Promises, promises! How does The One Who Can Do No Wrong handle the corner all his ‘jus words…jus speeches’ has painted him into? Easy! Just redefine your original goals and act as if America won’t remember what you said the first time. Neat trick, if we let him get away with it….but we will not!
When it came to the stimulus package, the president and his administration, in the words of National Economic Director Larry Summers, “You’ll see the effects begin almost immediately.” Huh? I guess that is why the unemployment rate ‘immediately’ went from 8% to 9.5% (unless that was the ‘effect’ Obama and Summers had in mind?). Those promised jobs and economic growth clearly has not materialized.
Earlier this year, Obama assured us that most of the stimulus money “will go out the door immediately.” But it hasn’t. Only about 7.7% of the stimulus has been spent in the SIX MONTHS since its passage, and more of it will be spent in the program’s LAST EIGHT YEARS than in its first year. No surprise, the current occupant of the Oval Office claims he said something different: “We also knew that it would take some time for the money to get out the door,” Obama said in his weekly radio address this past Sunday. So we are seeing Obama attempting to lower expectations retroactively, saying in an op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post that his stimulus “was, from the start, a two-year program.”
It seems that the only money that Congress can get out the door immediately is the pay raises they vote for themselves!
As Obama is wont to do, he answers his critics by creating straw-men arguments. In his latest radio address, he attacked detractors as those who “felt that doing nothing was somehow an answer.” But many of Obama’s critics didn’t feel that way. They offered – and Obama rejected out of hand – many constructive ideas to jump-start the economy.
For example, House republicans offered an alternative recovery package of immediate tax cuts and safety-net measures that cost HALF as much as Obama’s failed stimulus plan. Furthermore, Republicans calculated that their plans would have created 50% MORE jobs than the failed plan of Obama’s.
Now, what are you to believe? His statements now or your lying ears when he first demanded the stimulus bill passed? Hmmmmm?
