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PHIL KERPEN/OPINION: Please, Mr. President, No More Stimulus! (Fox News)
On the one year anniversary of the stimulus bill, the verdict is clear: Obama and the Democrats were wrong, and the American people were right.
One year ago today the Democrats forced a huge, bloated, pork-barrel spending bill through Congress that they called an “economic stimulus.” When the legislation was conceived they thought it would sail through with 75 or 80 votes in the U.S. Senate. Instead the American people rose up, took to the streets, and protested. President Obama went back out on the campaign trail and spent his then-considerable political capital to get his stimulus bill passed.
In the end, the Democratic Congress, aided by three Republicans–Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and the now-former Republican Arlen Specter, squeaked through a bill hated by the American people. President Obama and Congressional Democrats claimed their bill would save our economy. A year later the verdict is clear: Obama and the Democrats were wrong, and the American people were right.
Many of the claimed jobs “created or saved” (an inherently dishonest construct, since no matter how bad the employment situation is you can always claim to have saved it from being even worse still) were in fictitious congressional districts, and reports of fraud and abuse are piling up. While the White House claims a different inflated number of “jobs created or saved” or now simply points to “jobs funded” just about every day, the overall numbers tell the story. When President Obama signed the bill, the unemployment rate was at 7.6 percent, and the president promised it would never go above 8 percent. Instead we’ve spent much of the past year with unemployment hovering above 10 percent. The current rate sits just below that level at 9.7 percent.
Retiring Democratic Senator Evan Bayh spoke the plain truth on Monday when he said: “If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months.”
