Obama And Unemployment: Just So You Know How Pathetically Incompetent Dear Leader Is

Think back to February when Barack Hussein was frightening America with terrifying predictions unless we passed his porkulus package.  Obama repeatedly compared the economy to the Great Depression even though any student of history would know that the current economy was and is far more like the one Reagan inherited in 1981 than anything from the 1930s.

Obama said:

Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes. And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.

Obama said:

“For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet, more Americans will lose their jobs,” Obama said at a speech in Fairfax, Virginia. on Jan. 8

At the time Obama was fearmongering audiences in Fairfax, the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent.  Obama claimed in that speech that the country would face double-digit unemployment without the stimulus package even though the Congressional Budget Office forecast was slightly lower: 9 percent unemployment by 2010.

And the politics of fear worked.  Obama – who had promised an “end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics” – passed a stimulus bill which completely shut out Republicans, and rushed it through Congress so quickly no one was even allowed to read it.

Obama promised that his stimulus would “save or create” 3.5 million jobs.  Aside from the simple fact that “save or create” is nothing more than a cheap marketing sleight of hand gimmick that neither Bush or Clinton were allowed to get away with, Obama also promised something that is now easy to disprove: his administration assured America “that the economic stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8 percent.”

There were 1.6 million more jobs the day the stimulus bill passed than there are today.  And we saw a laughable White House response in the form of a bogus and unsubstantiated claim that they had “created or saved” just 150,000 jobs! To make it even more laughable, some of the jobs that Barrack Obama had heralded as “saved” – including private sector jobs at Caterpillar and government sector jobs at the Columbus, Ohio police department – are being wiped out.

You can read for yourself what Republicans like Paul Ryan said on February 14 as the stimulus passed:

With the stimulus bill now becoming law, we’re digging even deeper into debt. The headline price tag of $787 billion doesn’t include the extra $348 billion it will take to finance the new debt, or what it will cost when Congress extends the spending programs in the bill, as is likely — as much as $2 trillion more. Add in the billions that are being used to prop up the financial system, and when the dust settles on 2009, with millions of baby boomers retiring and entitlement spending exploding, taxpayers will face a financial nightmare.

Rep. Ryan was being too kind: the actual cost of the stimulus, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will be $3.27 trillion.

The stimulus isn’t producing jobs that can be documented, and a major study by the Associated Press revealed that the money isn’t going to the counties and states that need it most.

The media – who have been propagandists for this president since he began his campaign – managed to focus on “good news” about the fact that the unemployment has now risen to 9.4% – which is significantly higher than the unemployment figure the Congressional Budget Office anticipated over the course of a year had we done nothing at all.  And it is MASSIVELY higher than the Obama administration promise “that the economic stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising above 8 percent.”

Let that sink in for a moment: OBAMA COMPLETELY BLEW IT ON THE ECONOMY.  His stimulus has done more to harm the economy than help it by the official government numbers.  Just as conservatives predicted all along!!!

The media have done everything they possibly could for Obama.  From Newsweek (hardly a conservative source):

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America. […]

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: “President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House.”

Barack Obama – both in terms of liberal ideology shared by the media, and the need to protect a president who represents big government bureaucracy – has been deemed too big to fail by the media establishment.

And thus they have offered him one rhetorical bailout after another from the very get-go.

Realize that this fawning media coverage has occurred during the very time that Obama has implemented one bailout after another that the public despised.  For instance:

A new poll shows that a full 67 percent of U.S. voters oppose the Obama administration’s plan to bail out General Motors with nearly $50 billion – and 51 percent of all Americans say they would rather buy a car from Ford because it did not take a government bailout.

In a statement, the White House announced today that the U.S. Treasury will provide approximately $30.1 billion to GM through an expedited chapter 11 proceeding and transition the new GM through its restructuring plan.

Just so you know, fewer than 37% of Americans approved of the stimulus plan Obama forced through Congress in February.  Yet the media continued to run one fawning “Isn’t he just wonderful?” piece after another.

The stimulus has failed.  It’s not merely the fact that only 3% of the stimulus funds have been spent so far, which is EXACTLY what Republicans predicted would happen as one of their objections to it.  It’s not even that the stimulus has been filled with socialist pork barrel waste to pay off politically-connected liberals, which Republicans also predicted.  Ultimately, the stimulus has failed for the very same reasons that Americans despise the GM bailouts: because it depends on the morally and factually-depraved economic theory that the government can spend your money more wisely than you can.

How many jobs would the American people have been able to create had they had the $50 billion that Obama threw at GM?  More importantly, how many jobs would the American people have been able to create had they had the $3.27 trillion of the porkulus bill?

Sadly, what we’re left with are Barack Obama’s politically ginned-up “saved” jobs.

Commissioner Keith Hall of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is on the official record saying there is no way to verify Obama’s “saved job” claims (here is video of him acknowledging that very fact).  Thus the Obama administration is free to simply pull numbers out of thin air and claim the success of their policies.

Obama is now promising that 600,000 jobs will be “saved or created.” Don’t believe him.  He is already a documented liar on this very subject.  He is deliberately using statistical gibberish that is designed to allow him to conceal the truth from the American people, and it is in his political interest to continue lying.

If you’ve lost your job, just realize that your president is far more interested in playing games with statistics than he is in actually doing something that will help you find meaningful employment.

The president is a slick-talking incompetent fool.  And the longer it takes for the American people to realize it, the worse it will be for us.

Tags: 150000 jobs, bailouts, create or save, Democrats, fearmongering, GM, Obama, porkulus, Republicans, stimulus