Barack Obama pushed for almost $800 billion in stimulus spending by claiming that it would save or create millions of jobs this year. Critics pointed out that most of the spending started in 2010 and more than half of it came in 2011 or later, calling the stimulus useless at best for salvaging jobs, let alone creating them. The White House has quietly agreed with its critics, according to the New York Times, and now says it expects to see no hiring rebound in 2009.
I can’t believe what I’m reading. Are you telling me that the Marxist-in-Chief blew trillions of taxpayer dollars on big government wastefulness, and he created NO JOBS?
Hot Air continues:
We just got done hearing Obama take credit for saving 150,000 jobs — which his administration never documented. Now we’re hearing that the stimulus package demanded by Obama and passed over near-unanimous Republican objections won’t actually make any difference at all. The cure, Obama and his team now admit, is private-sector growth.
Take a look at the numbers below. We are getting worse unemployment numbers for Mr. Teleprompter than if he had never spent a dime of taxpayer money at all.
Chart by Geoff from Innocent Bystanders
Hot Air explains:
Actually, only the red indicators come from Geoff. The chart itself comes from page 5 of an analysis prepared by Romer and Obama’s council of economic advisers in support of the $787 billion Porkulus plan.
We’re already past 8.8%, well on the way to 9.5%, above her predictions in either case. They predicted that the upper curve would occur without spending $800 billion on government make-work, and that passage would prevent the severe spike in unemployment. Now Romer admits that the upper curve will happen anyway.
Remember under George W. Bush, when unemployment averaged about 5% over the course of his two terms? Yeah, I miss him too.
Obama claim that his socialist policies that attack “greedy corporations” and “the rich” are actually increasing employment rates. Now, that seems to be impossible for rational people to believe, and FactCheck.org confirms that intuition. It is not possible for socialist policies such as card check, higher taxes, increased spending, more regulation, etc. to create more jobs than are lost from the changes.
Obama’s claim was:
At President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.”
That’s what he learned to believe at Harvard in his marxist rap sessions with the radical students and professors.
It turns out the president’s claim is really an estimate of what his economic advisers think the stimulus bill is doing, and not based on any evidence of its actual effects.
But how does the White House respond to the falsification of their propaganda by reality?
We asked the White House for substantiation of Obama’s claim, and a spokesman responded that the figure comes from a recent estimate by the Council of Economic Advisers. “Because the baseline for employment is obviously still strongly downward,” the spokesman told us, “the estimate does not mean that employment has risen by 150,000. Rather, it means that employment is 150,000 higher than it otherwise would have been.” He said the figure is an estimate of people hired to work directly on ARRA-funded projects, plus “jobs created by the tax cuts, aid to the states, and other parts of the ARRA.”
So when the president said his stimulus bill “already saved or created” those jobs, he was just giving an estimate produced by his own economic advisers at the White House. Furthermore, the jobs figure is based on projections done at the time ARRA was passed. Recipients of ARRA spending aren’t required to report until later what they’re doing with the money and how well it’s working, so there’s very little hard data on where the money is being spent, let alone how many jobs may have resulted from the legislation. The CEA incorporated some actual spending reports into its estimate, but that information is not complete.
This is the result of voting by people who know more about the lives of celebrities than they know about economics. Imagine how surprised these Democrat voters are to find out that the 1 hour spent voting was not enough time to have thought anything through. Some of them thought that Obama was better on pro-life issues and government spending than McCain for example.
Cap and Trade Top Ten List
1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
2. It Will Not Make A Substantive Impact on the Environment
3. It WillKill Jobs
4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing or Haircuts.
7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” under a cap-and-trade program. (January 2008)
I can help with number 4: the energy price increases for consumers are right here, courtesy of Michele Bachmann.
Their post goes on to list and analyze the effects of various legislation proposed by Democrats in terms of number of jobs lost and amount of money confiscated from the private sector for the government to spend. It’s amazing how many times Democrats tried to destroy the economy while Bush was President. And now they will finally be able to do it!
The article also mentions how many jobs will be lost by the proposed green jobs programs, as well as how many jobs will be outsourced to China and India, who will enjoy a manufacturing boom since they are not capping their emissions at all.
That’s right, let’s be clear on that:
The Ultimate Outsourcing: India and China have repeatedly said they would not match U.S. environmental goals in order to protect their economies. Cap and Trade will merely move manufacturing jobs to China and India.
There are people I know who voted for Obama who are worried about their jobs. They complain to me about outsourcing. They do not understanding that Obama causes outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and regulating “greedy corporations”. What a tragedy! Defeated by your own ignorance!
The 10 part series on cap and trade
The Heritage Foundation has also started a nice series of 10 posts about what cap and trade will do to the economy. In this series, they are going into a lot more detail than in the summary posted I talked about above.
It works like this: Policymakers set a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that can be omitted into the atmosphere. Each power plant, factory, refinery, and other regulated entity will be allocated allowances (rights to emit) six greenhouse gases. However, only a certain percentage of the allowances will be allocated to these entities. The remaining percentage will be auctioned off or distributed to other emitting entities. Most emitters will need to purchase at least some allowances at auction. Emitters who reduce their emissions below their annual allotment can sell their excess allowances to those who do not–the trade part of cap-and-trade. Over time, the cap would be ratcheted down, requiring greater cuts in emissions.
So this is basically a tax on energy production. Yes, Democrats think that we produce too much energy, employing too many Americans, and that we sell it for too little money. According to Democrats, we need less production, fewer jobs and higher consumer prices for electricity. And other companies who use energy will have to pay more for it as well.
Take a look at this graph showing projected job losses under the Liberman-Warner cap and trade bill:
Again, Heritage explains how cap and trade transfers money out of the private sector, where money is used to produce goods, into the public sector, where money is wasted by bureacrats on bicycle paths and gold monuments to Obama.
…if President Obama were to sign a cap and trade bill into law, he would have to call for familial budget cuts much greater than one dollar. (For a brief explanation of how cap and trade works, go here.) As recently acknowledged by a top White House official, a global warming tax could generate as much as $1.9 trillion in tax revenue over eight years, which amounts to a nearly $2,000 tax every year for every American household.* Add this up over the period of a few years and we’re talking about trillions of dollars in lost income for the entire U.S. economy.
And here’s the chart:
How much will cap and trade cost you?
I hope the people with low income who were hoping to become rich under Obama won’t be too shocked to find that the poor do better under capitalism not socialism. I mean, I hope they don’t drop their television remote controls and doughnuts.
UPDATE: Good news! Michelle Malkin says the cap and trade tax is in trouble! It turns out that the Democrats in manufacturing-intensive states are aware of what the tax will mean to their unemployment rate.
The NRCC sent out a helpful fact sheet outlining why the radical green plan is really in trouble. You can thank opposition from Democrats in manufacturing and energy-producing states.
Michelle has all the citations from the Democrat politicians who are never going to vote for this mess. So, good news!
WINTERY KNIGHT 