Joe Biden’s Deceptive Celebration
February 26, 2010 by Chip Wood
Well, once again Barack Obama’s schedule conflicts with mine. The President has announced that he will host a “bipartisan summit” on healthcare this coming Thursday in Washington.
I say “this coming Thursday,” but by the time you read this, it will have been “yesterday.” That’s because I submit this column five days before you read it. So my comments about the healthcare summit—like the one last month, on POTUS’ SOTUS—will have to wait for a week-plus after the event. (In case you’re not up on your Washington acronyms, POTUS’ SOTUS stands for the President of the United States’ State of the Union Speech.)
Every week I write three columns for Personal Liberty Alerts, the wonderful free ezine you just clicked on. Straight Talk (the one you’re reading now) is the lead column every Friday morning. Also on Friday, I write a mini-column called Chip Shots that is the last item on the page. Chip Shots, as the name implies, is a collection of interesting little tidbits from the news. (For example, in today’s effort the first item is the scariest proposal to come out of Washington in a long, long time.)
Then on Wednesday I write another mini-column called This Week in History. This one gives me an opportunity to look back over the past 200 years and select one meaningful event to share with you. For example, two days ago I wrote about “The worst-ever addition” to the U.S. Constitution. Hint: It happened 94 years ago and costs you a ton of money every year. To read it, or any of the past columns, click on the archives tab to the right of this column.
The reason I mention all of this now is that today’s column is about another event in history—the signing one year ago this week of Barack Obama’s $787 “stimulus” bill.
Yes, the White House wants to go all-out to rewrite history about the biggest spending bill in history. It has announced that Vice President Joe Biden and various Federal officials will fan out across the country to speak at numerous rallies that are being staged to “celebrate” this wonderful program.
But what the heck are they celebrating? Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) said recently that any businessman in this country who has hired one new worker has done more for jobs creation than all of Obama’s hundreds of billions.
When he signed the bill into law 12 months ago, President Obama promised that unemployment would never get above 8 percent. A few months later it passed 10 percent. And even that figure is dishonestly low. It does not include anyone who has gotten so discouraged he has stopped looking for work. Nor does it include anyone who lost a full-time job and was forced to accept a part-time job at much lower pay.
The real unemployment figure in this country is at least double the reported number. And it’s probably much higher than that. But don’t count on Obama and his buddies to tell you the truth.
And don’t expect them to tell you the truth about any jobs that were created, either. A year ago, President Obama fully promised that 90 percent of the new jobs would be created in the private sector. An analysis by The New York Times found “the data suggests that well over half of the jobs claimed so far have been in the public sector.” Isn’t that great? Your tax dollars are being used to make our gargantuan government even bigger.
And how about this? We now know that hundreds of millions of stimulus money was spent to create jobs overseas! Thousands of jobs that the White House claimed to have created are in places that don’t even exist! Plus, USA Today reported recently that billions of stimulus dollars are being spent on programs that are so inefficient or redundant that the Administration now wants to cut or eliminate them.
Please tell us, Joe: What the heck will you be “celebrating” this week?
One more rant and I’ll get off this soapbox. When he signed this odious piece of legislation a year ago, our president declared that the money would be spent on “shovel-ready” programs. Every penny would go to work promptly, we were assured, to patch roads, repair bridges, improve sanitation and otherwise fix our shaky infrastructure.
Today, one year later, only one-third of the stimulus funds have actually been spent. Did you know that? Were you aware that of all the money Congress appropriated for this pork-packed monstrosity, a little more than $500 billion remains unspent?
Barack Obama wants to send Joe Biden around the country, bragging about what a spectacular success the stimulus package has been. And the VP—who has absolutely no problem claiming that black is white, hot is cold and wet is dry, if that’s what his boss wants—cheerfully goes along with the fraud.
But the American people haven’t been fooled. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll reported that only 6 percent of the public thinks the stimulus bill has created any jobs.
Let me repeat that number: Just six Americans out of 100 believe Obama’s $787 billion stimulus bill did what it was supposed to do. No wonder the White House has told its many minions not to use the word “stimulus” any more. Now it’s a “jobs creation” program. Or maybe a “jobs savings” program. At least that’s what Biden and Obama hope it will turn out to be… for them.
Before I get off my soapbox for another week, let me mention one more deceit that President Obama loves to utter. Time after time, he defends his massive deficits and budget-busting spending programs by claiming that he inherited “a trillion-dollar deficit” from President Bush.
No, he didn’t. While I’m no fan of the debt George W. piled on the backs of us poor taxpayers, his last deficit was less than half the total our Dissembler in Chief likes to claim. Here are the facts: The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reports that George Bush’s deficit for fiscal 2008 was $454.8 billion. While that’s a lot of red ink, it’s less than half of the number Obama likes to use.
To get the higher number, the White House engages in some sneaky slight-of-hand. It adds $700 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to the CBO number, thus coming up with a deficit of over $1 trillion.
The problem with that particular bit of chicanery is that the Treasury only spent $400 billion of the TARP funds while Dubya was still in office. The other $300 billion was handed over to President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner in early 2009.
And here’s one more little factoid these grand deceivers like to ignore: Most of the funds the Bush Administration paid out have been returned to the U.S. Treasury… with interest.
So if smilin’ Joe Biden comes to your town and hosts a public rally bragging about all the wonderful things the Obama Administration has done to create jobs with your tax dollars, use the information in this report to set the record straight.
After all, that’s why it’s called Straight Talk.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
—Chip Wood
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