Thanks, Obama, for being so presidential. For the man who is foisting a New New Deal on America and walking in FDR's footsteps, you're sure not acting very much like him.President Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
President Barack H. Obama: 'Do what I want, or the economy will melt, and you'll all die poor and alone.'
Irresponsible fear-mongering is not all that presidential. Now that I think about it, weren't we promised a calm, cool, post-partisan president?
Guess that 'hope over fear' stuff was "just words."
Although I'm not a big fan of FDR, the man knew that part of leadership was preventing panic. In 1933, during one of his "fireside chats," FDR said the following:
After all there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work.Roosevelt knew panic would only make the problem worse, so while he was honest about the state of the economy, he deliberately tempered his rhetoric. Compare that to Obama's words from last night:It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.
They can't pay their bills. They've stopped spending money. And because they've stopped spending money, more businesses have been forced to lay off more workers. In fact, local TV stations have started running public service announcements to tell people where to find food banks, even as the food banks don't have enough to meet the demand.HOLY CRAP GRAB THE GUNS AND START STUFFING MATTRESSES WITH MONEY AND STOCK UP ON CANNED FOODS!!!!!!!!!!!As we speak, similar scenes are playing out in cities and towns across America. Last Monday, more than 1,000 men and women stood in line for 35 firefighter jobs in Miami [Florida]. Last month, our economy lost 598,000 jobs, which is nearly the equivalent of losing every single job in the state of Maine.
And if there's anyone out there who still doesn't believe this constitutes a full-blown crisis, I suggest speaking to one of the millions of Americans whose lives have been turned upside-down because they don't know where their next paycheck is coming from.
The contrast couldn't be clearer. Roosevelt was deliberate in his attempts to calm. Obama is deliberate in his attempts to induce panic. In many ways, he's like Syndrome from "The Incredibles." *Spoilers for those who haven't seen the movie.* The villain deliberately creates a giant machine designed to attack a city and create panic so he can swoop in to play the part of the hero. He's designed the machine to respond to his commands, so he can 'destroy' it. Unfortunately for him (and the city) his plan goes awry and he can't control the destruction he unleashed.
I didn't say it was a comforting metaphor.
What we've seen over the past few weeks is that Obama's definition of 'hope' is 'not-Bush.' That may have been enough to get him through an election, but it's a piss-poor substitute for the real thing.
But wait, there's more...
First, he keeps talking about creating or saving jobs. That's a great political phrase because it's extremely vague and entirely unverifiable. Here are a couple thoughts on the subject.
Andy McCarthy
On (1): In other words, we're gonna spend $1.2 trillion (factoring in the interest ... but not counting who knows how much more when the new spending floors for future budgets are factored in) and we may not "create" a single new job, but the "stimulus" will be a success if unemployment doesn't get (much) higher.
On (2): Even in this, Obama is shrewd. I find myself disagreeing intensely with virtually everything he is trying to do yet praying ardently for his good health these next four years.
Jonah GoldbergSeriously, how is he going to quantify those 'saved' jobs? It's fairly well established how to track the number of jobs lost or created, but saved...? This is merely a political ploy that will allow Obama to claim success no matter what happens with the actual job numbers because he can simply make up a bunch of 'saved' jobs and take the credit for them. How convenient.
On top of that, he lied through his teeth throughout the speech.
On the subject of pork, Obama assures us that there is not a single bit of pork in this sausage patty:
When even the AP takes a dig at him, you know it's a flagrantly obvious lie:Barack Obama made the claim at least twice yesterday that the stimulus bill had no pork in it. In his prime-time press conference, Obama almost angrily rejected the notion that the Generational Theft Act contained pork:
"But what I — what I've been concerned about is some of the language that's been used suggesting that this is full of pork and this is wasteful government spending, so on and so forth. …
But when they start characterizing this as pork without acknowledging that there are no earmarks in this package — something, again, that was pretty rare over the last eight years — then you get a feeling that maybe we're playing politics instead of actually trying to solve problems for the American people."
