One Year Later: Where Does America Stand?
One year after President Obama’s stimulus package passed, we have higher unemployment, record high deficits and record high spending levels.
A year ago today, President Obama signed a $787 billion spending bill into law. This massive piece of legislation was crammed through Congress with zero transparency and was brought to a vote just 15 hours after being drafted in the dead of night – hardly enough time for anyone to read the bill. President Obama and Speaker Pelosi told us the so-called “stimulus” package was intended to create jobs and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. A year later, unemployment stands at nearly 10%, we have record high deficits, record high spending levels and our national debt currently stands at $12.3 trillion. Americans are demanding to know: Are we better off?
So here we are, one year later, and I join my fellow citizens in asking: Where are the jobs President Obama promised? It’s time to get serious about job creation by cutting income taxes and payroll taxes, and removing barriers to domestic productivity. Most importantly, we need to stop spending money we don’t have and leaving our children and grandchildren holding the bill.
This one year anniversary of the failed stimulus package is a fitting reminder of the liberal majority’s allegiance to deficit spending. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they still seem to think that throwing money at a problem will make it go away.
February 24th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Since stimulus spending is guided by current politicians, and not by investors who have a stake in the future finances of the government, government spending is almost never directed towards economy growing capital investments, but rather to short term consumption designed to benefit political leaders in near-term elections. When money is directed at capital projects, they’re very often in the nature of “make work” projects that are not economically worthwhile, but just provide the salve of some near-term employment, which basically means they’re an inefficient means to pay the equivalent of welfare and unemployment benefits. This stimulus is a case in point. Most of it has been shoveled to states to help them maintain welfare, healthcare, other unemployment benefits and meet government agency payrolls. Some of it was directed to “shovel ready” projects, which means projects the states and the federal government could identify and implement quickly but which were not sufficiently worthwhile to do before they were directed to find make work projects to help keep people (mainly unionized construction and contractor labor) employed. None of this spending is an “investment,” but just supports short-term consumption — the people (i.e.,. unemployed, government workers, union contractors and laborers) receiving that money will largely just turn around and spend it on consumer goods. That will provide an immediate boost to the extent that it’s taking money that would otherwise by stowed away in bank accounts and under mattresses and pushed back into the economy, but long term there will be no economic return on that money to justify the debt incurred. It’s the equivalent of a family running up the credit card to keep itself in house and home after the breadwinner loses his or her job.