On The Most Pathetic ‘Economic Recovery’ In History

Barack Obama began his presidency by fundamentally misunderstanding the economy.  There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he’s understood it one iota better since.

Let’s start where Obama started, with his massive stimulus.  You know, the stimulus that everybody on the left said would cost “only” $787 billion.  It didn’t take long before it suddenly cost “only” $862 billion.  And by the time it’s all said and done, the real total cost of the stimulus which will actually be a $3.27 trillion porker before all is said an done.

Obama sold his porkulus boondoggle as something that would solve the unemployment problem.  It didn’t.  In fact, it actually CONTRIBUTED to high unemployment, when one looks at the evidence.

The following chart – which was created by the Obama administration to sell the stimulus package – proves that Obama couldn’t have got it more wrong:

In other words, by Obama’s very own measure, unemployment is HIGHER than it would have been if he’d done NOTHING.

Even the reliably liberal Time Magazine realized what a failure Obama’s stimulus was, with an article entitled, “Obama’s Stimulus Plan: Failing By It’s Own Measure.”

Democrat Senator Evan Bayh summed up Obama’s failed economic policies, saying:

“[I]f I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”

According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, a whopping 94% of the American people agree with Bayh. Only 6% of Americans believe Obama’s massive porkulus has created jobs a full year after going into effect.

Only SIX PERCENT of Americans believe that Obama’s porkulus has created any jobs at all.  That means more Americans believe that space aliens have anally probed them than believe in the stimulus.  It also means that 94% think Obama and his entire administration and the entire Democrat congressional leadership are completely full of crap.

With all due respect to Obama’s spin and the mainstream media’s propaganda that things just keep getting better and better, we keep getting stories like this:

Jobless claims in another surprise surge
By Chavon Sutton, staff reporterApril 15, 2010: 9:35 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance for the first time jumped for the second week in a row, according to government data released Thursday.

There were 484,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended April 10, up 24,000 from an unrevised 460,000 the previous week, according to the Labor Department’s weekly report.

Well, at least they didn’t say “unexpected.”  Like pork to chicken as “the other white meat,” we can call the word “surprise” the mainstream media’s “other favorite adverb” to describe Obama’s unemployment rate.

A Washington Post writer presents the spirit of the constant stream of media excuses in the manner of a master of understatement:

Economists suggest the spike in claims could be related to the Easter holiday. Each week, it seems, there’s some sort of anomaly that affects the new jobless claims — the big February snows, the March snapback from the big February snows, the Easter holiday — so it’s hard to get a good handle on the real jobless picture in the U.S.

When excuses fail, the left resorts to demagoguery and fearmongering.

We might see a recovery.  Count how many times the U.S. had a recession we never got out of.  But even by Obama’s own analysis, any recovery will be a “jobless recovery,” with joblessness remaining shockingly high throughout his presidency.  And the grim scenario of a “W-shaped” recession looms larger and larger.

All that said, an article by Mike’s America at Flopping Aces asks the right question given all the propaganda and spin:

Does This look like an Economic Recovery to You?
by: Mike’s America

A failed $trillion stimulus and few, if any new jobs is Obama’s economic legacy!

Did you see these headlines last week?

UPI: Calif. unemployment hits record high
AP: Florida unemployment hits record high
California’s unemployment hit 12.6% and Florida’s is 12.3%.

And where was Obama when this dire news was about to hit? He was in Florida telling spaceworkers he was canceling much of the manned space program which means a loss of thousands more of the most highly skilled jobs in both Florida and California’s aerospace industries, not to mention Texas.

The past nine months Obama has talked about little else other than health care. Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain out of work. If a Republican President were in the White House we’d read daily stories about the toll of human suffering wrought by the President’s economic policy. But with Obama in the White House the “news” media hardly notices unemployment or discusses the lack of any effective jobs policy coming from Democrats.

From House Ways and Means Republicans:

48 of 50 States Have Lost Jobs Since Democrats’ Stimulus
Friday, April 16, 2010

While the President recently said the economy had “turned a corner,” it’s hard to tell that from looking at the job situation across the U.S. According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor, and the chart below, through March 2010 a total of 48 out of 50 States had seen net job losses since the President signed the Democrats’ stimulus plan into law in February 2009. The data show that only Alaska, North Dakota and the District of Columbia have seen net job creation since then. And (other than the perhaps predictable exception of D.C.) those states that have seen some increases in jobs are still well short of the growth the White House originally forecast. Additionally, over 3 million jobs have been eliminated since the Democrats’ stimulus, unemployment remains stuck at 9.7 percent instead of 7.4 percent and falling as Democrats predicted, and a record 16 million Americans are out of work.

