Liberal bloggers, a group of the most uneducated and misguided individuals in the country (IMHO), had their annual meeting with their liberal counterparts in government this last week. It is a great time because I do not think they realize that people outside of their conference can hear them. You get people like Harry Reid saying that their healthcare legislation was only the beginning…“We’re going to have a public option” says Reid. Then we have one of the great Obama appointees, Van Jones. If you did not know it, Mr. Jones went directly to the Center for American Progress after he was thrown under the bus by Obama. Jones in his infinite wisdom told the bloggers that they need to stop worrying about the deficit because there are plenty of rich companies that the government can take money from. Of course he said they need to take this money to fund more social programs…not pay down the deficit. I guess you can expect logic like that from someone who would make the first part of that comment. As for Biden…he does not need a liberal conference to reveal the liberal’s true mindset…he lost his internal filter a long time ago. He just told everyone that it is time to campaign; to try to now convince the American public that their big government policies are actually a good thing and not destroying our liberties. Obama took the cue and is off and running.
Showing where his priorities are, Obama has sent a team down to Florida. This team is not responsible for helping the response to the oil spill in Florida, but rather to limit the damage of Obama’s political image. Politico exposes his strategy in this short piece. The Obama strategy to turn this spill into a crisis so they could use it to push climate control legislation has backfired. In this case reality has trumped politics. The reality is that this administration has shown grave incompetence and apathy in their response to the clean up and many of their decisions such as the drilling ban and their refusal to lift the Jones Act have caused more damage than good. The people living along the coast are seeing the effects of a liberal ideology first hand.
Obama himself will be traveling around touting all of his legislative successes. On Thursday he will be a guest on The View, where I am sure he will be hammered with intelligent questions….or not. Obama and his staff will be putting out a lot of false information while promoting their successes so here is a primer of what they will say and how to respond to your liberal friends.
As pointed out in this article, he will of course try to remind everyone that he inherited all of this mess and it is not his fault. There are a couple of responses to this faulty logic. First, Democrats have had control of Congress since 2006…that would be four years. Congress controls spending and taxes. Obama himself has been in office for almost 2 of those years. At some point they have to take responsibility for what they created. I say what they created because it was liberal economic philosophy that got us into this mess. I pointed out in this post how Bush was not a fiscal conservative and Congress under Bush certainly was not. So when Obama says that the polices of the last 10 years caused this mess, he is actually bashing his own economic philosophy.
Part of this Bush bashing will certainly be a comment or two about Bush’s tax breaks to the rich. These tax cuts supposedly caused the great deficits we have now. This is more false propaganda used to push the FDR tactic of class warfare. Once again I mentioned it in the post I just linked to above. The Bush tax cut to the wealthy accounts for 4% of the deficit (as compared to the Stimulus which currently stands at 6%). Here is the link to the report again.Another thing Obama will not mention is that the tax break was for all tax brackets. For example it dropped the lowest bracket from 15% to 10%. These liberal friends of yours might change their mind when they find out their taxes are going up too. Suddenly it will not be fair.
Amazingly enough they will also be touting the successes of the Stimulus Bill. Just last week Obama was still making the false statement that the Stimulus created 3 million jobs. Here are the numbers to share. When Obama promised to create 3.5 million jobs with his stimulus bill the employment in America stood at 135.1 million. Current employment stands at 130.5 million. I am no mathematical genius but I am pretty sure that means we have lost about 5 million jobs and are about 7.4 million shy of his legislative big government goal. As pointed out in several places, the way they get the number of 3 million is by using a Keynesian economic model that says for every dollar spent by the government, you get 2.5 dollars in economic growth. That is why the recovery website lists around 700,000 jobs and not 3 million. Their number is based upon a model and not real data. A Harvard study done with real data shows that this model is bogus. The Study linked here shows that you only get $0.40 to $0.70 growth for every dollar spent and if that dollar is already taxed then it actually decreases economic growth. Here is a great article by Veronique de Rugy in the NRO that details how liberals are distorting the truth in the name of progressive ideology.
Another point made in her article outlines another line you will probably hear from Obama. That the stimulus has encouraged 280 Billion in private investment. This is more false propaganda put out by the administration, specifically from Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. This from Romer’s analysis
“The economic stimulus legislation pushed by U.S. President Barack Obama last year will help encourage $280 billion of investment by private industry and local governments…The analysis, by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, estimates that about $100 billion in government grants, loan guarantees, interest subsidies and tax breaks will be matched almost three-to-one by other spending”
I highlighted the important parts. To this administration promises are reality despite any factual evidence to support they actually came to fruition later. Once again they base their ‘facts’ on a flawed Keynesian model that has never worked….proven by the policies of Hoover and FDR during the Great Depression.
I hope this helps out when you hear some of these things this week.
As a note Veronique de Rugy is not a writer, but rather senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University. I also added a couple of more books to my reading list this weekend if anyone is interested.