And earlier in the day, during his Elkhart town-hall meeting:
In a literal sense, that's true — but only because the stimulus bill is essentially an Omnibus Earmark Package. It consists entirely of local and state projects that would normally only get funded as earmarks on other appropriations. ..."And, listen, I know that there are a lot of folks out there who've been saying, 'Oh, this is pork, and this is money that's going to be wasted,' and et cetera, et cetera. Understand, this bill does not have a single earmark in it, which is unprecedented for a bill of this size, does not have a single earmark in it."
And how did Obama sell this to the good folks in Elkhart? By using the same, old, tired pork-barrel pledges he supposedly rejected:
Obama told his Elkhart audience that Indiana will benefit from work on "roads like U.S. 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on." He added: "And I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart."
That's pork, no matter what Obama calls it. The stimulus package contains nothing but porky, wasteful spending, most of which has little chance of creating jobs within the first year, when jobs will be most needed. Obama even sells it like pork. If it looks like a pig, acts like a pig, gets sold as a pig, and stinks of pork, it's not difficult to identify it.
President Barack Obama had it both ways Monday when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana. He bragged about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.
The other giant lie he committed was to accuse Republicans of wanting to sit on their hands and do nothing. Hot Air has the quotes and analysis (emphasis mine):
He also lied about inheriting a trillion dollar deficit:"As I said, the one concern I've got on the stimulus package, in terms of the debate and listening to some of what's been said in Congress is that there seems to be a set of folks who — I don't doubt their sincerity — who just believe that we should do nothing. Now, if that's their opening position or their closing position in negotiations, then we're probably not going to make much progress, because I don't think that's economically sound and I don't think what — that's what the American people expect, is for us to stand by and do nothing."
Republicans in both the House and Senate have offered at least two alternative stimulus packages. None of them demanded that Obama "do nothing". In fact, it was the Congressional Budget Office and not Republicans that suggested that doing nothing might have a better effect than the Obama/Pelosi/Reid stimulus bill, as our friends at Power Line point out.
This lie is particularly egregious, as Nancy Pelosi locked Republicans out of drafting the bill altogether. Barack Obama talked about his own initiatives to reach across the aisle by naming three Republicans to his Cabinet, but what he didn't mention was his and Pelosi's version of bipartisanship in drafting the bill, which amounted to "we won". Had Republicans been given an opportunity to work on the bill, it would have been somewhat smaller with a different set of tax cuts, but probably in a range from $450-600 billion, which is what their alternatives proposed — and it would have gotten overwhelming support in Congress.
He's the only one revising history!My administration inherited a deficit of over $1 trillion, but because we also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression, doing little or nothing at all will result in ever — even greater deficits, even greater job loss, even greater loss of income and even greater loss of confidence. …
But what I — what I've been concerned about is some of the language that's been used suggesting that this is full of pork and this is wasteful government spending, so on and so forth. First of all, when I hear that from folks who presided over a doubling of the national debt, then, you know, I just want them to not engage in some revisionist history. I inherited the deficit that we have right now and the economic crisis that we have right now.
Obama tried a couple of times to lay the deficit off on the Republicans, but more than half of that deficit came from the bailouts of last year, which the Democrats pushed through Congress. Republicans balked at the massive TARP program, which Obama criticized in his press conference last night. The Bush administration didn't partner with Republican leadership to get that passed; they had to get the Democrats to pass it, and Democrats have controlled Congress for the last two years. And the economic crisis came from the collapse of the housing market bubble created by the kind of intervention Obama proposes.
He finishes off with a flourish of ignorance that makes one wonder if he was actually educated by the public school system instead of those fancy private schools:
Here's the problem with that statement:I think that what I've said is what other economists have said across the political spectrum, which is that if you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of.
We saw this happen in Japan in the 1990s, where they did not act boldly and swiftly enough, and as a consequence they suffered what was called the "lost decade," where essentially for the entire '90s, they did not see any significant economic growth.
So, in one speech, he has demonstrated his supreme mastery over lying, lack-of-bipartisanship, and ignorance of history.Er, what? Even the New York Times knows that Japan acted too swiftly, too boldly, and ran up massive deficits on infrastructure work that never stimulated the economy:
Japan's rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery. …
In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan's Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that some people had warned a few months ago that this was exactly what we would get...
There's my two cents.
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