (the Christian God only asks for 10%). So I signed on to WorldNetDaily's No More Red Ink campaign, which opposes any increase in the debt limit. That wouldn't cause a default or world-wide crisis, as the MSM would have you believe. It would simply require the federal government to reduce expenditures to match its revenues. I think that's a good start. 🙂

But in the spirit of compromise, I'd settle (for now) for this: cut federal spending back to its historical average of 19% of GDP in return for increasing the debt limit by enough to accommodate the difference between that and expected revenue (at current tax rates) for the next two years. As long as it's coupled with a significant roll-back of all the new federal regulations, which (along with the burden of massive federal borrowing) are one of the reasons the economy is so sluggish (and thus revenue is so far below the historical norm). 

So here's what you do, Speaker Boehner: Pass a bill that (1) caps federal spending at 19% of GDP and raises the debt ceiling by however many hundreds of billions that amount is above the projected revenues for FY 2012-2013, and (2) rescinds significant portions of the economy-stifling regulations the Obama administration has enacted in the past 2.5 years. Then dare the Senate to reject it or the President to veto it. Make it clear to both that there is no Plan B — it's a take it or leave it proposition. 

My friends, we can't continue on our current path. And we can't allow federal spending of 25-26% of GDP to become the new "baseline." At a minimum, we have to go back to the historical norm of 18-19% of GDP.

Preferably, we should simply refuse to increase the debt ceiling and force the federal government to cut expenditures to match current revenues (as a first step to fiscal sanity). That's really all that not increasing the debt ceiling does: it imposes a "balanced budget amendment" (which lots of Republicans claim to favor) immediately. No need for a Senate super-majority or ratification by the states. All it takes is for the House of Representatives to not increase the debt ceiling.

I have little hope that the Republicans have enough stones to go that far. But maybe if we keep the pressure on, they'll at least pass a bill along the lines of my compromise proposal. 

Sign onto the No More Red Ink campaign. And go to AFP's SickOfSpending.com to get your free "Cut Spending Now" bumpersticker. Membeship is free, but if you make a donation, you can choose to have the corresponding number of bumperstickers distributed on your behalf or sent to you to distribute. 

I know you've heard this before (and with far less justification), but it really is for the children. And the grandchildren.

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The Twitter questions Obama should have answered

Posted by Richard on July 8, 2011

Iowahawk submitted a bunch of questions to the President's Twitter Town Hall, but none were selected. Too bad, because they're much more entertaining than the ones chosen. And certainly more entertaining than the President's answers. Here are a few of my favorites:

An $8 billion high speed train leaves Chicago for Iowa City at 8:15am at 40mph. Why?

I let my Mexican drug lord license expire. Am I still eligible for the free machine gun program?

Why do you need permission to be clear, and not need permission to bomb Libya?

I just voted to increase my sobriety ceiling. Why won't the bartender give me another drink?

I really need to start living within my means. Do you recommend I start holding up banks or convenience stores?

Are strawmen cheaper when you buy them by the gross?

if punishing employers results in more employment, can you also punish beer makers?

Plenty more where those came from. Read the whole thing.

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Few jobs at a high cost

Posted by Richard on July 6, 2011

The President's Council of Economic Advisors released a jobs report on Friday, right before the holiday weekend, so you know they hoped no one would pay attention to it. And with good reason. According to Jeffrey H. Anderson, it shows that the jobs "created or saved" by the almost $900 billion in "stimulus" spending cost nearly $300,000 each (emphasis added):

The report was written by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama, and it chronicles the alleged success of the “stimulus” in adding or saving jobs. The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.   

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead. 

Furthermore, the council reports that, as of two quarters ago, the “stimulus” had added or saved just under 2.7 million jobs — or 288,000 more than it has now.  In other words, over the past six months, the economy would have added or saved more jobs without the “stimulus” than it has with it. In comparison to how things would otherwise have been, the “stimulus” has been working in reverse over the past six months, causing the economy to shed jobs.

