When serial gaffer Joe Biden, the sheriff put in charge of shepherding our economic recovery, reports in the link below that our government brain trust "guessed wrong" relative to said recovery, than we all know there is trouble in Dodge City.
His remarks are troubling on so many levels that it bears some review.
1. Guessing. That concept is not particularly reassuring to the general public. What it tells us is that the purported "best and brightest" economic team our dear leader Obama could put together had not a clue as to what would actually work relative to driving a recovery from recession.
This is an open admission that, in fact, none of them knew for sure what they were doing. Yet, as we can all recall, it had to be done in a panicked instant. Legislators could not even take the time to read the stimulus bill, passage was so important. There was no time for debate or study. If the bill didn't get done immediately, our economy would collapse. It had to be sent on to the President for his signature without a second to spare.
All the while the Obama's went home to Chicago for the weekend and the bill was not signed until the following week upon their return. How urgent was that? And now we are told close to five months later that it actually has not yet had any real impact.
The Obama economic team, including the President, are academics, ideologues and theorists. Administrators and bureaucrats. There is not an experienced business leader or long time private sector executive amongst them. They can grasp theory but they have not the least bit of understanding as to how to make such theory work in the real world of free market capitalism. Thus they guess and the economy flatlines.
2. Economy worse than expected. Give the world a break. Our fundamental problem was and remains the meltdown of our financial markets. Few will deny the importance of the initial TARP program in terms of securing our banking system. But we've moved so far away from that it is hard to even remember the starting concept: 'Toxic Asset Relief Program'.
Instead of following through on the financial foundation of our economy, the geniuses on team Obama have been wildly and without sound economic basis, nationalizing private sector industries. All the while leaving the banking system to struggle and attempt to stagger forward with little or nothing to show in an agonizing process.
Therefore credit markets remain under virtual lockdown making it close to impossible for entire sectors of our economy to get healthy. While Washington fiddles and guesses, our economy remains lifeless. Stimulus spending will not turn around an economic system frozen for lack of credit and an even greater lack of risk tolerance as a result.
The penchant of team Obama to blame predecessor Bush for their problems is not only getting very old, it is an attempt to cover up for their own incompetence. When they needed free market expertise, they chose Ivy League elitists with no practical market background. Certainly they came into power under less than ideal conditions but their pursuit of Utopian theory has made matters much worse. That is part of what is implied by the Biden admission.
3. Overestimated jobs number. No kidding. Let's acknowledge from the get go that the "saved and created" job language was purely a fiction from the start. It was an attempt to push forward numbers that could not, under any circumstance, be supported by hard data. In other words it was just plain Bovine Scatology.
So now Biden claims that the 3.5 million new jobs guess was too high. His revised guesstimate is 600k by the end of the summer. Quite a difference. And pure fiction as well, particularly if he and Obama are going to continue to claim "saved" jobs in that number.
Their and our best hope is that the unemployment rate will slow down by the end of the summer. At 9.4% nationally it is high as we speak but the unfortunate likelihood is that it will be over 10% by September. Let's all hope not and at the same time recognize that it is likely to happen. If we lose one million plus jobs in June, July and August, no one will be able to claim that 600k jobs were added to our economy. Instead, there will be a net loss. Not a good sign and certainly not what the Pinocchio Administration promises.
The bottom line is that most of the "Stimulus Package" passed by the Democrat Congress and signed by the most far left President in American history was by and large a political payback package as well as a pork extravaganza. It is not what our economy needed. Instead it is something our economy will have to overcome to recover.
It is not what the American middle class composed primarily of hard working, tax paying families needed. Instead, that massive deficit spending is so large and so unsustainable that it will serve to crush the middle class to the point of extinction.
It is not what the young people of America, along with generations yet unborn, needed. Their tax burden going forward will leave them without any reasonable quality of life unless they are born into the ranks of the super rich.
Because Obama "guessed wrong", this great nation has been placed squarely behind the economic eight ball. His is an election that will live in infamy.
Stimulus Concession
Biden tells "Meet the Press" that "everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the stimulus, economy was worse off than anyone thought.
Backs away from the estimate that the funds could create or save 3.5 million jobs, instead promises 600,000 by the end of the summer.
When serial gaffer Joe Biden, the sheriff put in charge of shepherding our economic recovery, reports in the link below that our government brain trust "guessed wrong" relative to said recovery, than we all know there is trouble in Dodge City.
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