Remember the "stimulus," or, as it was officially titled, the Recovery Act of 2009? It was President Obama's first major legislative initiative, enacted the month after he took office with only Democratic votes in the House and just three Republicans in the Senate (one of whom was a Democrat by that summer). The price tag was huge, some $800 billion, or 50 times the size (in nominal terms) of the stimulus Bill Clinton proposed at the outset of his presidency. Congress killed the $16 billion Clinton stimulus because it was too expensive. Unemployment that January was 7.6%, and Obama's economic advisers warned that it could rise as high as 8% without the stimulus. With the stimulus, it rose as high as 10.2% in October 2009. Last month's rate was 9.2%, still 1.2 points higher than the level the stimulus was supposed to prevent us from ever reaching. By contrast, in January 1993 unemployment was 7.3%. Without the Clinton stimulus, it had declined to 6.5% by the end of that year. ______________________________________ Oh well, at least school janitors in Nebraska have "diversity manuals," as the Omaha World-Herald reports: The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive. . . . The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that "channel wealth and power to white people," that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should "take action for social justice." The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and "ableism," defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities. . . . The Omaha school board approved buying 8,000 copies of the book--one for every employee, including members of the custodial staff--in April. ________________________ Your tax dollars at work! Or rather, your tax dollars will be at work for years paying the interest on the money the federal government borrowed for the Chinese to pay Omaha's diversity-manual bill. 'We were largely successful.' Now, one might reasonably object that this is but an anecdote. The law of averages makes it a certainty that some of the stimulus money found its way to less utterly appalling uses than this one. What it didn't do, however, was accomplish its stated objective: keeping unemployment from rising above 8%. Here is how Obama, in a press conference this morning, described this failure: "We took very aggressive steps when I first came into office to yank the economy out of a potential Great Depression and stabilize it. And we were largely successful in stabilizing it. But we stabilized it at a level where unemployment is still too high and the economy is not growing fast enough to make up for all the jobs that were lost before I took office and the few months after I took office." And Yasser Arafat is in stable condition. One school of thought is that the so-called stimulus failed because it was, as former Enron adviser Paul Krugman puts it, "woefully inadequate." This is the economic analogue of the Kagan Principle, which liberal Supreme Court justices would use to limit freedom of speech: The more stubbornly corrupt the government is, the more justified it is in curtailing fundamental liberties in the name of preventing corruption. It's a common refrain among those who lust to increase government's size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn't go far enough. Let's generalize this into the First Rule of Liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government. As Obama said today, complaining about Republican pressure to cut spending: "I'd rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes--like new programs." Fortunately for the country, the voters don't always agree. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...9735796.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Only a balanced budget amendment will restrain the President and Congress in the long run from continuing to spend us to the edge of the abyss.
And that's not going to happen until a million or so voters armed with pitch forks storm the WH demanding it.
Not "a million or so"... more like 50 MILLION! By the time that many people "get it"... there will not even be hope left.
I went to get my required FAA physical and medical certificate last week. The doctor told me that the FAA has gotten so inept and difficult to work with in the last few years that 3,000 doctors nationwide have stopped offering the service to pilots. I am not looking forward to government <s>run</s> ruined health care.
Obama Care in a nutshell "Let me get this straight . . . ... We're going to be "gifted" with a health care Plan we are forced to purchaseand fined if we don't, Which purportedly covers at least ten million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke!!!!! 'What the hell could possibly go wrong?"
Its a waste of energy complaining about bigger government. Its here to stay. your better off redirecting that energy towards increasing your earnings potential and then making that money invisible. Over half of our population pays zero income tax. You think they care about bigger government? And they outnumber the rest of us. Get yours, and get it right fucking now. Make lots of money and dont ever look back...