Jonah Goldberg's op/ed piece ("It's Obama's Economy, Stupid") in the the Los Angeles Times is a winner.
"Now, my administration has a job to do as well, and that job is to get this economy back on its feet," President Obama declared on July 14, 2009, in Warren, Mich. "That's my job, and it's a job I gladly accept. I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, well, this is Obama's economy. That's fine. Give it to me."
OK. It's yours.
The unemployment rate then was 9.5%. It's now 9.1%, well above the 8% cap that the administration advisors projected under the stimulus bill. But that's not the amazing part. According to a White House report written by economic advisors Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer in January 2009 in support of the bill, if we had passed no stimulus package at all, the unemployment rate would have topped out at around 8.8% in the last quarter of 2010.
If only.
Instead, we got Obama's vital "investments." Since his speech in Warren, we've spent another
$2.8 trillion in borrowed money.
Presumably, we could have cut the unemployment rate by four-tenths of a percentage point more cheaply than that?
Meanwhile, we've accrued a total of $3.7 trillion in debt on Obama's watch, while losing 2.8 million jobs. That doesn't sound ideal either.
But what do I know?
The more salient point is that Obama acts like he knows everything. From Day One, this White House has been cocksure about how to get us out of the economic ditch. In every major relevant speech, he has stuck with a consistent message: We know what to do and the Republicans don't...
McDonald's alone may be responsible for a quarter to half of the new jobs created in the last month. And that hiring probably wouldn't have happened if Mickey D's hadn't been given a waiver from Obamacare.
And then there's the stimulus, which the White House still touts as an unqualified success. Well, during Obama's first year in office, more than half (119,000) of all the new jobs in the United States were created in business-friendly Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If Obama created those jobs, why'd he put so many of them in, of all places, George W. Bush's home state?
