American Thinker | Ed Lasky | Feb. 3, 2009
The reviews are in and Barack Obama seems to have laid a big fat egg — on Wall Street anyway. In all fairness, the President cannot be held responsible for all the turmoil afflicting the stock market and the American economy. The crisis did precede him. But we were promised that an Obama presidency would restore our economy; the campaign was all about hope and change. Change is happening but not the hope. How do we know this?
Wall Street and businesses look ahead-stock prices reflect the future value of companies; businesses hire to prepare for the future. Conversely, when stock prices collapse (the Dow is down nearly 9% since the New Year began, the S&P 500 about 8.6%) and companies lay off workers (almost 600,000 and counting since Barack Obama won in November), hope is just not happening. It is just a word, after all.
Why?
I won’t linger over the policies being promoted that send a clear message: free enterprise is on the endangered list. But a brief recap might help to explain why I have this prognosis.
The “stimulus” bill will not stimulate the economy. Very few of the dollars being spent (borrowed — to be paid back by us and our descendants ‘til kingdom come) will go towards infrastructure spending or the types of targeted measures that help business grow and hire workers. Instead, Nancy Pelosi and company have larded up the bill to please a swath of Democratic special interest groups, including members of a politically powerful union with close ties to Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.
The bill is, as Ben Stein characterizes it, an exercise in the “politics of payoff”:
The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the House of Representatives to pass a bill spending $820 billion – or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.
Only 10 percent of the “stimulus” to be spent on 2009.
Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ (or both) members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions or other Democrat-controlled
There has been pork-barrel politics since there has been politics, but the scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before — and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.
Very few dollars will go towards stimulus as it is commonly understood, though it was clever of the Democrats to use that metaphor. It sounds more palatable than, perhaps, America’s Largest Earmark Bill Ever, or the Most Generous Welfare Relief Bill Ever.
But, Americans aren’t buying it; support for it is falling (58 percent of the American people now oppose the package) as more of those devilish details come to light (sexually transmitted disease prevention, for example); 50 million dollars for the National Endowment of the Arts; 2 billion dollars for the national parks that may be a payoff to the son of a powerful Democratic Congressman on the Appropriations Committee whose company will benefit from all that green; 150 million to the politicos favorite museum, the Smithsonian; 400 million for global warming research; 2.4 billion dollars for carbon capture projects; 650 million for digital TV conversion coupons; Hollywood, which is doing fairly well these days, even gets a big goodie, presumably as a reward for all those campaign dollars sent the way of the Democrats ). ACORN, which is close to Barack Obama and many other Democrats, and tarnished by sit ins and voter fraud, looks to be a winner.
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