That's the good news! The bad news is that the economy lost many more jobs than originally reported

From 2007 to 2010, initial reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) told us that the economy lost 4.201 million jobs. BLS revisions have thus far ramped up the number of jobs lost by 2.43 million. The four-year total is now 6.631 million — a stunning 58% increase. As seen above, the bureau’s revisions to the 12 months of the real recession (July 2008 through June 2009) have shot reported job losses up by almost 1.9 million, a jaw-dropping average of 158,000 per month.

They’re not done yet. Every February, BLS performs a comprehensive “benchmark revision.” The next one will affect the period from March 2010 through December 2011. Considering the results of the past four years showing average additional job losses of 415,000, the next benchmark revision seems destined to push the figures even higher.

Is this sort of depressing jobs data revision typical? Well, no, not during the Bush administration:

By contrast, from 2003 to 2006, initial BLS reports told us that the economy added 5.103 million jobs. After all revisions, the four-year total rose by 1.605 million to 6.708 million — a 31% increase. The sum of all benchmark revisions during that time was a positive 675,000.

The observant reader might conclude that if the government's statistics are off by 58% in one case and 31% (in the other direction) in another, maybe they're just not very good at this econometrics crap. And the observant reader would be correct. 

Be that as it may, there's a more fundamental problem with the administration's claims regarding jobs "created or saved." It's the "broken window fallacy" identified by Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen." Newsmax quoted a nice modern formulation from the Richmond Times-Dispatch (emphasis added): 

The effects of the stimulus have long been argued. Writing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, A. Barton Hinkle reported that nobody could seriously argue that it had had no effect on the economy.

However, he likened it to a purse snatcher who took a handbag containing $500 and spent the money on a new television.

“It is categorically undeniable that the theft has created a sale for the TV store. Conservatives who pretend the stimulus has not created any jobs whatsoever stand in the position of an observer trying to deny the TV has been sold,” Hinkle wrote.

“Yet the liberal analysis lacks any recognition that the purse owner now has $500 less to spend on the laptop computer she was going to buy. The theft has generated one sale only by destroying another.

“The first effect is easily seen. The second is not,” Hinkle added. “But only the economically illiterate would conclude that just the first effect occurred, and that therefore the way to increase consumption is to encourage more purse-stealing.”

Exactly right. The Obama administration's strategy for improving the economy amounts to promoting purse-stealing. 

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Another sorry presidential press conference

Posted by Richard on June 30, 2011

It's a good thing Congressman Joe Wilson wasn't in attendance at today's presidential press conference. He would have gone hoarse shouting "You lie!" so many times.

The president whose party has refused to introduce, much less pass, a budget the last two fiscal years, and who still hasn't proposed a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, chastised the Republicans for not solving our budget problems. Are you kidding me? 

The president who increased federal spending by more than 35% in two years to an astonishing 26% of GDP (a level unprecedented except during World War II) insisted that the problem is not enough revenue. Are you kidding me? 

The president who threw $800 billion of "stimulus" money largely into "infrastructure investments" to create "shovel-ready jobs" (which never materialized) says we need to invest more money into fixing our infrastructure. Are you kidding me? 

The president who included a tax break for corporate jets in his $800 billion "stimulus" bill now repeatedly inveighs against that tax break for corporate jets as part of his renewed effort to promote class warfare. Are you kidding me? 

The president whose profligacy promises to put the U.S. into a solvency crisis comparable to Greece's, possibly before his first term is up and certainly in his second (if, God forbid, he gets a second), wants to address the deficit "not just on the 10-year window but also the long term," as if ten years isn't nearly long enough to solve the problem. Are you kidding me?

I could go on, but I'm already both bored and disgusted. This poltroon is making Jimmy Carter look like a great president and Bob Dole look like a great communicator. God, I hope the inept party, a.k.a. GOP, doesn't blink on this debt ceiling issue. And I sure hope they don't nominate another McCain or Dole and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in 2012. This country is barely going to survive four years of Obama. Eight would spell doom.

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