Obama's spending spree
Last Updated: 4:01 AM, August 30, 2010
Posted: August 30, 2010
It was an $800 billion misadventure that will be wreaking havoc on the econ omy for years to come.
No, not the war in Iraq, where an American combat-troop presence officially comes to an end tomorrow.
We're talking about President Obama's economic-stimulus program.
Remember the stimulus? The miracle cure Obama said would boost the economy and save millions of jobs?
Well, the president's panacea turned out to be an $862 billion bottle of snake oil -- and it cost $100 billion more than the entire Iraq campaign to date.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the total Iraq tab comes to $709 billion this month, a costly engagement in terms of treasure.
But as Randall Hoven points out on the American Thinker Web site and in the nearby chart, the war made up just 3.2 percent of federal spending while the fight raged. Leave it to the feds to make $700 billion look like a drop in the ocean.
And it accounts for less than 15 percent of the overall deficit since it began in 2003.
In fact, the war is to blame for a majority of the deficit only in 2007, when the US launched its surge, a brilliant success that changed the war. (If only all federal spending were as effective.)
Meanwhile, despite assurances that the stimulus would be "timely, targeted and temporary," Americans will be paying for some of it well into 2019.
Even with that vast, taxpayer-funded infusion, the economy remains stagnant, with unemployment pushing hard against 10 percent.
As Bush adviser Lawrence Lindsey wrote, "the actual performance of the economy is almost exactly what [Obama White House advisers] said would happen if we had done nothing."
But the beat goes on, and some of the more popular stimulus programs look likely to be made permanent -- in which case, the "temporary" fix could end up costing more than $3.2 trillion.
That's big bucks.
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