Thursday, February 5, 2009

Obama's U.S. faced with catastrophe speech

Obama spoke to the Democrats at their retreat tonight and said some interesting things.

Obama said that the last 8 years doubled our national debt and mentioned that this was a bad thing. This was an exaggeration as the current debt is around $10T and the last 8 years added $4T which is a 75% increase not 100% which the word double suggests. His new $930B plus in spending will increase annual government spending by 17% and increase the national debt by 20% over the next 2 years (the current spending deficit is around $500B, the stimulus adds another $500B in deficit spending). If that is allowed to continue, the national debt will double again in 7.2 years.

So, more of a bad thing now equals a good thing?

Last November, Obama promised to go through the federal budget line by line and eliminate the waste. Where are the results of this line by line review? Did I miss the news that day? Why are we rushing through Congress a new set of spending before the waste has been eliminated in the current budget? I don't run my household budget this way. Why do we allow our government to do so?

Related to employment he stated that
There were 626,000 new unemployment claims this week
500,000 jobs were lost in January
500,000 jobs were lost in December
2.6 million jobs lost in 2008

This comes to a total of 3.7 million lost jobs since January 2008 according to Obama's math.
He says that his "stimulus" plan will save or create 3 million jobs. How do you account for a "saved" job anyway? This means that given his calculation of the 3.7 million jobs lost since January 2008, we will still have 700,000 people who have lost their jobs that won't have jobs after this so called "stimulus". Wouldn't a real stimulus create new jobs in addition to those already lost?

Obama justified the earmarks in the stimulus bill by saying "when was the last time that a bill of this magnitude went out without pet projects?" Yeah, but isn't that one of the so called "failed policies of the past" that Obama campaigned against for the last 2+ years? Where's the change? Where's the hope?

Where's the money going to come from?

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