The Big Lie: Obama's Stimulus Worked

It's been one year since Obama signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the 'stimulus') into law.  Believe it or not, Obama is trotting out there today to boast about how it's been such a grand success.

Really?

Let's review:
- Obama promised the stimulus would create or save 4 million jobs...but in the past 12 months America has shed 2.74 million jobs
- unemployment rose from 7.6% to over 10%, then tipped back to 9.7%...after Obama promised it wouldn't go above 8%
- only 6% of Americans think the stimulus actually created any jobs (compare that to the 7% who think Elvis Presley is still alive)
- mortgage delinquencies are up 50%
- billions of stimulus dollars have been spent on programs that are being slashed
- suburban homelessness is on the rise
- Dem Senator Evan Bayh recently announced he would not run for re-election; he also said this: "If I could create one job in the private sector, that's more than Congress has done in six months."

If this is his idea of success, I can't imagine what he would call a failure.  I guess that's why he's refusing to admit one.

If you're interested, you can view a timeline of the stimulus milestones here.

In various press conferences about the stimulus' one-year anniversary, Obama and VP Joe Biden told some tremendous whoppers.  For example, Obama claimed that he had given 95% of Americans a tax cut.  Um...no.  A one-time tax credit is not a tax cut.  We've beaten that dead horse many times here.  Biden whined about Republican obstructionism: "I don't ever recall a time in my career where to get anything done you needed a super majority, 60 out of 100 senators… I've never seen it this dysfunctional. I'm trying to get the other team to cooperate."  One little problem: that little 60-vote rule has always existed in the Senate!  It's the standard threshold to begin and end debate on legislation.  It's standard procedure.  And besides, did Biden forget that the Dems had those 60 votes for the whole 12 months?  Even if the GOP had been doing something improper, the Dems should have been able to conduct normal business, right?  Any obstruction was not with Republicans, but with Democrats who knew that what Obama was doing was not good for the country (or their re-election chances).  Gateway Pundit sums up what Biden was really saying:  "If only Republicans would vote with Democrats to pillage the treasury, nationalize industry and play nicey-nice with terrorists, everything would be cool. Unfortunately for Democrats, Republicans aren't participating in their rape and plunder of the American economy."

Bingo!

Part of the problem is that Obama and his team have a fundamentally flawed understanding of the situation they inherited:

During his State of the Union Address, the president asserted: "At the beginning of the last decade, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription-drug program."

In other words, it's President George W. Bush's fault.

This can't be true. Mr. Bush implemented the three policies mentioned by Mr. Obama in the early 2000s. Yet by 2007 — the last year before the recession — the budget deficit stood at only $161 billion. So how could those policies cause trillion-dollar deficits from 2009 through 2020?

They can't.  Hit the link for much more analysis.  The point is that sure, Bush spent way too much; no one denies that.  But, he also cut tax rates, which spurred incredible economic growth throughout the decade that only slowed down when the housing market melted down in 2008.  That's when bailout/stimulus mania began, and our current debt problems took off like a rocket.  Obama has made Bush's spending look frivolous, and that -- combined with his anti-business, higher-tax-and-more-regulation policies -- has more or less stalled out the economy.  With the economy stalled, jobs evaporated.  It's not rocket science, and it's all there for anyone who is willing to see the truth.  (Oh, by the way, those tax rate cuts that Bush ded are the same tax rate cuts that Obama is going to let expire, causing even more hardship for all Americans.)

So how in the world are they thinking they'll get away with these easily disprovable lies and deceptions?

Rush Limbaugh mentioned on his radio program today that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf of the concept of 'The Big Lie'.  The basic idea is that people will accept a big, supremely audacious, ridiculously unbelievable lie far more quickly than a small lie simply because they assume that no one in their right mind would dare to tell such a grossly incompetent and unbelievable lie...thus it must be true.  Basically, if you're going to go at all, go BIG.  Coupled with appropriate propaganda techniques like incessantly repeating something until people think it's true even if it is obviously not, The Big Lie is an effective way of re-writing reality that Hitler used to change the face of the world.

Barack Obama's big lie: the stimulus worked.  So how about another one?

There's my two cents.


Related Reading:
Why Big Business is Good
Barack Obama and the War on Banks
The Obama Budget: A Tipping Point?
No Tax Left Behind
Economics in Four Dimensions