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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mph who wrote (317823)	7/31/2009 2:21:39 PM
From: KLP	1 Recommendation Respond to of 793886

President Obama’s One Successful Stimulus Idea Goes Bankrupt Published by AJStrata at 8:34 am under Measuring The Recovery strata-sphere.com I am not a fan of the “Cash for Clunkers” government giveaway. We all should have been given the opportunity to save our tax money and apply it to buying a new car. The fact only people with older or larger cars got the hand out is another classic case of government playing favorites, which I believe is unconstitutional. In any event, this unconstitutional idea turned out to be the only successful idea the Obama administration had for stimulating the car market and economy because it has already gone bankrupt due to its own success: The Obama administration is telling lawmakers that its much-touted “cash-for-clunkers” program is already running out of money, according to three Senate aides familiar with the discussions. The program — aimed at giving at boost to the U.S. auto industry — was supposed to expire at the end of October. But in the one week since it took effect, it appears to have run dry of the $1 billion allocated to it, aides said Thursday. The Obama administration had told senators that the program would be suspended at midnight Thursday, aides said, but a White House official told POLITICO that the administration is “working tonight to assess the situation facing what is obviously an incredibly popular program. Auto dealers and consumers should have confidence that all valid CARS transactions that have taken place to-date will be honored.” Why was this market driven stimulus given such a small, insignificant place in a $787,000 billion stimulus package (FYI - thats .00013%)? Because the stimulus package is a liberal disaster built on the idiotic premise that government spending, not the free market, can create jobs and pull us out of this Great Recession. Where would the auto industry and its workers be today if this plan had some serious funding to it? Where would this economy be today if the rebate was a tax rebate for all Americans? It would be in a lot better shape. Instead we got a failed liberal fairy tale about the magical powers of a sluggish and constipated federal bureaucracy riding to the rescue. Think about this. The federal spending for job creation has not even really started, it has spent less the 1% of the money that was supposed to go to job creation 5 months after it was enacted. And many of those jobs are a joke: How much are politicians straining to convince people that the government is stimulating the economy? In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program’s first three months.But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one work week. After that, those workers were effectively back unemployed, according to an Associated Press analysis of state spending and hiring data. By the state’s accounting, a job is a job, whether it lasts three hours, three days, three months, or a lifetime. But the miniscule part of the stimulus plan which is market driven runs through its budget in ONE DAMN WEEK! Hello! Is there anybody in DC paying attention! Update: More bad economic and jobs news, something we will be getting a lot of through the end of this summer of ‘09: More than 90 percent of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas saw their unemployment rates climb in June from the previous month. … Unemployment rates rose from May to June in 348 of more than 370 metro areas, according to an Associated Press analysis of Labor Department data released Wednesday. … The Labor Department does not provide seasonally adjusted metro area unemployment data. It does adjust the national unemployment rate for seasonal factors. The U.S. jobless rate, which hit 9.5 percent in June, is expected to rise to 9.7 percent when the department reports the July rate next week. We are spending ourselves into $1.85 trillion worth of debt this year (see chart below), yet the one successful program was 185,000th of that massive, generational debt. DC needs to be cleaned out, top to bottom, left to right. Update: Allah Pundit over at Hot Air has similar thoughts about the teaching moment here. Allah Pundit also links to a way to game the system and get that Corvette of your dreams!