Will we ever be rid of the execrable Barack Obama? That guy is nothing but a narcissist and a liar. Here he is taking “credit” just yesterday for signing the stimulus package in 2009 that he claims has led to the “longest streak of job creation in history.”
Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history. pic.twitter.com/BmdXrxUAUf
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 17, 2020
As usual, the consummate narcissist obfuscates the reality and submerges the facts. He apparently would have us forget that many commentators have debunked the notion that his stimulus package was a success. In fact, it’s common knowledge that the stimulus package failed to deliver as advertised – although Obama regime hacks like Austan Goolsbee continue to claim otherwise to this very day. Here are just a few of those analyses:
Then there is this devastating analysis from 2016 that concluded that 94% of the jobs created during the Obama presidency were part-time or temporary jobs:
A new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton indicates that 94% of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were temporary positions.
The study shows that the jobs were temporary, contract positions, or part-time “gig” jobs in a variety of fields.
Female workers suffered most heavily in this economy, as work in traditionally feminine fields, like education and medicine, declined during the era.
And then there is this 2016 Forbes article that provides historical context on the failures of government stimulus programs from the Herbert Hoover era through the Obama regime, as well as explains the failures of Keynesian economics. Here are a couple of poignant excerpts.
The biggest test of the effectiveness of deficit-spending-as-economic-stimulus in modern times came from Barack Obama. In his first economic speech, given just a few days before he took the oath of office in 2009, President-elect Obama averred, “Only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession…” Obviously, Obama was (and remains) a true believer in government, instead of free market prices, as the driver of the economy, and so he jacked up Uncle Sam’s annual spending by approximately three-fourths of a trillion dollars while doggedly pursuing additional tax revenues. The results of Obama’s stimulus plan are well known and undeniable: the weakest economic recovery from a recession in history.
The dismal results of stimulus plans adopted by a bipartisan quartet of American presidents (the deficit spending of Republicans Hoover and Bush was continued and expanded by their Democratic successors, FDR and Obama) should have been sadly predictable to anyone who understood basic economics
[G]overnment attempts to stimulate economic growth by increasing government spending end up discombobulating and misdirecting production thereby impeding rational economic growth and making the population poorer. Some “stimulus”!
Finally, here are some excerpts of an article on Dan Bongino’s website that was first posted in July 2018 that elucidates what really happened, as compared to the vaunted predictions of Obama and his Council of Economic Advisers beforehand.
It should’ve been a red flag to most observers when the Obama administration began inventing new economic terms to measure the stimulus’ alleged success, such as how many jobs were being “saved or created” by it. Obama told us not long after passing the stimulus that it had created or saved 150,000 jobs in June, and would save or create another 600,000 by September. How the heck does one measure a “saved” job? Simple, create a baseline prediction (for example: predict the economy will lose a million jobs next month), and then if the economy were to only lose 200,000 jobs, Obama could claim he “saved” 800,000 jobs. Convenient, right?
[T]he Obama administration predicted the unemployment rate would never top 8% with the stimulus passed. But in absence of the stimulus, we were told that unemployment would touch 9 percent.
[N]ot only did unemployment crack eight percent, nine percent, and ten percent, the actual unemployment rate was always higher than the unemployment rate that was predicted without the stimulus.
[During the Obama years,] the number of Americans employed rose by 9.9 million – compared to 14.6 million who left the labor force. In other words, nearly 50% more left the labor force, than became employed. The labor force participate rate of those aged 65 and older actually increased during the Obama years, meaning this shrinkage in the labor force under his watch cannot be attributed to people leaving the labor force by retiring.
Had Obama’s recovery kept pace with historical averages, incomes would’ve been 20% higher at the end his presidency than they actually were.
This last article contains damning charts and graphs that blow to smithereens any claims made by Obama about the supposed success of his stimulus program. All of the articles linked and excerpted in this piece put the lie to Obama’s tweet, but that 2016 analysis that shows 94% of the jobs created during his presidency were part-time or temporary jobs is the clincher.
As usual, his braggadocio from yesterday can be ignored and laughed at.
The end.
