Once again, sadly, Mickey McGuire is wrong. In his Jan. 20 op-ed about President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, Mr. McGuire contended that the United States is better off with the stimulus than without it.
Mr. McGuire should have checked what Obama himself said about the stimulus and the standards that he set for its success. By the president’s own standards, it is a miserable failure.
Obama claimed that with the passage of the stimulus, unemployment would not rise above 8 percent. It is now 10 percent. If you include unemployed workers who have abandoned their job searches or accepted part-time work, that number soars to a staggering 17.5 percent.
Obama also said the stimulus would create 3.7 million jobs, 90 percent of which would be in the private sector. With the Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey showing that 3.8 million jobs have been lost since last January, few people other than Obama and Mr. McGuire believe that last year’s massive increase in government spending has created or saved 640,239 jobs and that the economy would have been even worse without the stimulus package
And Mr. McGuire might recall that the Congressional Budget Office, which is renowned for unbiased information, indicated in December 2008 that the recession would end in mid-summer 2009 if the government did nothing.
Furthermore, for the record, the nation lost 85,000 jobs in December, according to the Labor Department, not 11,000 jobs, as Mr. McGuire claimed. In addition, 661,000 people also gave up looking for jobs in December (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 22).
America doesn’t need any more Obama “success stories.” We need hope and change, and it’s coming in 10 months. I can’t wait.
NOT.
Print or borrow $100 billion and spend it in America, and yes, the GDP has increased. This is putting air into a tire with a nail in it. It gets you a bit further down the road, but you are still going to have to stop at some point and fix that tire.