FreedomWorks: Obama’s Economic Plan Stimu-less

Washington, DC – “Save and create” is the catch phrase of the hour. The Obama administration has continually used it as leverage against mounting new jobless data that further indicates Obama’s $787 billion debt stimulus plan has produced a lot of debt, but not a lot of jobs.

In January President Obama and his economic team promised that if the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 passed, that unemployment would peak at 8 percent and that his recovery plan would “save or create three to four million jobs.”

The unemployment rate currently sits at 9.4 percent and many economists believe unemployment will continue to rise into double digits later this year. While it is impossible to determine how many jobs have been ‘saved or created’ by the debt stimulus plan, a staggering 1.6 million jobs have been lost since the stimulus package was set in motion.

In response to rising public frustration, President Obama was back on the stimulus campaign trail. His repackaged deal—what merely amounts to further deficit-spending—promises to “save or create” an additional 600,000 jobs this summer.

FreedomWorks contends that this continued advocacy of the stimulus plan distorts economic recovery and heaps a catastrophic debt burden on future taxpayers. The plan stimulates the government, not the private sector.

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe observed:

“There can be no better way to categorize the Obama economic recovery plan than through the use of the Broken Window Fallacy, where it is argued that breaking windows is good for the economy by creating jobs for the repair man, while not counting how the  resources used for window repair could be more efficiently used.  The administration can conjure up all the guesstimates it needs to soothe over public opinion, but the president is a far cry from making good on his promises of ‘saving or creating’ jobs. Unless, of course, you’re only concerned about the immediate consequences, or what Hazlitt and Bastiat referred to as the seen. That is what the administration hopes, and is nothing short of a sham with the bill falling directly on the backs of future generations.”