Our Dear Leader openly criticizes the ‘private sector economy’, something he has absolutely zero experience with, for not creating new jobs in the harshly anti-business, anti-growth, economic environment created by President Obama and the congressional democrats. Then he sends out his new Chief of Staff to attempt to the “defend the indefensible.”
Kudos to Mr. Daley for having the guts not to stand there and openly and blatantly lie about the effects of the Obama economic policies as other members of this administration have done in the past. I can’t help but wonder if our Dear Leader will toss Mr. Daley under the bus, as he is doing to Kenneth Melson, the current head of the ATF.
Update: Doug Powers points out that it’s the one-year anniversary of Recovery Summer™. How is that working out for you? If you aren’t sure, try this simple experiment. Drive around your local community and start counting the number of empty store fronts. Are there more or less than last summer? How many new businesses have opened up in your local area in the past year? That should a good meter stick to measure the, ahem, “recovery” the Obama economy has brought us.
The annual inflation rate for May climbed to 3.6% as price spikes spread beyond oil and food. At the same time, May’s unemployment rate edged up to 9.1%, yielding a Misery Index of 12.7.
That marks the fourth straight monthly increase in the index, which is now 62% higher than it was when Obama took office…
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Regulation: In just his first 18 months in office, Obama imposed 43 regulations that will cost, by government estimates, $26 billion. And that doesn’t count the avalanche of costly new rules headed our way courtesy of ObamaCare.
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Taxes: While Obama grudgingly acceded to keep all of Bush’s tax rates in force for two more years, he agitates endlessly for massive tax hikes on the “rich.” His debt plan calls for raising the top tax rates to pre-Bush levels and squeezing an additional $1 trillion out of them under the guise of “tax reform.” All of the tax cuts he has approved have been gimmicky and short-term.
Spending: Federal outlays have risen more than 25% since Obama took office, and they’re on track to eat up almost a quarter of gross domestic product for the foreseeable future — a spending level not seen since World War II. Annual deficits, meanwhile, have topped $1 trillion every year since Obama took office.
Debt: Gross federal debt has climbed more than a third under Obama, topping $14 trillion. His budget plan puts it on a course to reach $20 trillion by 2016.
Don’t expect any “change” in the path to self-destruction that our Dear Leader, Barack H. Obama is bound and determined to drag the country down from him. The American electorate is going to have to force change in November 2012.
As noted before, our Dear Leader‘s economic policies, i.e. Keynesian economics theory that only really works in a classroom environment, has resulted in a noted and sharp increase in inflation, while doing little or nothing to spur real economic growth.
The lack of growth, is evident in these three figures pointing the change since our Dear Leader took office:
Unemployment: up 25%
Debt: up 35%
Price of a galleon of gas: up 104%
The source for these numbers, that tool of the Vast Right Conspiracytm, NBC News’ own “Meet the Press.” Oh, sorry, NBC is a decidedly left leaning News organization, so these numbers must be pretty damn solid in order for David Gregory to rub DNC spokesperson Rep. Wassermann-Schultz’s nose in them.
There is also this informative graph.
As you can clearly see, the affect our Dear Leader‘s economic policies have had is to make things worse than if he and the Congressional democrats had done nothing at all! Also keep in mind, that it was in our Dear Leader‘s best interest to take the worst case scenario for the “Without Recovery Plan” numbers in this graph. Thus the odds are that if the federal government hadn’t done a damn thing, including not violating the rule of law and letting GM & Chrysler file Chapter 11 without making sure the UAW got paid off before the bond holders, the unemployment numbers would not only be lower than what they currently are, they would be lower than the “Without Recover Plan” projections the chart listed above. Not just lower, but probably closer to the “With Recovery Plan” numbers, which I can see the Keynesian addicted White House “economists” considered their “safe” number projections for economic performance based on their years of classroom experience.
The the democrat’s so-called “stimulus plan” failed came as surprise to nobody who was 1. Paying Attention, 2. could do some basic mathematics, and 3. ever held a job in the real world. Even if you take the White House numbers on faith, i.e “created or saved” jobs does not equal new jobs when you recount the same jobs as “saved” multiple times, the basic math doesn’t work. Economic Policies for the 21st Century points out one of principle flaws.
[E]ven if you buy the White House’s argument that the $800 billion package created 3 million jobs, that works out to $266,000 per job. Taxing or borrowing $266,000 from the private sector to create a single job is simply not a cost effective way of putting America back to work. The long-term debt burden of that $266,000 swamps any benefit that the single job created might provide.
In the face of the obviously failure of their policies, what do you think our Dear Leader and the Congressional democrats are offering? Yup, that’s right. More of the same. Yet another “quantitative easing” (i.e. printing money with nothing to back it, an inflationary tactic) is being planned. Despite that the results of such a policy were clear back in March of 2009, when this cartoon was published.
Hmmm….looks like the nice men at Cox & Forkum nailed it right on the head with that one. It makes one wonder, if the label on the outside of the box was our Dear Leader’s ultimate goal, and that he really didn’t care what the effect on the economy would be. He knew that he wasn’t going to be bothered by it, as Mark Steyn pointed out:
“I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it’s such a smart idea to let one’s breezy insouciance out of the bag when you’re giving a press conference.
To use a phrase our Dear Leader is fond of, he just doesn’t have any “skin in the game.” He has never worked a day in his life in private sector economy and he never will. Prior to running for President, he managed to go $300,000 in debt on a family income of half a million dollars a year. Is there any surprise in the fact that he has done the same with the US economy?
Not a surprise to anyone who has taken a graduate level economics class and pays attention, but since that is probably a small slice of the population, let’s review.
