Obamanomics: Take Two

If at first you do not succeed, try, try, and try again – This is the Obama plan to rescue our struggling economy. This mantra may work on a smaller scale, but it is not wise to repeat a failing strategy that has already cost the taxpayers nearly a trillion dollars. With our debt at record levels, we do not have the luxury of repeating past failures. The Recovery Act (the 862 billion dollar stimulus that was signed into law a year and a half ago – sometimes referred to as the “New New Deal”) has failed to create jobs. The pork riddled legislation was nothing more than a mere waste of money that supported too many congressional pet projects. With the unemployment rate at 9.6% and the actual unemployment rate hovering around 17%, Obama is proposing his second stimulus (the “New New New Deal”) to create jobs.

The latest Obama plan to stimulate the economy proposes over 50 billion dollars to fix 150,000 miles of roads, 4,000 miles of train tracks, and 150 miles of airport runways. What’s worse is that Obama plans to pay for the bill by closing tax breaks for oil and gas companies. Are you serious Mr. President? Is this the best that you and your economic team of so called experts could come up with? Keynesian economic strategies of “stimulating” the economy have failed time and time again over the past century. Why are Democrats so enamored with reviving old FDR economic policies, which incidentally, failed to work? The only thing this plan will accomplish in the short term is higher energy costs for all Americans. In the long term, the “New New New Deal” will finance temporary jobs that will go away once the runway, road, or track is fixed. In other words, the Obamanomics version of Keynesian style economics lacks strategic vision to build permanent jobs. Obama’s plan is short sighted at best, even though many of the projects may not start for a few years.

Obama, conveniently blamed Republicans for causing the current recession, and he blamed them for blocking his economic agenda. Obama conveniently forgets that the Democrats held sound majorities in Congress when the recession started, and every single domestic policy that Obama has pursued has been passed into law: financial reform (which incidentally will not stop another financial meltdown), healthcare reform, auto bailouts, unemployment extensions, and the Recovery Act. Bush may have been in charge when the economy took a nose dive, but Obamanomics have been the economic policies that have failed to get us out of the recession. Obamanomics have created artificial increases in the Gross Domestic Product giving the appearance we are out of the recession. Remember, most recessions last under a year, but this recession will last multiple years because of the misguided economic policies from President Obama.

Obama touts Obamanomics for keeping the economy from going into a depression. Obama and Biden both defend the Recovery Act by claiming it saved millions of jobs. And Obama has the audacity to claim that special interests “treat him like a dog”. There is no data or any evidence to back these statements. These are fictitious statistics manufactured by the Obama White House to defend a failing policy. If anything, the Toxic Asset Relief Program (TARP) saved a complete financial meltdown, not the Recovery Act. TARP bailed out failing banks and was started by Bush. The Obama administration continued the TARP policy until major national banks were once again healthy. And let’s face facts; the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics does not keep statistics on saved jobs. Face it; it is an imaginary statistic to make the administration look good. And let’s be very clear, Obama cut thousands of deals with special interests to pass his massive healthcare and financial reform bills. This explains why these bills are over 2000 pages long – to accommodate the thousands of provisions and carve outs to cater to the thousands of lobbyists involved in the legislative process.

Obama is finally calling for a tax break for small businesses, but they are too small to make a difference, and they are coming way too late in the recession. The damage is done. Besides, a small tax break, such as exempting businesses from paying social security taxes if they hire unemployed individuals, is simply not enough incentive for businesses to take the risk of increasing their payrolls. Obama is going to have cut small business taxes considerably to get the economy moving in the right direction.