Reality Unwound

I don’t believe you can really be confused at something this simple. Even though I give you and most of the TV guys enough credit for intellegence that I know it’s just a political thing to take shots wherever you can even though you know its not a real issue, the sad truth is that there are people who read this page that will think this is true and there is some sort of promlem or contradiction in all this.
The “right now”, “right now” part is the importance of using the money in programs to cities and school districts and states to give jobs right now to firefighters and police and teachers so those people don’t lose thier jobs over some short term budget concern caused by the economy. This is ion contrast to the other option which would be to stimulate the economy through tax cuts or writing everyone $400 checks which would take longer and wouldn’t even have a hope of saving those jobs. The stimulus has done exactly what it was designed to do in that it provided funding for those entities and saved many jobs that would have been lost. In addition it created jobs for those projects that were included in it.
The second part… the economy is bad. Unemployment is high. If we’ve lost 2 million jobs the last 6 months then it would have been 3 without the stimulus bill. If we had lost 10 million jobs then it would have been 11 without it… etc. Longterm, the hope is that we saved some pain for many americans while we all wait for the economy to recover. It is not reasonable to expect that a trillion $ stimulus would fix the entire economy overnight. We seemingly plugged the dam and stopped the freefall with the TARP, Bailouts and stimulus now we work to improve growth over the long haul. This has been the consistant message fromt he beginning and the worst part is YOU know it, you just post this chopped up edited junk anyway.

The problem is that what your’e talking about isn’t what he said. His on going rhetoric was that the stimulus was going to CREATE jobs and turn around the economy right now. He didn’t say it was going to keep 100,000 cops on patrol.

Why do you defend his infallibility? They guy botched it. The situation was worse than he thought it was, and his plan didn’t work like he thought it would. He’s predisposed to spend his face off, and it didn’t work like he thought.

I’m amazed at how hard you are working to make sure it seems like he never makes mistakes. He’s doing just what we expected him to do… spend spend spend, and centralize everything. It’s working just like I thought it would (that is, not at all). But to imply that when the President says that the money is “going to go out immediately for job creation” means something other than that he thinks it’s immediately going to create jobs (not keep), that’s just blind fawning loyalism. I don’t understand that. Job creation isn’t job maintenance.

Incidentally, an increasing unemployment number isn’t job maintenance either. So it’s pretty much failing on all counts.

Hard to argue with logic like that. So the Toyota plant in San Antonio didn’t actually CREATE any jobs since SA is probably down in total. Right? The good news is that if SA has a net gain any time in the futue, then the loss of the AT&T headquarters wont actually be a LOSS of any jobs. Right? Do I have it now?
So If a stimulus package creates 2 million jobs, but the rest of the economy loses 3 Mill for a net loss of 1, then it didn’t create any jobs. Gotta admit, it certainly qualifies as “new math” but I think I’m catching on.
And I think I understand now why you people didn’t like the AIG plan and TARP because it stopped the probable collapse of the finacial system, but there was still a net negative so it “didn’t work”. I get it. I mean its REALLY stupid, but at least I understand now.

No. It’s saying that if you’re not adding any jobs if you’re just shifting jobs around. When Cap-n-trade destroys the energy industry, but some of those people go get new “green” jobs, you didn’t create anything. You destroyed an entire industry.

It’s just ridiculous for him to come out and say, “It’s working!! Hooray for the stimulus!! There are 150 new cops in Portland, OR!” While he turns a blind eye to the fact that unemployment is higher than he predicted it would be, and his own wooden dummy number 2 confesses that the whole economy is worse than they thought it was.

For your Toyota analogy, if one out of every 10 people in San Antonio were unemployed, up from one in 40 two years ago, would you herald the Toyota plant as an indicator that everything is working wonderfully in the San Antonio economy.

I’d be careful throwing the word stupid around if you couldn’t deduce that, but whatever sustains your passionate love and reverence for Dear Leader. I’m good if you are.

On a somewhat unrelated note… I am really impressed at how quickly you have shifted from “its not that bad, we don’t need any stimulus…” To “Ha! see, it’s worse than they thought, they didn’t do enough!”.
You’re like one of those subatomic particles that can be two places at once.

I NEVER said they didn’t do enough. My general feeling with this administration is that they’re doing waaaaaaaaay too much of the waaaaaaaaay wrong thing. All I want him (and you) to admit is he called it wrong. The stimulus didn’t work like he thought it would.

Again, there is no shift. The stimulus was a bad idea for precisely the reasons that we’re seeing now… it didn’t (it won’t) create jobs, and it’s a huge financial burden.

We have a president who was continually attacked for saying its going to get worse before it gets better and we have a long hard road ahead of us… and now that it has gotten worse all you can say is HA look it didn’t get better.
I would guess that if you had forced him to predict weather or not we would have 10.5% unemployment in July he may have guessed against it, and I would guess that he thought he would be able to cut through the red tape of getting the money distributed a little easier, but to jump from that to he’s a liar and it was all a scam and NO jobs are being created is just too much of a stretch.
The stimulus claim was that it would create 3 to 4 million jobs. This was NEVER intended to be a net figure. NOBODY in the administration (or me) would have predicted we would have net job gain in 2009. NOBODY. So for you to try to present it now as if somebody claimed that is just wrong, or some misunderstanding, or just a political Gotcha game.
The stimulus was an emergency measure to help the economy, and the real future growth lies in new industry and innovation. Thats always been the policy and thats always been whats said. Now separate from that, if somebody was wrong by a couple percentage points on where we would be on this day or that day, It’s pretty dumb to use that as some indictment of the whole program. (espescially if its used to make everyone out to be liars and crooks along with it)
What I see now is pretty much the picture he painted in the two big stimulus speeches he gave. Its just not that complicated. It reminds me very much of the years when the republicans would say there was a link between Saddam and Alqueda but no link between Saddam and 911 but the dems kept saying, “see they keep saying Saddam had something to do with 911″ when they obviously weren’t. Just because there are enough words available to make someone out to be a liar or to say there is some contradiction that we intellectually know doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean you should do that just because that person is on the other side.

Oh, and for the record. He didn’t call it wrong and the stimulus has worked almost exactly as it was intended too. On a separate note, the economy has been worse than expected.