Obama's Convoluted Logic: High Unemployment 'Evidence' Stimulus Worked

Video below:



Text via CNS:

“Now, without relitigating the past, I’m absolutely convinced, and the vast majority of economists are convinced, that the steps we took in the Recovery Act saved millions of people their jobs or created a whole bunch of jobs.

“And part of the evidence of that is as you see what happens with the Recovery Act phasing out. When I came into office and budgets were hemorrhaging at the state level, part of the Recovery Act was giving states help so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters. As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, you’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector--teachers, police officers, firefighters losing their jobs.”

Commentary:

I have said, multiple times, the $787 billion stimulus Obama and Democrats passed in February 2009 was nothing more than a band-aid slapped on a gushing wound.

Using any failing business as an example, whether it is a lack of sales, bad management, whatever the reason the business is losing money, if you pump more money into it, that business can keep it's doors open until the money runs out.

If the underlying causes of failure was not addressed and fixed, the business would again fail when the extra money runs out.

The stimulus did exactly that, it pumped good taxpayer money after bad into the economy. It did not address or fix the underlying problems and as the money ran out, or as Obama puts it, "phased" out... surprise, surprise, the problems are still there.

The stimulus only gave the illusion that there was some kind of recovery going on.

Obama likes to talk about how many jobs were created or saved by his stimulus plan but we never see him acknowledge or see the media ask about the one million private sector jobs that were destroyed/forestalled as a direct result of the stimulus package, leaving his stimulus package with a net loss of 500,000 jobs.

Unemployment was 8.1 in February of 2009, it is now 9.2 in June of 2011.

No worries though, Democrats want...wait for it....... another stimulus plan.

The evidence is in alright and Obama is right, the stimulus worked if the purpose of that stimulus was to create an illusion.

Video- RNC Ad, 'Change Direction' Attacks Obama On Spending And Taxes

The Republican National Committee has produced an ad called "Change Direction" which challenges Obama's economic decisions and record over the last two-and-a-half years.

Video below:




Transcript:

"He promised to change direction, $800 billion in stimulus, trillions got government healthcare, 2 million jobs gone, left turn after left turn America's heading the wrong way fast. Six million foreclosures, fourteen trillion in debt, $500 billion in higher taxes and the worst long term unemployment in generations. Don't let Obama drive us to disaster, change directions. "

The ad campaign will run for four weeks on national cable channels.

This comes amidst news that Obama's stimulus not only failed but could have made matters worse. Click all the links over at Hot Air and James Pethokoukis to see how much of a mess Obama's policies have truly created.

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Data Shows Obama Did Not Prevent Second Great Depression Despite Claims To The Contrary

Investors Business Daily reports that "the White House and its supporters seem to be engaging in a bit of historical revisionism."

White House economists forecast in January 2009 that, even without a stimulus, unemployment would top out at just 8.8% — well below the 10.8% peak during the 1981-82 recession, and nowhere near Depression-era unemployment levels.

The same month, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that, absent any stimulus, the recession would end in "the second half of 2009." The recession officially ended in June 2009, suggesting that the stimulus did not have anything to do with it.

They call it historical revisionism, I call it just another one of Obama's lies.

Another Obama meme bites the dust....

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International Monetary Fund Downgrades U.S. Forecast

Via Washington Examiner we see the International Monetary Fund has downgraded their 2011 and 2012 growth forecasts for the U.S.

The IMF now forecasts U.S. gross domestic product of 2.5 percent in 2011 and 2.7 percent in 2012, yet Obama's budget proposal anticipated growth of 2.7 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively. While that may not seem like a big deal, small fluctuations in GDP can make a huge difference on deficits because economic performance has an effect on both sides of the budget ledger. Greater growth means more revenue because more people are employed and earning higher incomes, but it also means less spending on so-called "automatic stabilizers" such as unemployment benefits.

Obama's growth compared to Reagan's:

Reagan recovery saw GDP surge by 4.5 percent and 7.2 percent in 1983 and 1984,and the Obama economy isn't going to achieve that in anybody's wildest dreams.

Here are a few differences between Obama's policies and Reagan's:

* Reagan cut income tax rates. Obama spent his first two years promising to increase tax rates on “the rich,” mostly small business owners and investors. In December he signed legislation that schedules his tax increase to take effect two months after the 2012 Presidential election

* Reagan cut “discretionary” spending. Obama dramatically increased it.

* Reagan reduced regulation and government intervention in the private sector.

* Obama has implemented waves of new regulation and under his leadership Congress passed legislation that will require new regulations of health insurance and virtually every detail of banking and finance – even ATM cards.

