Archive » fiscal stimulus

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The House is currently debating the federal debt ceiling increase to $14.3 trillion. (The Senate, with every single Democrat voting in favor, adopted the debt limit increase last week.) These measures are on top of two other debt limit increases over the last year (including one adopted in the dead of night over [...]

Over the weekend, White House operatives were all over the map with their stimulus job estimates.
(I think they were using “Mayan Math.”)
Anyway, talk show host Bill Wills in Cleveland asked White House spokesman Bill Burton about it. Burton airily dismissed criticism of the discrepancies as “petty.”
Here’s the audio:

And transcript:
WILLS: And finally Mr. Burton, on [...]

My syndicated column today torches President Obama’s fiscal freeze follies. A new CBO reports says the year-old Porkulus will now cost $75 billion more than originally estimated. Which is why the White House is scrambling to de-emphasize its spending discipline pose and talk about something else. Anything else. Like new legislation “restricting foreign corporations from [...]

It’s Return of the Crap Sandwich.
Porkulus, Jr.
Spendapalooza Redux.
Special Interest Slush Fund: The Sequel.
Whatever you call the Obama Jobs Bill, it’s more red ink, generational theft, and wealth redistribution all rolled up into another Democrat “economic recovery” intervention.
Democrat Rep. Brad Sherman admits that his leadership has told him not, not, not to use the s-word when [...]

The ballyhooed budget spending freeze that will be a feature of the State of the Union address tomorrow doesn’t cover behemoth entitlement programs.
It doesn’t cover a second stimulus.
It is limited to an electorally-timed three-year period.
The White House is already promising that favored left-wing programs in education and the environment would get a [...]

Hard for me to suppress a snort. But here it is: John McCain — who supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $25 billion auto bailout, a $300 billion mortgage bailout, and the first $85 billion AIG bailout – has grandiosely announced that he will oppose Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s second term:
“Our country is [...]

Astroturf Master/Senior White House adviser David Axlerod’s twin, David Plouffe, is officially being called an “outside adviser” It’s not clear who is paying his salary. But based on the Obama propaganda flowing into my e-mail box in his name over the last few weeks, I think we can properly call him the Spam Czar:
Organizing for [...]

Let’s do the time warp again.

After engaging in mind-boggling acts of non-stop generational theft over the past year and blowing through the debt ceiling during the Christmas holiday, the White House and Democrat majority have unveiled a phony plan to “solve” the red-ink disaster they helped create by kicking the can to a toothless panel.
GOP Sen. Judd Gregg calls it [...]

Grabby hands.

(Photo via R.S. McCain)

(Photo via Voting Female)

(Photo of Northeastern University rally sent in from reader Scott T.)
On Sunday night, Public Policy Polling (swing state specialists) released the latest stunning numbers in the Massachusetts Senate race. Martha Antoinette Coakley is hemorrhaging independents and the enthusiasm gap is widening as the Bay State heads into the January [...]

Gird your loins.
The latest job numbers are out and they’re worse than expected.
Which means it’s time for another White House green jobs boondoggle campaign:
The White House pitched Friday’s jobless report as the start to stabilization while President Barack Obama planned to push for another $5 billion to help create much-needed jobs.
Obama planned an afternoon [...]

As if you needed more evidence of the boondoggle-ishness of the Green Jobs racket, two items for your file:
1) Via Inside Charm City, Maryland’s Democrat Senators dole out green job funding to an SEIU partnership…
Senators Benjamin L. Cardin and Barbara A. Mikulski (both D-Md.) today announced the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes funding for [...]

A fiscal conservative shot heard ’round the world on March 25, 2009:

Would that we had more like him on our side of the pond.

I discussed the Time Magazine man of the year, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, on Fox and Friends this morning. In sum: Failure has never had such rich rewards. Via the Mises Institute, here’s a video compilation of his spectacular wrong-headedness about the housing bubble and the state of the economy over the years.

Here’s GOP Sen. [...]