To see how the Democrats’ stimulus has failed your state, see the table below.

State	Administration Claims of Change in Jobs Through December 2010	Actual Change in Jobs Through March 2010
Alabama	+52,000	-61,200
Alaska	+8,000	+3,800
Arizona	+70,000	-100,300
Arkansas	+31,000	-17,800
California	+396,000	-558,900
Colorado	+59,000	-86,700
Connecticut	+41,000	-41,100
Delaware	+11,000	-11,500
District of Columbia	+12,000	+10,000
Florida	+206,000	-203,700
Georgia	+106,000	-139,400
Hawaii	+15,000	-12,000
Idaho	+17,000	-18,200
Illinois	+148,000	-187,900
Indiana	+75,000	-59,700
Iowa	+37,000	-25,200
Kansas	+33,000	-47,600
Kentucky	+48,000	-29,500
Louisiana	+50,000	-39,300
Maine	+15,000	-11,200
Maryland	+66,000	-31,400
Massachusetts	+79,000	-69,800
Michigan	+109,000	-121,200
Minnesota	+66,000	-62,300
Mississippi	+30,000	-26,000
Missouri	+69,000	-65,600
Montana	+11,000	-6,200
Nebraska	+23,000	-17,000
Nevada	+34,000	-68,800
New Hampshire	+16,000	-3,700
New Jersey	+100,000	-85,300
New Mexico	+22,000	-22,400
New York	+215,000	-143,300
North Carolina	+105,000	-91,800
North Dakota	+8,000	+900
Ohio	+133,000	-178,900
Oklahoma	+40,000	-50,700
Oregon	+44,000	-53,200
Pennsylvania	+143,000	-117,700
Rhode Island	+12,000	-14,100
South Carolina	+50,000	-25,600
South Dakota	+10,000	-6,600
Tennessee	+70,000	-73,100
Texas	+269,000	-211,000
Utah	+32,000	-30,500
Vermont	+8,000	-5,300
Virginia	+93,000	-75,000
Washington	+75,000	-84,000
West Virginia	+20,000	-16,600
Wisconsin	+70,000	-94,100
Wyoming	+8,000	-11,800

California’s unemployment rate is now the highest it has ever been since 1940 and the Great Depression.

The California jobless rate of 12.6 percent for March was slightly higher than the 12.5 percent level reached in February.

Still, that was the worst California unemployment level in nearly 70 years, stretching back to the Great Depression. December 1940 marked the last time California staggered to the dismal milestone of a 12.6 percent jobless rate.

It was 9.3% when Obama took office.  Which is to say, unemployment has increased by 35.5% since Obama began to “fundamentally transform” things.

California is a huge chunk of the U.S. economy.  It is the eighth largest economy on the planet all by itself.  And it represents 13% of the entire U.S. economy.  In every single other recession the U.S. has ever had, it was California that led the country out.  This time, under Obama, it is California which is lagging the farthest behind, with only two states having a higher level of joblessness.

Right now, California is poised to go the way of Greece – and Greece fell into a black hole of total economic collapse.

And Florida – the fourth most populous state with the fourth largest economy in the nation – isn’t in much better shape.  It’s unemployment rate under Obama’s “Wonder Boy” management is the highest it has ever been in history.

MIAMI — Florida’s unemployment rate reached an all-time high for the second straight month at 12.3 percent in March.

The figures released Friday by the Agency for Workforce Innovation show a marginal increase from February’s rate at 12.2 percent.

If these two giant states’ economies go boom – and it is very possible indeed that they WILL go boom – then the U.S. economy is doomed.  They are too big to fail, and too big to save.  The Louisiana Purchase?  The Cornhusker kickback?  You aint seen NOTHING yet!  Get ready for the Mother of All Bailouts, suckers.

All this to say, it’s time to ponder the previously content-free Obama campaign slogan “Hope and Change.”  “Change” would be a return to the Great Depression by the same policies that the president pursued during the LAST Great Depression.  And “Hope” is hoping that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Copenhagen: Apparently The Only Way Obama Will Be Able To Lower The Oceans Is By Shutting Up

When someone said that no occupant of the White House had ever been able to walk on water, liberals rushed in to correct us: no previous occupant of the White House has been able to walk on water.

