In defense of rhetoric…

In response to Brad’s post below, he fails to point out that the Obama Administration and Congress, with its seemingly (though not literally) infinite wealth, pushed the stimulus bill through with the explicit purpose of creating jobs and even presented the public with a graph showing unemployment with and without (pg. 5) the passage of the bill. Of course, those of us here at TLP and other likeminded blogs knew that the stimulus bill would be a failure and could possibly lead to more unemployment, if not immediately then definitely over the long term.

This isn’t a corporation building a skyscraper, it is the government errantly pouring $700+ billion into the economy, ostensibly taking money away from future generations to invest and create jobs. There is a difference between actual investment, such as a private corporation expanding, and waste, which is the very definition of government spending.

The Obama Administration absurdly claims that the stimulus bill has created 150,000 jobs. They offer no evidence to back up the claim, when in fact the economy has lost around 2.8 million jobs since the beginning of the year. It’s a win-win for Obama because, as Steve Chapman recently pointed out at Reason, the administration and majority in Congress can claim that the stimulus wasn’t big enough if the economy fails to recover or he can take credit for any rebound we may see.

I’m tired of Obama pulling everything he says out of thin air with absolutely nothing to show for it. Whatever the amount spent per job, and of course the costs of raw materials are included, it’s much more substantive that anything the Obama Administration has used a talking point for pissing away our future.

Was it a rhetorical point? Absolutely. I make no apologies for it.