Obama's Mission Accomplished!

Mission accomplished! The economy is fixed! The heavy lifting is over. According to Barack Obama, we should be thanking him. Happy days are here again. It’s Recovery Summer!

Except that, we’re still losing jobs. Just last month, about ten times as many people quit trying to find work as actually found jobs. When the under employed and the discouraged are counted, the real unemployment rate is about 17%

In an honest world, Barack Obama’s declaration of Recovery Summer would earn at least as much derision as was heaped on his predecessor for the “Mission Accomplished” banner. In truth, it should serve as an even greater albatross around Obama’s neck because the Recovery Summer meme came straight from the White House, while the Mission Accomplished banner was raised by the crew of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln proclaiming that they had completed their assigned task and were returning home.

Let’s review all the claims that have been made for Obamanomics.

First, there were to be about 6 million jobs created or saved. Considering that the US has suffered a net loss of at least 4 million jobs, we are expected to believe that without the stimulus package, we would have lost about 10 million jobs. To support this claim, the Obama administration generated reams of data on jobs created or saved, but when the news media perused it, even CBS’s Katie Couric found it laughable. And when the Obamatons tried to break down the numbers by congressional district, they ended up claiming job growth in about twice as many congressional districts as the United States Constitution allows.

Of course there’s no way to know what alternative reality would have descended from an economic program that simply liberated the economy rather than imposing central planning on it. I can claim that without the stimulus plan, the economy would have created 50 million new jobs on its own and such a claim deserves just as much credibility as any other untestable prediction.

On the one year anniversary of the stimulus bill’s passage, Vice President Joe Biden declared that American taxpayers had “gotten their money’s worth.”

“I don't think they realize it" Biden said, but, "we've only been halfway through the act." He declared that the stimulus had been carefully crafted and calibrated and was performing exactly as it was designed to.

As recently as June 2, 2010, Joe Biden was declaring the stimulus “an absolute success!”

"An absolute success," he told Charlie Rose. "We will create over 3.5 million or save over 3.5 million jobs before this is over."

Although, it was barely six weeks later on ABC’s This Week with Jake Tapper that he blamed the stimulus’s failure on Republicans. “There’s a lot of people at the time argued it was too small,” he said. “A lot of people in our administration…even some Republican economists and some Nobel laureates like Paul Krugman, who continues to argue it was too small.”

“But, you know, there was a reality. In order to get what we got passed, we had to find Republican votes. And we found three. And we finally got it passed.” Biden said.

Nancy Pelosi claimed that passage of ObamaCare would create 4 million jobs on its own and that 400,000 of those jobs would appear almost immediately. I guess that depends upon how you define immediately.

This past spring, Democrats were predicting that Barack Obama would create more jobs in 2010 than Bush did during his entire two terms in office. It’s not looking that way.

So sadly, Recovery Summer has given way to yet another “Blame Bush” autumn. And who can blame them? With every economic report providing “surprisingly” bad data, the Democrats have to return to the only remotely original campaign theme they’ve come up with in the last half century. Accusations of racism have lost their sting as Democrats finally maxed out their race card. Accusations of racism are so integrated into Democrat thinking that they can’t even resist using it in their foreign policy. Obama actually accused Al Qaida of racism. And even though they still employ that tired old scare tactic about Republicans wanting to destroy Social Security, the only mileage that strategy has left is as fodder for late night talk show comedians.

Blame Bush it is.

Meanwhile, Germany implemented a Reaganesque austerity program and is enjoying 9 percent annual growth. How do you say “recovery summer” in German?