The weatherization boondoggle.

Follow the bouncing ball: TARP, the trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout, has morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout. I’m sure I forgot more.
Well, now the Democrats want to use it to bail out [...]

Zzzzzz.

Turkeys of the year
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
As we gather ‘round the Thanksgiving table, bow our heads in prayer, and feast on the holiday bird, it is only fitting to take a moment to fete the unforgettable turkeys of 2009.
1. The stimulus. Back in February, I wrote that if the trillion-dollar stimulus plan were a [...]

A few weeks ago, I said we needed a new metric for all the bogus jobs claimed by the Obama White House. I called it the “Stimulus Jobs Inflation Index.”
The Examiner does even better — creating a handy, interactive Stimulus Jobs Inflation Map.
More than ten percent of the jobs the Obama administration has claimed were [...]

Old metric: Jobs created or saved.
New metric: Jobs inflated or craved.
The White House put out its new fuzzy porkulus math report — and then patted itself on the back for “transparency:”
More than 650,000 jobs have been saved or created under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, the White House said Friday, saying it is on [...]

Hey, how’s Obama’s job-creating stimulus working out for you, Philadelphia?
More hype than hope, as usual:
MORE THAN six months after President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package was passed into law, the city of Philadelphia has spent less than $1 million in recovery money and retained just 52 jobs.
The data was laid out in a memo sent [...]

The WSJ spotlights tax code affirmative action for golf club carts:
We thought cash for clunkers was the ultimate waste of taxpayer money, but as usual we were too optimistic. Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy high-mileage cars that was part of President Obama’s stimulus plan, Uncle Sam is now paying Americans to buy [...]

Conn Carroll at Heritage’s Foundry blog breaks down the stimulus spin from the White House today:
The Obama administration released the first hard numbers on how many jobs their $787 billion stimulus package has created or saved on Recovery.gov today. The number: 30,383 jobs from roughly $16 billion worth of stimulus contracts awarded directly by federal [...]

Scroll down for updates…10:45am – Snowe wanted reassurance from CBO and Baucus that scoring “integrity” will be preserved as conceptual language becomes legislative language…1:04pm Eastern…Snowe will vote YES on government health care takeover…2:54pm Eastern Senate Finance Cmte vote is 14-9

Sen. Olympia Snowe was one of the three members of the Senate GOP Turncoat Caucus who [...]

President Obama was unavailable for comment:
The American economy lost 263,000 jobs in September — far more than expected — and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the government reported on Friday, dimming prospects of any meaningful job growth by the end of the year.
The Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of unemployment dashed hopes that the [...]

Photoshop: Leo Alberti
So, now the White House has issued “new guidelines” in the wake of the “inappropriate” political lobbying call coordinated by the National Endowment for the Arts and exposed by Patrick Courrielche .
Translation: Instead of delivering “specific asks” to potential government grant recipients, they’ll stick to non-specific asks on behalf of Hope and Change.
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Commenter [...]

Props to the Associated Press for stepping outside its traditional role as Obama water-carriers and shedding light on the none-too-surprising politicization of border security funding under DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
She’s in a state of denial.
The White House is desperately undermining transparency.
And maybe it’s finally dawning on the media stenographers that the Era of [...]

Just to recap:
Cash for Clunkers.
Cash for Kitchen Appliances.
Cash for Coiffures.
And now…Cash for Convicts. Really.
The feckless feds are begging prisoners to give the money back. Really:
Federal economic stimulus cash was handed out to cons behind bars in Bay State prisons after a bureaucratic snafu resulted in $250 checks being sent to some inmates – and now [...]

Cash for Clunkers.
Cash for Kitchens.
And now…Cash for Coiffures:
Arguing in favor of President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in January Democratic Congressman and senate candidate Paul Hodes claimed the stimulus act would “Reduce Soaring Unemployment.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Instead, according to a report issued by the New Hampshire Office of Economic Stimulus, the [...]