WhatFinger


$3 trillion of debt-bloating, economy-killing, spread-the-poverty around Keynesian economics once again proved itself to be a colossal failure

Completely Expectable ‘Unexpectedness’



Last Friday, Americans revisited two of the most depressingly recurring themes they have been forced to endure for almost three years. First, $3 trillion of debt-bloating, economy-killing, spread-the-poverty around Keynesian economics once again proved itself to be a colossal failure. Second, economists who use the word "unexpected" to describe that which is painfully obvious to everyone else have once again proven they are unrelentingly clueless. The unemployment rate? "Unexpectedly" up to 9.2 percent. Job creation? 18,000, "uber-unexpectedly" below the prediction of 90,000.

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But it gets "better." Unexpectedly, the April and May job figures had to be "revised." 44,000 less jobs were created than previously reported. Some people, as in those not lined up at the Obama Kool-aid concession, might characterize such revisionism as "lying." Some people, such as those who can see through the despicable media charade protecting our re-distributionist, Marxist-in-Chief, might be able to put two and two together and come up with four, as in re-electing the worst president in modern history in 2012, and giving him four more years to wreak his economic mayhem, would just about kill this country. Even the most whorish # in the media firmament can't paste a happy face over this debacle. And the "Blame Bush" excuse, or it's subtler version, "this recession was far deeper than we anticipated," has, much like the race card, been maxed out. Never before has the most left-handed compliment ever bestowed on a sitting president, as in Mr. Obama is "leading from behind," been more obvious or more apropos. If there were a ever bigger scam than "hope and change" perpetrated on a largely see no evil public who elected, as writer Ben Stein has put it, a "pig in a poke" in 2008, it is hard to imagine what it was. The saddest part of this whole drama? Absent a miracle, nothing will change. The president who has rung up the two years of deficit spending unmatched anywhere in the entire history of the planet, the man who produced a budget so appalling it was defeated 97-0 in the Senate, the man whose entire economic arsenal consists of playing one group of Americans off another, has no Plan B. The deficit reduction talk? Utter bull-hockey. This president just upped the ante to $4 trillion in spending cuts--over a dozen years. For those victims of an Atlanta school system which changed the answers on tests to pass failing kids, that's $300 billion per year. Perspective? If you multiply that number by five, you get the $1.5 trillion that this government borrowed this year alone. Want a recipe for disaster? Try this: combine unconscionable government spending with the dog known as ObamaCare. Mix in a FinReg bill that is just as pernicious if not more so, even as it fails to regulate the twin titans of our economic disaster, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Add the second highest corporate tax rate in the world at 35 percent to the mix, the one which everyone but the class-warfare know-nothings understand is passed down directly to the consumer. Combine all of the above with the currency debasement known as QE2 which has driven up the price of everything. What do you get? A zero-sum economic pie covered with two scoops of double-dip recession ice cream. And for those of you who want spread the blame equally between the parties, understand this: Republicans have proposed a budget for this year and the next. Democrats have proposed nothing. Republicans have proposed fixes for entitlements. Democrats have proposed nothing. Republicans have proposed reforming the tax system. Democrats have proposed nothing. Why? Because something, with a healthy dollop of media assistance, can be demagogued to death, detail after media-skewed detail. Nothing? Nothing is nothing. On Friday, in yet another speech bordering on insanity, the president called for "rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our infrastructure," in order to "put back to work right now some of those construction workers that lost their jobs when the housing market went bust." Only people afflicted with progressive ideology or Alzheimers could fail to see that this is nothing more than this president's determination to re-package the same "shovel ready" spending binge that was a demonstrable failure. The same shovel-ready b.s. the president himself admitted was b.s. last October. Yet he was right on the money with one part of his speech when he said, "we still have a big hole to fill." He's absolutely right. And nowhere is that hole bigger than in the Oval Office. Sadly, for those of us who genuinely understood what this president meant when, shortly before the 2008 election he said, "we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," none of what's happened is unexpected.


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Arnold Ahlert -- Bio and Archives

Arnold Ahlert was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years.


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