The Obama Cheerleaders Are Busy

The Obama Cheerleaders Are Busy

A person we know who is a public school teacher sent us (and many others) some propaganda from Organizing For America that shows how the number of jobs lost each month has been falling since Obama took office. (Not unemployment, which has been rising, but the number of new jobs lost.) And from there, it goes onto how the stimulus bill stopped what could have been a much worse situation!

My response (to everyone on the distribution list):

Back on January 8, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report to Congress about the future of our economy. It's here.

On page 1 of that report, they explained that their predictions assumed “that current laws and policies regarding federal spending and taxation remain the same...” (meaning, if Congress did not pass the stimulus bill then being discussed.) On page 2? “CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II. (The longest such recessions otherwise, the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions, both lasted 16 months. If the current recession were to continue beyond midyear, it would last at least 19 months.)”

In short, the CBO's estimate was that if Congress did NOTHING, the recession would start to recede in the second half of 2009. Did the stimulus bill do any good? Hard to know for sure. But we do know that it did something that seemed impossible: made Bush and the last several Congresses look almost responsible in their budgets. You can see the results in the graph here, which shows both the White House estimates of deficits over the last and next few years, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Either way is profoundly disturbing.

Here's another source for deficit numbers that let's you pick various starting and ending years.
Obama, and more importantly, these last two Democratic Congresses, have, with some cooperation from Mr. "Compassionate Conservative" dug a hole that our grandchildren are going to be paying back--if they are lucky.

The Obama Administration claims, according to USA Today, to have saved one million jobs with the stimulus bill. That would mean that they spent $787 billion to save one million jobs--or $787,000 PER JOB SAVED. This is something to brag about? If they had given ME $787,000, I could have put about a few people to work for several years improving our property (building a garage, finishing paving the back driveway, paving the shared road into our subdivision, etc.), and had $600,000 left over. (And there are few people that really believe that the stimulus bill saved a million jobs.)