Saturday, July 11, 2009
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The Obama Mind Trick
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Posted by:
Duane R. Patterson at
5:12 PM
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We all remember the famous scene from 1977's Star Wars. Sir Alec Guinness waives his hand to the storm trooper and says, "These aren't the 'droids you're looking for, they can move along." Barack Obama is trying to apply the same technique to the American people in regards to whether the non-stimulus stimulus bill worked or not. The polls show the American people might finally have become immune to the Obama Jedi ways.
Back in February, when the Obama economic team did the full-court press for why we had to have the stimulus now, they said without the "stimulus" bill, unemployment might climb as high at 9%, and with the stimulus in place, unemployment would top out at 8.5%. Well, the Democrats got their stimulus, and the unemployment number sailed way past their dire prediction of 9%.
Remember when Barack Obama told Americans that Joe Biden would keep track of every dime of the stimulus? Remember when ol' Joe himself appeared on television and announced the new website to help him account for the money, if he just knew what the "numbers" of the website address were to give to people? It turns out the one place that is going to see a major influx of stimulus money is Joe Biden's stimulus tracking website. It is currently dysfunctional, and is slated to get an $18 million dollar taxpayer-paid for makeover. In case you aren't in the website design field, let me tell you. $18 million dollars can not only build you a top notch website, it can build you about 20 top notch websites.
In Ghana, Obama defended his stimulus plan, and make no mistake, this is his albatross, by saying, "It has already extended unemployment insurance and health insurance to those who have lost their jobs in this recession." The problem is, that's not what the stimulus was intended to do. It was all about job creation - shovel-ready work projects. Extending the welfare safety net isn't economic stimulus. It's welfare extension.
As Lawrence Kudlow notes over at National Review's The Corner,
Here’s the clincher: Year-to-date, Dow Jones stocks are off 7 percent, while China stocks are up 71 percent. The world index is up 4 percent. Emerging markets are up 25 percent. They’re all beating us. None of this is good.
We’re going the wrong way. That’s why stock markets are not voting for the United States anymore.
The stimulus is widely regarded to be a bust, not a boon to economic recovery. And that's without all the money even being spent yet. It is so much a bust that there are Democratic rumblings amongst administration officials and Congress to double down on the mistake and spend their way further into another stimulus bill, something that even President Obama is unwilling to do. Even Joe Biden tried to spin the ineffectiveness of the first stimulus by admitting they, the administration, misread the economy.
Not willing to admit defeat on the stimulus, not wanting to compound the mistake by advocating another stimulus, and desperate to make sure Joe Biden never speaks for the Obama administration ever again on anything substantive, Obama is left to take credit for non-gains of the non-stimulus, relying on his rhetorical salesmanship to do so.
The questions you have to ask yourself, especially if you are one of the many who voted for Obama, is if the Obama administration tackled the economic recovery by misreading the problem, advocating for a solution that hasn't born fruit, spending trillions of future debt in the process, and then trying to tell you the results are great when you can see with your own eyes they're not, do you really trust the same group of people to get health care reform right by not just reforming or adjusting, but completely seizing the industry and dumping it into a government-run expansion of Medicare? Do you really trust them to create a new casino-like cap and tax and tax scam cleverly disguised as an energy bill?
At some point, shouldn't we as Americans tell the President that he has to show to us he has some ability to comprehend the economy before letting him commandeer it? May the force of proven free market policies be with you.
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