Obama Promises “Job-Killing Tax Increases” After 2012, Says Job Losses Prove Stimulus Worked (Videos)
Ben Johnson, The White House Watch
If you were regularly described as one of the most “brilliant” leaders in our nation’s history and were poised to launch a 16-month-long crusade to convince the nation to re-elect you, how would you sell your dismal economic record? Barack Obama gave his answer in a press conference yesterday, when he promised to deliver “massive, job-killing tax increases” and claimed a 9.2 percent unemployment rate proves he was right all along and Americans should be grateful.
Obama’s plans for the nation include more redistribution of (borrowed, Chinese) wealth, financed by $1 trillion in tax increases. Even Obama understands the likely impact of this move. In 2009, he told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, “You don’t raise taxes in a recession,” and during the lame duck session of Congress he called extending the Bush tax cuts “an essential step on the road to recovery.” In Monday’s press conference, he admitted:
So, when you hear folks saying, “Well, the president shouldn’t want massive job killing tax increases when the economy is this weak.” Nobody’s looking to raise taxes right now. We’re talking about potentially 2013 and the out years.
In other words, he promised he will wait until he is safely re-elected and beyond the reach of the people (except for impeachment), then destroy the economy. Obama ’12!
(Story continues after video.)
Only the most naive believe these tax hikes will only touch the “millionaires and billionaires” Obama constantly inveighs against. The Associated Press noted yesterday, “Proposals under consideration include raising taxes on small business owners and potentially low- and middle-income families.” After all, the wealthiest Americans are already paying a disproportionate percentage of income taxes. Patrick Tyrrell of the Foundry blog writes that the IRS estimated as of “2008, the top 25 percent of income earners—those earning $67,280 or more—pay 86.34 percent of the income taxes, yet earn only 67.38 percent of all income in the U.S.” If Obama is re-elected, he has told American you can expect unemployment to skyrocket.
Obama then added an odd claim: that the discouraging job reports of Recovery Summer 2.0 prove his stimulus plan worked. He said….
Video: Stimulus Jobs Cost a Quarter-of-a-Million Dollars Each
1.9 Million Fewer Americans Working Now Than When Obama Signed Stimulus Bill
Matt Cover, CNSNews.com
Twenty-eight months after Congress passed President Obama’s signature economic stimulus law, and nearly one year after he declared the summer of 2010 to be “Recovery Summer,” 1.9 million fewer people are employed.
In February 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 141.7 million people were employed. By the end of May 2011 – the last month for which data are available – that number had fallen to 139.8 million, a difference of 1.9 million.
While the number of people with jobs has increased slightly from its low point during the recession – 137.9 million in December 2009 – those 1.9 million jobs have been lost despite $800 billion in stimulus spending.
This does not mean that the economy is not creating jobs, but rather that it is not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with a combination of layoffs and people entering the job market for the first time.
In a Washington Post op-ed, former White House chief economist Larry Summers noted that the percentage of the population that has a job has not improved, even though the economy is technically in recovery.
Obama Gives Stimulus Money to Tax Cheats Who Owe Millions
Judicial Watch
In the latest outrage involving President Obama’s disastrous stimulus, a federal probe has determined that thousands of companies that got cash under the fraud-infested program have cheated the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.
At least 3,700 recipients of stimulus money owe Uncle Sam more than $750 million in taxes, according to a report published this week by the investigative arm of Congress known as the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The recipients got a combined $24 billion in Recovery Act funds, according the probe, which also found that more than a dozen likely committed crimes.
The offenders include individuals, businesses and other entities. Examples listed in the report include a security firm that owed more than $9 million in payroll taxes when it got $100,000 in stimulus funds, a health care nonprofit that received over $100,000 despite bailing on $4 million in payroll taxes and a construction firm that got around $1 million even though it owed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over $700,000.
The taxpayer dollars were carelessly disbursed with little scrutiny as part of….