BTW, it has been a year since Obama's much lauded "Recovery Summer" as Speaker of the House John Boehner explains:

The “stimulus” was all about big spending and big government — not jobs. That was obvious on the day the “Recovery Summer” began in my home state of Ohio. Local construction workers on a nearby site in Columbus were forced to take the day off, without pay, so the White House entourage could roll through and tout all the taxpayer dollars they were spending. But all that spending got us was more debt and fewer jobs.

Approximately 1.5 million jobs have been lost since the “stimulus” was signed in 2009 — roughly 300,000 of them as administration officials hopped from town to town promoting the “summer of recovery.” The national unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in May — far above the 8 percent promised by the White House — and has averaged 9.5 percent throughout the Obama presidency.

The president can call this a “bump in the road,” or blame ATMs, or joke that those “shovel ready” jobs that were promised “weren’t as shovel ready as we expected.” But there’s nothing funny about policies that keep workers on the unemployment line and drive us deeper into debt. Those aren’t the kinds of results — and this isn’t the recovery — the American people deserve.

There has been no recovery. Obama and the Democrats who controlled the House and Senate at the time, poured almost a trillion dollars into the economy and slowed down the bad news, but using an analogy I have used before, that was nothing more than putting a band-aid on a gushing wound and claiming the wound was healing just because less blood visibly flowed.

Slamming money into the economy will not fix the underlying problem. If the root cause is not addressed then it does no more than throw good money after bad to watch it get sucked up before everything starts collapsing again.

In the meantime, all that money thrown at the problem adds to our debt/deficit.

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Obama Administrations Incompetence At A Glance

Economic Policies for the 21st Century provides another graph of what the Obama administration claimed the $787 billion plus stimulus package would do to prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent in order to get public support for the passage. (It is now at 9.1 percent)

Three different graphs below will show, in a glance, how Obama's policies not only failed, but led to a decrease of jobs, compared miserably to Reagan's policies when he was handed a horrible economy and tripled our deficit.

Click image to enlarge



(H/T Gateway Pundit for deficit graph)

In the first graph above: The dark blue line on the bottom is what they claimed would be unemployment with the stimulus package that Obama and Democrats who controlled the House and Senate passed.

The light blue line is what they claimed unemployment would be without passage of the stimulus package.

The red line is what actually happened after Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill.

E21 explains:

In May 2011, using the latest figures available from the BLS, the unemployment rate reached 9.1%. In contrast, the Romer and Bernstein projections estimated that the unemployment rate would be around 8.1% for this month without a recovery plan, or 6.8% with a stimulus plan (which was ultimately passed). The actual unemployment rate has been consistently below Romer and Bernstein’s worse case scenario for the economy – and by a considerable margin. They projected that the unemployment rate would never climb above 9%. As time has passed, it turns out that only two months out of the last two years have seen an unemployment rate lower than 9%.

And the unemployment trajectory appears to be getting worse, not better. The last two months have seen unemployment grow; again, against projections that unemployment would decline every single month after August 2009 with a stimulus in place.

The second graph above from Liberty Works shows the comparison between Obama's policies and Reagan's and which policies produced results and which has failed miserably.

Like President Reagan, President Obama inherited an economy in crisis. But Obama came into office vowing to implement policy ideas that were exactly opposite the ideas that inspired the successful Reagan Presidency.

* Reagan cut income tax rates. Obama spent his first two years promising to increase tax rates on “the rich,” mostly small business owners and investors. In December he signed legislation that schedules his tax increase to take effect two months after the 2012 Presidential election

* Reagan cut “discretionary” spending. Obama dramatically increased it.

* Reagan reduced regulation and government intervention in the private sector.

* Obama has implemented waves of new regulation and under his leadership Congress passed legislation that will require new regulations of health insurance and virtually every detail of banking and finance – even ATM cards.

The result of ObamaNomics has been a slow, halting economic recovery compared to the extended economic boom that followed the recession of the 1980s.

The third graph shown above shows what Obama's failed and dangerous policies have done to America's deficit problem, he tripled it.

The Obama presidency has failed from one end of the spectrum to the other and instead of changing course and reducing spending, creating jobs, reducing regulations so businesses can grow and employ more people, and following Reagan's example on the economy, Obama keeps trudging along, lying, misleading and fighting against any policies that will help dig us out of the Obama hole we are in.

The only thing the American voters can do now is ask themselves, did Obama make it better or make it worse and vote accordingly in 2012.

[Update] Must-read: The Economy Is Worse Than You Think

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After Stimulus Plan Fails, Democrats Want....... Another Stimulus Plan

(H/T Gateway Pundit for graph)
Generally when something has failed, big time, logical prevails and they try something else and continue to do so until they find something that works.

