Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Stimulus Package a/k/a TARP and "shovel-ready" jobs

I heard President Obama joke: "Shovel-ready was not as . . . uh . . . shovel-ready as we expected..." The problem with that is . . . uh . . . he wasn't very funny!

Why does the POTUS just get a pass on this type of behavior? When the previous president would have been eviscerated for such an insensitive joke/comment.

No sir, the whole "shovel-ready" scam did not even occur; not even sure that GAO could measure what it turned out to be, but jobs did not spontaneously arise out of the vaunted stimulus package.

Was it a way to appeal to the old FDR notion of the WPA work creation on public works and infrastructure projects that admittedly need some work? Even construction jobs are much too sophisticated to just hand some out-of-work-dude a shovel and solve the economy's problems. It was immature and naive to think "shovel-ready" was a viable alternative to the economic woes of the country at that time.

What we need now is not the absence of uncertainty, which is so often written about in the newspapars. The economy needs a rolling-back of much of the Obama legislation and the freeing up of small business to start hiring again. Small business is not "afraid" of uncertainty, in fact, on the contrary, they are afraid of what the anti-business administration has accomplished since 2009.

http://tiny.cc/78ae5 (article link)
By CLIFFORD S. ASNESS (Wall Street Journal)
Suggests that drag on the economy in such legislation as Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare, is what actually slowed down hiring, which is still our most pressing problem, and something that POTUS still is not acknowledging. The economic engine will not run smoothly without full employment. Could the POTUS acknowledge that Keynesian solutions have not worked in the market and work with Congress to throw off the fetters on small business? Either he will, or the voters will force the point.

4 comments:

  1. (June 21, 2011 quoted: POTUS) "Over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs. (Laughter.)" said Obama per the transcript, emailed to reporters Monday night at around 11:30 p.m. White House later changed transcript to *Applause* Really?!

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  2. (August 3, 2011 quoted: POTUS) "It's been a long, tough journey. But we have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much as good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we we were inheriting so many challenges, that we're not even halfway there yet. When I said 'change we can believe in' I didn't say 'change we can believe in tomorrow.' Not change we can believe in next week. We knew this was going to take time because we've got this big, messy, tough democracy," President Obama said at a campaign fundraiser in Chicago on Wednesday night.

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  3. (2006 quote from then-Sen. B. Obama, D-Ill.) "The fact that we're here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. Leadership means 'The buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America's debt limit."

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  4. POTUS said he was going to "laser-focus" on jobs and spend every minute of every hour of every day trying to foster the creation of more jobs.

    Shouldn’t all options have been part of their economic agenda during his first 100 days in office? This further illustrates the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, knee-jerk approach of this administration toward fixing our plummeting economy.

    Read more: http://technorati.com/politics/article/americas-leadership-crisis/page-2/#ixzz1Vb0wuqm3

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