In North Carolina yesterday, meeting with the Council on Jobs and Competiveness, Barack Obama was questioned about the fact that government bureaucracy invariably delays projects and even oftentimes puts a stop to them altogether, to which Obama jokingly replied:
“Shovel-ready was not as — uh — shovel-ready as we expected.”
This clever remark got some pretty good laughs, and I, for one, find it very amusing indeed that these left-wing elitist, among whom Barack Obama is top of the heap, regard their deadly economic philosophy as a kind of joke, which I suppose in one sense it actually is: a complete joke, as a matter of fact, a joke of staggering proportions, a joke about as funny as a cry for help — a joke, in short, that’s nearly as laughable as Obama’s boast that he now “has a better plane” than three years ago, and that he now travels “with a bigger entourage,” while the rest of us pay the price for it.
I imagine, though, that the people who have been out of work for months on end are not laughing nearly as hard as Obama and his clownish administration.
Recall also Barack Obama telling us that his so-called Stimulus had to be passed before it was read because “it would provide for hundreds of thousands of shovel-ready projects that will bring our unemployment rate below 8 percent.”
And yet $821 billion later: “Unemployment is now 25 percent higher than when [Obama] took office, the deficit is 35 percent higher, and gas prices have more than doubled”(source).
Moreover:
“Obama’s stimulus included $28 billion in new highway money, which he said would ‘create or save’ 150,000 jobs by the end of 2010. These are the quintessential ‘shovel-ready’ jobs that Obama jokes turned out to be not so shovel ready.”
From Investors Business Daily:
A new study by economists Timothy Conley of the University of Western Ontario and Bill Dupor of Ohio State found that despite the influx of all that federal money, highway construction jobs actually plunged by nearly 70,000 between 2008 and 2010.
As these authors explain, many states simply took the free federal money and shifted their own highway funds to meet other needs. Examples:
Texas got $700 million in highway stimulus funds last year, but spent $560 million less on its roads in 2010 than it did in 2009.
New York’s highway spending was basically unchanged between 2009 and 2010, despite getting $522 million more in federal highway bucks.
Michigan boosted its highway spending just $17.4 million, far below the $189 million extra the feds handed the state for highway improvements.
And quoting Neal Boortz:
When others, like yours truly, were telling you that MORE government spending on “shovel-ready” projects were not going to be the way to save this nation and grow our economy, you passed the gargantuan bill, continued to pass other bills (like ObamaCare) that increased the size of government and then refused to do anything to actually tackle our entitlement crisis.
According to government figures: When you add up all of the money that we owe in order to cover our future liabilities in entitlements, our country is now in worse financial shape than Greece. Greece! While Obama has nearly doubled our debt to $14.3 trillion, that doesn’t even compare to the $50 trillion that we owe when you include Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Funniest of all, though — at least in my opinion — is the fact that Barack Obama was voted into power by people who, like Obama himself, have no understanding of economics whatsoever but chose him simply because it was the hip trendy thing to do.
Now that’s what I call a hilarious joke.