The Obama administration’s monetary policies have added approximately 56.5 cents to the price of every gallon of gas you pump, according to a report by members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee.
Estimates suggest that had the dollar maintained the value it had when Obama came into office, gasoline would cost approximately $3.40 per gallon instead of around $4 per gallon in many parts of the country.
Here is the short form for those who haven’t studied macro economics. Oil is traded on the open market with the US dollar being the standard currency used for for that commodity. Our Dear Leader’s monetary policy of just printing money to pay for his massive spending increases ( the so-called “quantitative easing” programs are good examples of this) has caused inflation, which means the US Dollar has less value than it did before. To make this even simpler, things cost more when you buy things using US dollars. Not because the value of the item being purchased has gone up. It is because the amount of goods and services a US Dollar can be traded for has gone down. This includes crude oil. Your dollar is worth less, so you pay more dollars for things like gasoline, a crude oil product.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed this printing money scheme would actually “grow the economy.” Fed Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan disagreed, stating that the Obama/Bernake plan would weaken US currency and result in inflation.
Clearly, Volcker and Greenspan were right, and Obama and Bernanke were wrong.
The Obama administration is calling for another round of “”quantitative easing” in spite of the clear and obvious facts of the matter.
I’ll limit this quickie post to that nasty 3-letter word: J-O-B-S. Today’s unemployment report showed that we, Unexpectedly™, added only 54,000 jobs in May and the unemployment rate shot back up to 9.1%. Backing out the 62,000 jobs added by McDonald’s leaves … a one-term president.
Additionally, coblogger emeritus Geoff pointed out that we’ve shed 430,000 full-time jobs in the last couple of months and are now back where we began the year. It’s as if the entire population of Reno cried out in terror and was suddenly silenced given a pink slip.
That means that over twelve years of Republican rule, there was an average annual budget deficit of about $104 billion. Compare that with an average annual deficit since 2008 of $1.074 trillion — or about $90 billion per month.
For those of you with bad math skills, let me sum this up for you. Every month, the democrats come within 90% of increasing the deficit of what it took the Republicans an entire year to do.
Republican and fiscal conservative voters removed the Republican party from power because that party was spending too much money, putting a burden on the economy and not holding back government growth.
Independent fiscal conservatives, including many who are registered as democrats, are not going to reward the democrat party with their votes in 2010 for behavior that is much, much worse than what the Republican party did.
The White House has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money.
Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It’s no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it’s a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.
That means that any stimulus money used to cover payroll will be included in the jobs credited to the program, including pay raises for existing employees and pay for people who never were in jeopardy of losing their positions.
That’s right. The “open and transparent” Obama administration is now going to take credit for “saving or creating” jobs that already exist.
What is clear, is that Obama’s team of Socialists are trying desperately to hide obvious fact that the democrat “porkulus” bill was an utter and complete failure at the stated goal of “stimulating” the economy. It has been a job killer, not a job creator, and the Team Lightbringer and their co-conspirators in the democrat congressional “leadership” are now trying to make it impossible to accurately track the effect of their pork laden payouts have on the job market, and the economy.
– $430,000 to repair a bridge in Iowa County, Wis., that carries 10 or fewer cars per day.
– $800,000 for the John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pa., serving about 20 passengers per day, to build a backup runway.
– $219,000 for Syracuse University to study the sex lives of freshmen women.
– $2.5 million in stimulus checks sent to the deceased.
In the non-existent 14th congressional district alone, the Obama administration claims to have spent $617,848 in order to “create or save” five jobs. That is $123,569.60 per job, in a part of America that doesn’t even exist.
According to ABC News’ Jack Tapper, Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, used the term “Calculator Abuse” when a reporter did some basic arithmetic the the federal government’s own numbers. The government’s own numbers show what the reporter pointed out, $160 billion spent divided by 1 million jobs “created or saved” means that each of those jobs “created or saved” cost the US taxpayer $160,000 per job. Once again, Team Lightbringer responded with a classic defense, “Who are you going to believe? Me or that lying calculator?”
As we know know, the term “jobs created or saved” is a scam created by our Dear Leader to hide the truth from the American People. It has become so obvious that even CBS “News” has been forced to report on it.
Ace goes into much more detail on how the Obama administration knew it was a farce from day one and were much more concerned with creating the illusion of economic growth where there is none.
When the WH demanded that those who received Spendulus money “report” back on how many jobs were “saved or created,” they insisted upon a nonsensical rule: If a single dollar of Spendulus was spent on an employee’s salary, whether that employee was a new employee or an old one, that gets counted as a job “saved or created.” If he’s a new employee, that job was created. If he’s an existing employee, that job was saved.
For $1.
Yes, $1. Because the nonsensical rules the White House told these people to count “saved or created” jobs by simply stated: If any employee’s salary is paid, in whole or in part (any part!), count that as a job “saved or created” by the spending.
And then report that number back to us.
Note that the White House’s rules do not seek to discover which jobs really were “saved or created.”
The harsh reality of the current economy, the worst since Jimmy Carter, and its effects on the average American just doesn’t matter to our Dear Leader.
Michelle Malkin has more details on the “jobs created and saved” scam.
President Barack Obama’s economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there.
The Georgia nonprofit’s inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government’s latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an “extensive review” to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.
About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press.
Update: Even the way far left leaning Boston Globe has noticed that the White House numbers have no connection of reality. It is interesting to listen to the Globe reporter try to spin this White House scam as a “mistake.” There is no mistake. Team Lightbringer knew that the porkulus wouldn’t actually create any actual jobs, so they came up with “rules” that would make it appear that some actual benefit was was created by that massive spending bill.