Obama’s Economic Advisers: International Socialists, Union Thugs, NBC Execs, Soros Scholars, Subprime Lenders, Amnesty Shills, and Campaign Cronies
Ben Johnson, FloydReports.com
The media enthused when Barack Obama bloviated during his State of the Union Address, “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” They now enthuse that the president has appointed members to his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness allegedly designed to cut down inefficient regulations and unnecessary government burdens. None of the media announced that the appointees are a collection of globalists, media elites at NBC News, union thugs, amnesty activists, employees of Soros-funded think tanks, wealth redistributionists, business failures in the subprime lending industry, and Chicago cronies. Nonetheless, today’s issue of USA Today is already spinning the story under the headline, “Obama Wants Business World’s Best Ideas on Jobs.”
Where he would get those ideas is anyone’s guess.
Richard Trumka is perhaps the most conspicuous choice on this job-creating council. Trumka, who recently admitted to Astroturfing the protests in Wisconsin and around the country, is president of the AFL-CIO and a longtime Big Labor activist with a shady history. Michelle Malkin has noted that Trumka led the United Mine Workers when a non-union worker named Eddie York was shot to death in the midst of a mining strike. The UMW aided all eight union members present at the scene of the crime and disciplined none of them. In a separate incident, Trumka incited a crowd in Illinois to “kick the s–t out of every last” person who crossed the UMW picket line. Working his way up the ranks, as AFL-CIO treasurer he was implicated in two money-laundering scandals involving the Teamsters. He said if he were forced to testify before Congress, he would invoke the Fifth Amendment. Trumka climbed the ladder by gripping the coattails of John Sweeney, the union’s former president and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sweeney and Trumka saw the union donate more than $200 million in political aid to the Democrats in 2008 and send out more than 250,000 “volunteers,” many of whom worked for Obama in swing states. On February 15, Barack Obama awarded Sweeney the Medal of Freedom.
After succeeding Sweeney as the union’s president in September 2009, Trumka decided to further radicalize the union. Just last fall, Trumka insisted, “We need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job but one we should start now.” To that end, Trumka has worked with European socialists to establish a global tax, a measure that is also a top priority of Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren. Last year, Trumka carried out his threats to go after Democrats who opposed ObamaCare’s “public option,” failing to oust Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln as the Democratic nominee.
The new council position provides no real boost to Trumka; he doesn’t need one. Although certain members of Obama’s Cabinet have not heard from the president after serving two years into his administration, Trumka recently boasted: “I’m at the White House a couple times a week. Two, three times a week. I have conversations everyday with someone in the White House or in the administration. Everyday.”
Trumka is not the only union thug with a seat at the table.
Joseph T. Hansen helps Trumka present the Labor Left’s views. Hansen is president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) and chairman of Change to Win, the AFL-CIO’s major union rival (the one formed by SEIU). Like Trumka, Hansen is already a frequent presidential advisor. Hansen serves as a member of Obama’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. Hansen, too, helped elect Obama. UFCW’s political action committee, United Food & Commercial Workers International Union Active Ballot Club, spent $673,309 on Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and $3.5 million on Democratic candidates in 2008 and 2010….
How to Put America Back to Work
Our regular contributor, Tom W. Pauken, provided this testimony in writing to the Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Improving Efforts to Help Unemployed Americans Find jobs on February 11, 2011. As chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, Pauken has played a pivotal role in a state that has weathered the Great Recession better than most and provides those lessons to the rest of the country. – Ed.
by Tom W. Pauken
Texas has an important story to tell and because I believe our experience can help policymakers here and in other states address the problem of unemployment.
Texas has weathered the current recession better than any other large state. While we have not been immune to its effects, consider these numbers….
Obama Gives Big Labor Millions — of Your Dollars
Warner Todd Huston, Canada Free Press
The government is over spent. This single fact is beyond dispute. Even Democrats say so. We have but to recall that Democrat after Democrat attempted to run for office this last election by claiming fealty to small government, cost cutting, and lower spending. So with all this small government/low spending fever sweeping the political classes, what does Barack Obama do? He forces policies on federal building projects that inflates costs by the millions. And why would he do this? As a payoff to unions that gave him millions in campaign contributions, of course.