Not the looney left though, noooooooooooooooo.

Obama and Democrats $787 billion plus economic stimulus package failed to create a net increase of jobs, put a band-aid on the gushing wound that is our economy, then claimed that because it hindered the sight of massive blood loss it was somehow working.

Newsflash- The economic stimulus plan failed, ended up with a net decrease of jobs, to the tune of about 500,000. Unemployment is on the rise (9.1 percent again), housing is on the decline, foreclosures are on the rise, the dollar on the decline. Our country is going bankrupt at an alarming pace. Dow has plunged into the longest weekly losing streak since 2004. CBS reports that chronic unemployment is worse than the Great Depression.

Here is something to think about:

The majority of states considered red, run by Republican elected officials have seen an increase in jobs and over the last decade and all together come out on the plus side.

The majority of blue states, run by Democratic elected officials, have seen a decrease in jobs over the last decade and all together have suffered over 2 million private-sector job losses.

Republicans have a job creation plan which include, but is not limited to;

Empowering Small Business Owners and Reducing Regulatory Burdens, Fixing the Tax Code to Help Job Creators, Increasing Competitiveness for American Manufacturers, Encouraging Entrepreneurship and Growth, Maximizing Domestic Energy Production to Ensure An Energy Policy for the Twenty-First Century and Paying Down America’s Unsustainable Debt Burden and Start Living Within Our Means.

Democrats have a plan too...... spend more.

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May's discouraging job-creation figures.

Even as Republicans are insisting on "trillions" of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday's disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case.

I used to think that the "tax and spend" label given to the Democrats was just that, a label. I see now that it is actually their identifying marker, there is no problem that throwing more taxpayer money at, money we don't have for the record, cannot fix according to Democrats. There is no tax that is a bad tax to cover all their reckless spending.

Does Keynesian Economics Really Work? Short answer, NO.

Let me tell you something else that has failed just as spectacularly as the economic stimulus package...... the Barack Obama experiment.

It is time to put someone in the White House, anyone at this point, that will start undoing the damage this man has done to our economy and our out-of-control deficit.

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Generic Presidential Ballot Has Republicans Ahead Of Obama

Rasmussen hands Barack Obama more bad news in a week which economic news has already been devastating for him.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that in a hypothetical 2012 presidential matchup, a generic Republican candidate earns support from 45% of Likely U.S. Voters, while the president attracts 43% of the vote. Three percent (3%) favor some other candidate, and eight percent (8%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

On average, 57.3 percent of the American public believes the country is on the wrong track. Home prices continue to drop by over 4 percent in the first quarter of 2011, unemployment is at 9 percent and Friday's report is not projected to be good. Added to that, the so-called recovery is faltering.

It never was a recovery. The massive stimulus package that Obama and the Democratically controlled House and Senate passed, simply put a band-aid on a gushing wound, postponed the inevitable and ended up costing more and worsening the job situation.

Quick analogy- Take a lot of money and pump it into a failing business without changing the way the company does business will do no more than help that business keep the doors open until they run out of the money that was pumped into it.

If you do not address the root cause of a failure, no amount of money is going to stop it from failing over and over again.

When businesses and/or corporations grow and expand they hire more people. Basic Job Growth 101.

The stark contrast coming into the 2012 election is clear.

Liberal Democrats , including Obama believe pumping more money into the economy aka "invest" will help it recover. Republicans believe spending less by cutting government spending and working on helping businesses grow will help the economy and encourage massive job growth.

You don't bite the hand that feeds you and Obama and liberals, like rabid dogs, continue to attack the very people that can help the economy recover, by threatening them with higher taxes or creating regulation after regulation to prevent them from growing.

Conservatives and liberals are walking, no running, in opposite directions, widening the gap between the two and by November 2012 the choice before the American people is going to be very very clear.

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Obama's Stimulus Package Costs Over 500,000 Net Jobs

H/T Power Line for bringing attention to a 36 page report, by economists Bill Dupor and Timothy Conley who have analyzed the effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act aka Obama's stimulus package and concluded that while 450,000 state and local government jobs were created/saved, one million private sector jobs were destroyed/forestalled as a direct result of the stimulus package.

You can see the charts, graphs and details for yourself in the 36 PDF report, they listed alternate methods of computing in it, other economists projections, etc...

The next time Obama makes a speech using the word "investment" instead of the actual word "spending", keep in mind what his last reinvestment cost America and what it did to job creation.