Barack Obama was going to be different.  He was going to be the Messiah who replaced God with Government, and would be anointed as the Savior of the world.

Obama told us:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

I mean, wow.  It’s not like he didn’t promise the world, well, the world or anything.

Statements like that help you understand why liberals like Spike Lee went just a little bit beyond absolutely insane:

“It means that this is a whole new world. I think…I’ve been saying this before. You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”

And why people like Nation of Islam racist demagogue Louis Farrakhan proclaimed Obama as The Messiah:

“You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

But something happened to Captain Amazing after he actually took office: a fundamental inability to even begin to walk his talk.

We all remember Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his two signature accomplishments of Jack and Squat.  And that Nobel Prize for Accomplishing Nothing may be the symbol of the Obama administration.

We tend to forget about how he promised his stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8% (it’s now 10.2% and rising), or how pathologically pathetic his administration has since been in fabricating statistics to show his $3.27 trillion porkulus has been anything other than an abject failure.

Obama can’t even pretend his useless policies work without spectacularly screwing up.  As ABC puts it:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.  And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Oh, there’s more “there” there.  A lot more.  More dishonest butchery of employment statistics than you could ever hope to shake a stick at.

It turned out that not only was he basically not able to do anything to create jobs, but he couldn’t even do nothing right.  As Charles Krauthammer put it:

“When they speak seriously about this and how precise all of this is – 640,329 jobs saved –  comical precision.  And then it turns out a lot of these are fictional jobs in fictional districts, what happens is an administration that has already been satirized by Saturday Night Live as “do-nothing,” is now going to be seen as an administration that cannot even do nothing competently.”

Conservatives predicted his partisan stimulus slush fund would fail to deliver jobs.  And now liberals are finally recognizing it too:

NAACP, La Raza, AFL-CIO Tell Obama Stimulus Failed

With unemployment among blacks at more than 15 percent, the N.A.A.C.P. will join several other groups on Tuesday to call on President Obama to do more to create jobs.

The organizations — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group— will make clear that they believe the president’s $787 billion stimulus program has not gone far enough to fight unemployment.

They will call for increased spending for schools and roads, billions of dollars in fiscal relief to state and local governments to forestall more layoffs and a direct government jobs program, “especially in distressed communities facing severe unemployment.”

Reminds me of an article title I had way back in May: “Obama Stimulus Robin Hood In Reverse: Poor Get Poorer.”

Obama passed off a pretty clever (though blatantly fallacious) load of hooey onto an equally dishonest and ideological lamestream media when he ginned up the bogus “created or saved jobs” statistic.  As Allan Meltzer, professor at Carnegie Mellon University put it, “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved’.”

But since then, his self-justifying  fabrications have been increasingly absurd and asinine.

To those brainwashed liberals who insist that the economy would have been worse if Obama hadn’t passed the stimulus, let me put it this way: the economy would have been worse if George W. Bush hadn’t done everything he did, too.  I mean, one load of baloney deserves another.

Obama has watched the American death toll in Afghanistan double from George Bush’s last year in office.  And his dithering over making the obvious decision to send the troops his own general requested has turned any momentum we may have been able to create into abject failure.  Both friend and foe alike should question Obama’s commitment, along with his competence.

Then we’ve had the mindboggling exhibition of incompetence in the Obama administration’s bungling of the H1N1 vaccine.  Lower the level of the oceans?  Obama can’t even raise the level of the flu doses!

And now even the liberals in Europe are turning on Obama as a colossal fraud and impostor.  As the German der Spiegel put it:

Barack Obama cast himself as a “citizen of the world” when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely, his country’s addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change. Health-care reform and other domestic issues were more important to him than global environmental threats. He was either unwilling or unable to convince skeptics in his own ranks and potential defectors from the ranks of the Republicans to support him, for example, by promising alternative investments as a compensation for states with large coal reserves.

The Democrat-controlled Senate put off Obama’s cap-growth-and-tax-prosperity climate agenda until Spring (and good luck passing that economy killing monstrosity then!); and world leaders just said, “Better luck next time” with their climate change treaty.

Personally I cannot for the life of me understand why Obama’s plan –

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

– failed.  I mean, who wouldn’t want shockingly high energy prices? Who doesn’t want to freeze in the dark?

Sorry, Barry Hussein.  If you want to live up to your promise to lower the oceans and heal the planet, I guess you’ll just have to start doing a lot more shutting the hell up and saving the planet from all your useless hot air.  Because other than that, you did squat.