Straight from the mouth of the man charged with appropriating Stimulus funds overseeing Stimulus fund distribution, VP Joe Biden:
“No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be.”
“Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed.”
No kidding. Biden was forced to make that embarrassing admission Sunday on Meet The Press, when David Gregory began hammering him about the fact that — even with the Stimulus in place — unemployment has now exceeded the level that President Obama warned we could reach if we “did nothing” and failed to pass the Stimulus.
Wow. Nearly $1 trillion dollars worth of pork-laden government spending turns out to have been worse than doing “nothing.” Knock me over with a feather. I’m sure nobody saw that one coming.
Of course Biden tried to cover for the Obama Administration by reeling off a list of all the jobs that the Stimulus supposedly “saved or created” (a claim which, of course, can neither be conclusively proven or refuted) as well as once again making the fairy-tale prediction that 600,000 jobs will be “saved or created” by the Stimulus bill within the next 100 days. Biden also tried to cushion the Obama Administration’s massive deficits by claiming that the Bush Administration wasn’t “honest” about spending (since items like funding for the Iraq war and the Medicare prescription drug program were included in spending bills, not in the Federal budget) and declaring that the Obama Administration had actually produced “the first honest budget you or anybody’s seen in eight years.”
One can argue about the details of the Bush Administration’s budgets (conservatives certainly spent the last eight years doing so) but to claim that the Obama Administration has been “honest” with respect to the cost of its massive government expansions, or how we will realistically be able to pay for them, is nothing but pure chutzpa.
All of which makes me wonder — how many times will Obama’s various czars and egghead experts “guess wrong” with respect to health care, energy policy, economics, environmental policy, and foreign policy? The truth is, no matter how often intellectuals congratulate themselves because of how clever they think they are, they still manage to “guess wrong” an alarming amount of the time. That’s why free nations with market-based economies have always outperformed nations under single-party rule with centrally-planned economies.
That ought to be worth considering, come Election Day 2010.