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Independents Believe Politicians That Voted For Obamacare, Bailouts And Stimulus Should Not Be Reelected

Rasmussen sampled likely voters and in each case of major legislation the Democrats call accomplishments, bailouts, stimulus and health care aka Obamacare, the majority or plurality believe a politician that voters for those laws should not be reelected.

50 percent of all likely voters are opposed to the reelection of a politician that voted for Obamacare with 43 percent saying they deserve to be reelected.

53 percent of likely voters are opposed to the reelection of a politician that voted for the auto industry bailout with 36 percent saying they should be returned to Congress.

50 percent of all likely voters are opposed to the reelection of a politician that voted for the $787 stimulus package with 41 percent saying they should be reelected.

More telling than those numbers though is the Independents because naturally with Democrats being the driving force behind those pieces of legislation, Democrats favor those politicians and Republicans are more likely to say they are oppoed to reelection of politicians that voted for the legislation.

But, tellingly, voters not affiliated with either party also feel strongly that supporters of the health care law, the auto bailouts and the stimulus should not be returned to Congress.

More:

Since Democrats in Congress passed the health care law in late March, support for its repeal has ranged from a low of 53% to a high of 63%.

Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans still think the federal government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler was a bad idea.

Voters continue to give the stimulus plan mixed reviews. Thirty-four percent (34%) say it has helped the economy, but 39% think it has hurt the economy. Twenty-two percent (22%) say it has had no impact.

With results like these the final days of the campaigning before the November 2, 2010 midterms will most likely see campaign ads focusing on how current politicians voted for these issues, connecting the names of those who voted for Obamacare, bailouts and the stimulus package to each piece of legislation.

[Update] According to a new Gallup poll, 58 percent of Independents also view Nancy Pelosi unfavorably with 86 percent of Republicans and 22 percent of Democrats also holding an unfavorable view of Nancy Pelosi.

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55% of U.S. Voters Oppose Second Stimulus

Rasmussen:

President Obama is expected to announce on Wednesday plans for at least $50 billion in new government spending on the nation’s transportation infrastructure and billions more in tax credits in hopes of jumpstarting the troubled economy with midterm elections less than two months away. But the administration has been careful not to call the new spending a second economic stimulus plan, although Republicans and others view it that way.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 55% of U.S. voters continue to oppose a second economic stimulus package. Only 31% support a second stimulus, and 14% more are undecided.

Problem is, the majority of voters also believe Obama and the Democrats will ignore the majority once again.

However, 63% of voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that Congress will try and pass another economic stimulus package this year. Only 24% view an effort by Congress to pass another stimulus as unlikely. This includes 32% who say it is Very Likely and a mere two percent (2%) who think it is Not At All Likely.

If the polls are correct and the Democrats are looking at a GOP Tsunami in the midterms, Democratic leaders, Pelosi and Reid, may come back figuring they have nothing to lose and try to jam through as much as they can before GOP takes leadership control.

If Democrats that lose their seats truly hear the message the midterms tell them, they will refuse to do so on the basis that their constituents have spoken loud and clearly.

Yeah, I laughed at the thought of them actually listening to their constituents too.

Good news here is that once the GOP takes control, they will hold the purse strings so anything the Dems do jam through after November won't get funded.

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Outgoing Obama Admin Economist Admits Stimulus Failed

Dana Milbank describes lunch at the National Press Club where Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers was giving a farewell speech and the news, while not surprising to some, was dismal.

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: "Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare."

Anybody want dessert?

One key portion of Milbank's article caught my eye:

....When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize "how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy." They "failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be."

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. "To this day, economists don't fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would." Her defense was that "almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction."

Not true, all analysts were not surprised, just the ones in the Obama administration were surprised that massive borrowing and spending on the part of the government, passing trillion dollar initiatives, threatening to raise taxes on those producing and employing, would cause such a "violent reaction."

Threaten their money, they will stop spending it. Threaten to massively tax their businesses and they will stop hiring and producing. Spend money you do not have to spend and they will stop investing.

That is not a violent reaction, that is a response to the Obama administration and the Democrat's policies.

That miscalculation, in turn, led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent.

Hell of a miscalculation. Now she calculates that more spending is needed?

She is not the only one that needs to go. Obama's whole economic team has failed and now they want to throw more money at the problem instead of.. what was that term they constantly used about George Bush?...oh yessssssss..... instead of changing course.

Stop the spending, extend any and all tax cuts, stop with the punish the rich mentality, which will in turn punish businesses, and perhaps they will start producing at level again, perhaps they will start hiring, perhaps they will start spending their money to stimulate the economy.

Newsflash:





[Update] Must Read- Summer of Economic Discontent.

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