Obama’s Phony Stimulus Numbers

With the announcement last week that only 5% of the “urgent” stimulus package has been spent to date, the the Supreme Court’s staying of the sale of Chrysler to Italian car company Fiat, and unemployment numbers that have surpassed Obama’s expected high of 8% and are growing the White House is beginning to feel the heat.

Obama has called for faster spending of the $789 billion in stimulus funds over the summer to “create or save” 600,000 jobs over the summer, and moving closer to meeting the 3.5 million jobs the Obama administration intends to “create or save.” The problem, there is absolutely no data that can quantify the number of jobs saved by the stimulus money. They are phony numbers but, the President’s lap-dog media falls for it every time Press Secratary Robert Gibbs hits the podium. The New York Times argues that the sham numbers are “based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs.” That doesn’t mean much, nice spin NYT.

Today Obama called for “restoring the pay-as-you-go rule” and making it law. Pay-go for short, is a rule that states that every dollar spent by Congress has to be backed up with a spending cut or a tax hike. With a deficit of around $8 trillion for the year, it doesn’t make much sense to call for pay-go after having accrued such a staggering debt. Expect more tax-hikes, because Obama’s pay-go proposal won’t cover discretionary spending like the stimulus, it’ll only cover mandatory spending like Social Security and Medicare. We can’t cut enough to cover a $630 billion health care plan let alone the stimulus that is already being spent, and the deep hole that entitlement programs continue to dig.

And now you know why Newt Gingrich says Obama has already failed.