Obama Stimulates More Lies, Unemployment And Reckless Spending

The Obama administration is going all out this week to tout the failed economic stimulus program on its first anniversary. Obama went so far as to claim that it saved the economy from the brink of disaster and that it is the model of transparency.

The only stimulus that is working is Obama’s fertile imagination. He has created a new measure of success – what he calls “jobs saved” as a result of the stimulus spending. If a school system or fire department received any stimulus money, for example, someone who received a pay raise was counted as a “saved job” under Obamanomics. A postponed lay-off is a “saved job.” Even by its own measures – which most economists and the Congressional Budget Office have rejected as meaningless indicators of the real unemployment picture – the administration has been caught claiming that jobs were saved in congressional districts that did not exist and that more jobs were saved than the total number of jobs that existed in some places.

The official unemployment rate rose to over 10% during the last year and is now at 9.7% – nearly 30% more than it was a year ago. About three million jobs were lost over the past year – real jobs.
Underemployment – which includes those unemployed people who have stopped looking for work but looked for work sometime in the recent past and people who are working part-time but want full-time jobs – is nearly 17%.

The Obama administration can’t even tell us the truth about how much the stimulus program has cost. They still use the original price tag of $787 billion. The Congressional Budget Office, however, has said the the actual cost is $862 billion.

In this administration, a discrepancy of $75 billion is a speck of dust compared to the trillions of dollars of spending they are racking up.

This reckless spending has ballooned the deficit to $1.6 trillion. The federal debt is now at an astounding 94.27% of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product – the highest since 1949! As Bill O’Reilly pointed out during his “Talking Points” segment last night on “The Factor,” Washington under Obama is heading the way of California – bankruptcy.

Government spending on pork projects does not create real jobs. It may fatten the recipients up for awhile at the expense of the taxpayers but it is only lard.

Real jobs are created in the private sector. And Obama’s economic policies – runaway government spending, onerous regulations and higher taxes – are at direct odds with what is necessary to create more jobs in the private sector.

by Joseph Klein