Recession Tea Leaves 'Misread'

by Donald Lambro - July 9th, 2009 - Washington Times

The Obama administration's latest lame excuse for its failed stimulus spending plan is that it underestimated the severity of the recession.

"We misread how bad the economy was," Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

The White House has been coming up with a lot of half-baked reasons why the president's massive $800 billion plan has not made a dent in the mushrooming unemployment rate, but this was a beaut.

The Magic Marxist Messiah wants you to believe that his Keynesian stimulus failure is because he did not think things were as bad as they are. He thought it was going to be easy to stop the recession. He promised that unemployment would not go over 8% at the time he insisted the stimulus had to be passed.

So why was he claiming then the economy was a disaster equal to the great depression? Considering the stimulus last year under Bush, the Bush TARP bailout, the Obama TARP bailout, the Bush auto bailout, the Obama auto bailout, the Obama stimulus, the Obama budget that quadrupled Bush's deficits (which by the way Obama criticized and insisted were useless), what exactly does this economically challenged amateur think we should do? It is clear to anyone but an idiot that it was not in fact as bad then as he said it was. To claim now it was worse than he thought requires him to explain the numbers that would support this contention. And he can't. It wasn't his opinion on the economy that was wrong. It is his solution to fix it.

One thing is clear - he thinks he can say anything that he wants and we are too stupid to remember what he said.

The reality is that Friedman was right. Keynesian stimulus does not work. FDR tried it. It didn't work. LBJ tried it. It didn't work. Carter tried it. It didn't work. Now Obama is trying it. It isn't working. However Obama now wants us to believe that it isn't his fault. The fault is really George W. Bush because the recession that started last year is worse than Obama thought.

If you believe that, you are as stupid as Obama thinks you are.