Obamanomics is a Failure

Obamanomics is a failure.  This has been clear to most Americans for a long time. 

First, we had this chart which made things pretty clear:

 

 Then we have this study by The Weekly Standard which claims that jobs created by the stimulus actually cost up to $278,000 each.  In yesterday's daily briefing at the White House, Jay Carney took issue with this, discounting it simply because it came from The Weekly Standard:

A Weekly Standard analysis that says the jobs created in the stimulus cost $200,000 each is “based on false information,” Carney said, reading a response he had prepared on a piece of paper. “The Weekly Standard did this analysis, and we should view it through that prism, I suppose," he said. 

James Pethoukoukis puts it all together:

The centerpiece of Obama’s plan to “push the car out of the ditch” was the trillion-dollar (including interest expense on the borrowed money) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A recent article in The Weekly Standard determined that it may have cost as much as $278,000 for each job created. But that’s generous. Respected Stanford economist John Taylor, perhaps the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, has analyzed the actual results of the ARRA. Not what the White House’s garbage-in, garbage-out models say happened, but what actually happened as gleaned from government statistics. Taylor, simply put, looked at whether consumers actually consumed and whether government actually spent in a way that produced real growth and jobs. His devastating conclusion:

Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.

Indeed, the results are horrifying. The two-year-old recovery’s terrible tale of the tape: A 9.1 percent unemployment rate that’s probably closer to 16 percent counting the discouraged and underemployed, the worst income growth and weakest GDP growth of any upturn since World War II, a still-weakening housing market. Oh, and a trillion bucks down the tube. Oh, and two-and-a-half years … and counting … wasted during which time the skills of unemployed workers continue to erode and the careers of younger Americans suffer long-term income damage. Losing the future.

And that's not all.  It gets worse.  Add in Obamacare and then Obama's decision to ignore his own debt commission findings (which Pethoukoukis contends led directly to the debt crisis we now face) and things are worse than ever.

Read the whole piece here.

Ed Morrissey is absolutely spot on when he says:

In order to accelerate growth in a real and sustainable manner, the US government has to create an investor-friendly environment.  The Obama administration has done everything but do so.  Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric, including the ridiculous new war on corporate-jet owners, as well as his legislation (ObamaCare, financial reform) and regulatory expansion all signal a determined hostility to capital.  Moreover, the White House refusal to acknowledge the obvious deficit and debt crises with its insistence on trillion-dollar annual red ink shows that the leaders of its economic policy simply have no clue as to the damage they are doing to America’s financial standing.  In that kind of environment, who would want to invest their capital and take risk in the US if they had the opportunity to use it elsewhere?

Steve Benen criticizes Mitt Romney for saying that Obama has made things worse and offers two questions for Mr. Romney:

1. When Obama took office, the economy was shrinking. Now it’s growing. In what way is that “worse”?

2. When Obama took office, the economy was hemorrhaging jobs. Now it’s gaining jobs. In what way is that “worse”?

I'm not sure those questions even make sense, but they certainly show the "rainbows and unicorns" world in which Benen lives.  I'd like for him to explain to me how jobs that cost taxpayers over $200,000 is a good thing?  Or how an unemployment rate that is at least 25% higher than when Obama took office shows that things are better?

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was right:  Democrats own this economy.

(H/T:  Instapundit)

Get Ready for Sky High Energy Bills

Rick Moran at American Thinker poses the question:

Has there ever been a great nation that committed economic suicide for no real reason?

Not that I can think of.  Yet that's exactly what Obamanomics is doing to this country.  Of course, Obama promised he would make energy prices skyrocket, and by golly, he's doing it.  He held onto the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico as long as he could and when that was finally lifted, he initiated a "permitorium" where so few permits were issued, well, it was the same as a moratorium.


The news that five coal powered power plants will be shut down is only the first of many to come.


I'd ask the liberals that voted for Obama...is this what you want, really?  I'd really like to know.  I'd also like to ask, are you planning on voting for Obama again?


From The Chicago Tribune:

American Electric Power, one of the country's largest coal-burning electricity generators, said Thursday it will retire nearly a quarter of its coal-fueled generating capacity and that it will spend up to $8 billion to retrofit remaining units to meet regulations that start taking effect in 2014. Those moves will have an impact.

"The sudden increase in electricity rates and impacts on state economies will be significant at a time when people and states are still struggling,'' AEP Chairman and CEO Michael G. Morris said.

How many jobs will be lost in this maneuver?


One more time.  Obama is anti-business, anti-free market, anti-consumer, and anti-America.  


He's killing America.


(H/T:  Memeorandum)

"People are Cranky!"

Yesterday afternoon I was in the grocery store picking up a few little things on my mom's shopping list.  Some milk, bread, hair spray, nothing much.  I got to the checkout line and was behind a couple of guys buying a loaf of bread and two sodas.  They were paying in pennies, dimes and nickels.  One lane over a customer had the store's weekly ad in her hand and was arguing with the cashier about the cost of an item.  When I finally moved up to check out I visited with the cashier as she scanned my items - she's been there about thirty years and I always go through her line when I can.

"People are tired," she said sadly.  "Cranky.  Prices keep getting higher and higher everywhere they go and they're tired."

She's right about that.  I see it.  People are definitely cranky.  Steve and I were driving somewhere last week, stopped at a red light, and we were about three cars back.  When the light turned green the guy in the lane next to us started screaming, "Go!!!  It's not going to stay green for ... ever! "  Yeah, so lots of us have temper tantrums when confronted with ignorant drivers (and there are plenty of them), but I think it's true that people are testy. 

Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator hits on the issue of rising prices in his column this morning to explain why Obama is a "political goner" in 2012:

You can get away with a lot of things as president and blame them on other people. For Obama its George Bush or now the oil companies or also now those evil corporations or… well… yada yada yada. But when average Americans begin to understand that Obamanomics is directly responsible for a 28 cent rise in the price of milk (with over a year and a half to go to the 2012 elections), there is going to be political hell to pay. And the buck, so to speak, stops, as it always does, with the president of the United States.

It's all related to the cost of gas, of energy.   Gas prices during Obama's tenure has nearly doubled and that's reflected everywhere you go.  He can't blame this one on Bush.  This is when the rubber meets the road; this is when the Average American starts paying attention:

Paying an increase of 28 cents for a gallon of milk inside of less than four months? This is the language understood by average Americans too busy with daily life to pay much in the way of attention to the economists, journalists, and politicians.

And they' re getting cranky about it.  They're going to look for someone to blame and someone to answer for this.  It's going to get worse as summer approaches and the summer driving season kicks in.  Gas prices always rise then.  And then comes hurricane season.  Up, up, up.  


And Obama's answer?  There's no "silver bullet" to bring down gas prices.  Does that satisfy you?  


It doesn't me, either.