This Is No Joke .. Mr. President

This Is No Joke .. Mr. President

Neal Boortz
June 14, 2011

Yesterday PrezBo went to North Carolina to meet with his Council on Jobs and Competiveness. I know what you are thinking .. Barack Obama is the last guy that I would associate with job creation or competitiveness .. these businessmen must be insulted when he gets up to talk about the issue. But when asked about the bureaucratic red tape that can delay projects or put a stop to them completely, Obama jokingly says: "Shovel-ready was not as ... uh .. shovel-ready as we expected."

Gee, ya think? And it was nice of you to have a little chuckle at your own cleverness, PrezBo …. But the people who have been out of work for six months weren’t laughing with you.

Barack Obama said that if we implemented his grand stimulus plan, it would provide for hundreds of thousands of “shovel-ready” projects that will bring our unemployment rate below 8%. We HAD to do this, otherwise our country would not recover. Remember? So $821 billion later, what do we have to show for it?

“Unemployment is now 25 percent higher than when the president took office, the deficit is 35 percent higher, and gas prices have more than doubled,” according to Commentary Magazine.

Obama’s stimulus included $28 billion in new highway money, which he said would "create or save" 150,000 jobs by the end of 2010. These are the quintessential “shovel-ready” jobs that Obama jokes turned out to be not so shovel ready.

From Investors Business Daily:

A new study by economists Timothy Conley of the University of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.

As the authors explain, many states simply took the free federal money and shifted their own highway funds to meet other needs. Examples:

*Texas got $700 million in highway stimulus funds last year, but spent $560 million less on its roads in 2010 than it did in 2009.
*New York's highway spending was basically unchanged between 2009 and 2010, despite getting $522 million more in federal highway bucks.
*Michigan boosted its highway spending just $17.4 million, far below the $189 million extra the feds handed the state for highway improvements.

These jobs and our economy, Mr. President, are not a joke. This stimulus bill was your great plan at turning the tide of this nation. This was it! When others, like yours truly, were telling you that MORE government spending on “shovel-ready” projects were not going to be the way to save this nation and grow our economy, you passed the gargantuan bill, continued to pass other bills (like ObamaCare) that increased the size of government and then refused to do anything to actually tackle our entitlement crisis.

According to government figures: When you add up all of the money that we owe in order to cover our future liabilities in entitlements, our country is now in worse financial shape than Greece. Greece! While Obama has nearly doubled our debt to $14.3 trillion, that doesn’t even compare to the $50 trillion that we owe when you include Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

This is not a laughing matter. Americans are not impressed that you “have a better plane” than three years ago or you now travel “with a bigger entourage.” What Americans DO know is that your stimulus plans were a big fat freaking failure and their families are paying the price for it and will continue to pay the price for your policies for decades.