The latest bloated price tag for a federal project is that of the Lafayette Federal Building in Washington, D.C., a project that has seen costs rise at least $3.3 million thanks to Obama’s payoffs to unions. That’s right in a day when we are drowning in government overspending, Obama is making sure costs rise, not insuring that they fall.
Barack Obama’s political tin ear is nowhere better revealed than in his constant payoffs to Big Labor. One of Obama’s very first actions, for instance, was to write an Executive Order that forced all government building projects to follow union marching orders in pay scale, work rules, and pension payouts by imposing Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) on all of them.
In February of 2009 Obama issued EO 13502, headlined, “Use of project labor agreements for federal construction projects.” This order forced all construction projects to adhere to union rules even if the companies and workers involved were not members of unions….
New Fed Study: Porkulus Created Zero Net Jobs?
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
Via Reason, the economists at e21 take a long look at a new study by Daniel Wilson at the San Francisco Fed on the effect on employment from the Obama administration’s stimulus plan, which indicates that the impact was a lot less than advertised. Instead of adding two million jobs to the economy, the Fed finds that any new jobs added had disappeared by August of this year (via The American Thinker):
It is difficult to properly calculate the effects of the 2009 ARRA bill, as it was a nation-wide program. Though employment and growth failed to respond to ARRA as the Administration had suggested, fiscal stimulus advocates have argued that employment levels would have been lower still without the program.
Wilson’s study makes an important contribution to this debate by focusing on state-by-state comparisons. A large portion of stimulus funding at the state level was based on criteria that were entirely independent of the economic situation that states faced. For example, the number of existing highway miles was used to calculate additional transportation spending.
The study uses this resulting variation in state-level stimulus funding to determine what impact ARRA funding had on employment — including both the direct impact of workers hired to complete planned projects, as well as any broader spillover effects resulting from greater government spending. Administration economists have repeatedly emphasized the importance of this indirect employment growth in driving economic recovery.
The results suggest that though the program did result in 2 million jobs “created or saved” by March 2010, net job creation was statistically indistinguishable from zero by August of this year. Taken at face value, this would suggest that the stimulus program (with an overall cost of $814 billion) worked only to generate temporary jobs at a cost of over $400,000 per worker. Even if the stimulus had in fact generated this level of employment as a durable outcome, it would still have been an extremely expensive way to generate employment.
Well, all anyone needed to do was look at unemployment over the last 19 months to figure that much out. We have had 19 months of joblessness at 9% or higher, a record in the post-WWII era, despite the administration’s insistence that the outlay would curtail the extension of unemployment. That number is lower than it should be, thanks to a generational low in the workforce-to-population ratio, too. The number of the unemployed and discouraged workers didn’t drop; in fact, those numbers have grown since Porkulus.
The rebuttal from the White House has been to argue the counterfactual. Just imagine, they say, if we hadn’t spend $800 billion in stimulus! The analysis by e21 addresses that argument as well….
Biden Says Stimulus Fraud at “Surprisingly Low Level”
Judicial Watch
In yet another delusional assessment of the administration’s disastrous stimulus program Vice President Joe Biden claims that fraud and abuse has been kept “to a surprisingly low level” thanks to rigorous oversight.
The laughable estimate comes just a few months after Biden made a fool of himself touting a scandal-plagued welfare program to make low-income houses energy efficient as an example of success in stimulus spending…
Biden conveniently omitted reality (9.6% unemployment rate) by failing to mention that tens of billions of dollars have gone to wasteful projects, including international ant research, studying why monkeys react negatively to inequity, a “tunnel to nowhere” in Pennsylvania and a $3 million turtle crossing in Florida, to name a few. At least $20 million has been spent on road signs declaring that the stimulus is “putting Americans back to work” and tens of millions more on a number of other frivolous projects that have been documented in several different reports.
Cartoon of the Day: Obama Rescues the Trapped Economy
