As the Trillion Dollar Man rides down the road in his million dollar bus passing by signs that say “Your Stimulus Dollars at Work,” the outlines of Obama’s presidential reelection campaign have already become apparent.
Spend. More. Money.
Practically every big government program that Obama has tried has failed to deliver the results that the president’s economic team projected.
As Obama said: Those shovel ready projects included in the stimulus spending binge weren’t quite as shovel ready as they thought. Or as his critics have said: If they were shovel ready, it was only because they were so rotten they needed to be buried quickly.
Taking their cues from the mid-term election that saw Obama’s team lose control of the House on dissatisfaction with the growth of government, they slimmed down, huddled up and came out with a new plan.
Ready for it?
More government, bigger spending, more entitlements.
Ta da!
While some Democrats will certainly welcome the president’s new, improved, same, old plan, I guarantee that Obama will have a harder time selling many Democrats up for reelection on this strategy than he had on selling tax increases to Speaker John Boehner.
Last week as reported on Townhall Finance, Hotair, the Blaze and elsewhere, White House spokesman Jay Carney mixed it up with a Wall Street Journal reporter by cunningly insisting that unemployment insurance benefits create jobs.
"There are few other ways that can directly put money into the economy than applying unemployment insurance," Carney said.
And since unemployment benefits are an insurance program where the cost is passed along to the employer, there are few ways to more effectively raise taxes on employers either, thereby taking the money right back out of the economy; in fact right back out of the pool that funds private job creation.
But hey, never mind: We’re campaigning here. In other words, we’re more interested in talking about creating jobs rather than actually creating them. The administration has to go with their strength.
While Carney says there are few entitlements more effective than unemployment insurance to get money into the economy, Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has seemed to find one:
“I should point out that when you talk about the snap program or the food stamp program, you have to recognize that it’s also an economic stimulus,” Vislack told a forum. “If people are able to buy a little more in the grocery store, then someone has to stock it, shelve it, process it, package it, ship it. All of those are jobs. It’s the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.”
I’m not a White House economist, but if I were I’d diagram that Winning-the-Future food stamp formula like this:
Food stamps = Most + Direct = WTF.
My money is on Vislack to edge out Carney for Employee of the Month at the White House for August.
But a future award has to be held in standby for the geniuses that are putting together the plan to make the mortgage market work.
Remember Too-Big-To-Fail? Well apparently it wasn’t big enough to NOT fail.
So the White House is getting really serious about the problem. They’re thinking about combining the government mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into an Uber mortgage overlord that controls the entire mortgage market rather than just 95 percent of the mortgage market that the government is responsible for now.
Let’s see: We started out with the government doing 50 percent of the mortgages and that failed; so we tried letting them do 95 percent of the mortgages and that’s failed.
Of course you and I can easily understand now how the 5 percent of private mortgages getting done currently are ruining things for the 95 percent of government mortgages that make up the rest of the market that’s created a housing malaise.
It’s kind of like when Joseph Stalin stopped the Kulaks from competing with the collective farms because the Kulaks’ higher production made the collectives look bad.
So there was an epic famine. The death of 7,000,000 people is a small price for farm fresh produce grown on a collectivized farm.
Yum.
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