Changing Washington

Or Rather Lying and Fear Mongering

Obama is putting on a full court press to sell this economic stimulus bill, but he is not winning me over. In face he is losing ground with me not only for the bill, but to some significant degree for his presidency.

For one thing, he is lying to me, and he promised not to do that. He says that the portion of the bill that provides money to the states prevents the states from having to lay people off. I don’t doubt that part, but how is that simulative? When asked that he replies, “When people do not lose their jobs that stimulates the economy.” No, that keeps the economy from getting smaller, so giving money to the states is a preventive measure, not a simulative one and the President knows that. He is smarter than I am and knows the difference between prevention and stimulation. He is doing some “harmless political lying” in order to sell his bill. But he promised he would tell us the truth.

When I hear him shoveling horse dung on one part of this pile of junk, I am no longer willing to believe anything he says about this damned thing. If he has to lie about it, then even he knows it is a bad bill.

Now I find out that only projects that are ready to begin within 90 days qualify for money under the infrastructure portion of the bill, and it uses as an example such things as road resurfacing. As I said yesterday, small thinking writ large. Yes, these small projects will provide jobs, but only for a limited time, and they leave no lasting legacy, they provide no long term benefit to the coming generations whose money is being spent.

It’s like a parent saying to it’s children, “I have no money so I’m taking yours. No, you get nothing for it, I’m using it for my own current needs. No,
I don’t know how you’re going to manage, that’s your problem.”

As opposed to "I'm taking some of your money, and I'm using it to build a home which I will leave to you in the future and which you will live in."

Obama keeps saying that the bill needs to be “big enough to get the job done” as if size alone mattered. If all we needed was big, we could do that by piling up a trillion dollars on the National Mall and setting fire to it. That would be “big, targeted and temporary,” but it would not help the economy very much.

I don’t know about you, but I got fed up with fear mongering under the Bush Administration and I am really offended to be getting the same thing fed to me by Barack Obama.

Obama is raising panic over the economy to sell his economic bill and prove that he has bigger balls than Congress. I cringe when I hear him screech about the impending loss of “millions of jobs if we fail to act today” and how “crisis will turn into catastrophe” if we delay. I cringe, not because he is successfully inducing the fear that he seeks to induce, but because I hear in him echoes of the administration that I thought we were finally done with.

Henry Paulson, speaking for Bush, warned of dire consequences if his bailout pill was not passed within days. The toxic assets that he insisted must be bought were not bought and the world did not end with the massive collapse of banks that he predicted. Now we have Obama warning of dire consequences if his bill is not passed within days.

Bush: “You are all about to die in a mushroom cloud.”
Bush: “Terrorists are going to walk the streets of America.”
Paulson: “Banks are about to collapse and there will be a depression.”
Obama: “Millions of jobs will be lost and we will have a depression.”
Obama: “Crisis will turn into catastrophe” if we fail to act immediately.

The question was asked during Obama’s presidential campaign when he promised to change Washington: would he actually accomplish that or would Washington change him?

We know the answer, and it only took two weeks.