(Updated August 6, '10.)
America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.
Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans despaired even of looking for work, which for purposes of government statistics wipes them from the official labour force and conveniently lowers the top-line unemployment rate.
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.
Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?
The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.
The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.
The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.
The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)
The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."
And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.
The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.
And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.
There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."
And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.
The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.
The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.
America had problems, but too little federal spending was not one of them. President Bush spent too much; President Obama is spending much, much more. Obama and his Congress are fixing problems America doesn't have with solutions America can't afford. And it all started with the $787 billion stimulus -- since revised upward to $862 billion.
Obama's stimulus, by his own measures, has failed. Obama promised his stimulus would "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs over the next two years" -- "90 percent...in the private sector"; it's been nearly a year and a half already, and in that time the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net. Obama's advisers projected that unemployment wouldn't hit 8 percent if Obama got his stimulus; Obama got his stimulus, and unemployment went over 10 percent for the first time in a quarter-century. Obama promised his stimulus would "immediately creat[e] jobs"; 16 months later, in June alone, 652,000 Americans despaired even of looking for work, which for purposes of government statistics wipes them from the official labour force and conveniently lowers the top-line unemployment rate.
The stimulus was sold as the greatest improvement in America's roads since Eisenhower built the Interstate system, but spending for roads and bridges came to just 3 percent of the final bill.
Forty-three percent of the bill remains unspent nearly a year and a half after it was passed -- $370 billion as of late-July -- and what is the use of a "stimulus" for "immediately creating jobs" if 43 percent of it is still on the shelf after 17 months?
The bill became too much a cheque-book for the preoccupations of the Democratic Party, and bonus spending on institutions favoured of the Democratic Party, from $39.5 billion for public schools, to $2.4 billion for something called "carbon-capture demonstration projects," to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nowhere in the bill was there any bonus spending for some of the most "shovel-ready" of government work in war-time -- defence projects -- and in fact the Obama administration later announced cuts to missile defence and production of the world-beating F-22 stealth fighter, national defence being the solitary area of government spending which Democrats are capable of cutting, never mind that there's a war on.
The bill cost $205 billion more than President Bush spent on the Iraq War in six years.
The bill ran to 1,073 pages, and neither the Congressmen and Senators who passed it nor the president who signed it into law bothered to read the thing.
The usual legislative process was suspended, committee hearings were bypassed, and the Republican minority was shut out. ("I won," President Obama explained. "We won the election. We wrote the bill," House Speaker Pelosi elaborated.)
The bill got exactly 3 of 217 Republican votes in both houses of Congress -- one of which three turned Democrat not long after -- and the final votes were reported by the Associated Press in this newspaper as "a major victory for President Obama."
And that was the least of the press abuses where the stimulus was concerned. The Canadian Press in this newspaper reported in March of last year that if Obama's economics are socialist then "it’s a brand of socialism Americans are behind. Countless public opinion polls suggest that the majority of Americans support both additional stimulus spending as well as government intervention to save insolvent banks." The CP report didn't cite any of those "countless" polls, and at least three major national polls in the days and weeks previous were pointing in quite the opposite direction.
The Rasmussen poll found "just 27 percent of voters nationwide favour passage of a second economic stimulus." The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 61 percent were more concerned the government would spend too much than too little in aid of stimulating the economy -- even if spending less would mean a longer recession. And the Gallup/USA Today poll found all of 14 percent saying it would have been better to spend more on the stimulus.
And never mind any "additional stimulus spending": it was only 44 percent who were calling the first stimulus a "good idea" in the Journal/NBC poll even when the bill was passed in February of '09. Five months later, that number was down to 34. And a year after passage, the New York Times/CBS News poll could find only 6 percent to say the stimulus had actually created jobs.
There was ample warning it wouldn't work. Dominic Lawson in the London Times had it right even before the stimulus was law. "Obama is backing the most primitive interpretation of Keynes’s theories: that any form of government spending amounts to an economic stimulus."
And it turned out Obama's crudified Keynesianism was his Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C for the American and global economies. So far from discreetly retiring the stimulus and taking a new direction, Obama mystifyingly claimed "every economist" had concluded the stimulus "did its job," proclaimed this "Recovery Summer," called for $266 billion more stimulus spending, pushed the $26 billion "state aid" bill to supplement the stimulus, and lectured the G-20 nations on following his example and spending their way to prosperity with bottomless boondoggles.
The best thing at this point would be to cancel as much as is workable of the unspent provisions of the stimulus, and cut the losses. But Obama's Congress has refused to redirect even a fraction of the stimulus allocations to cover an unfunded unemployment benefits extension, so any change of course is going to take a very different government in Washington.
The stimulus was an act of faith in government, and in Barack Obama, and in the end its greatest effect has been on the national debt.
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