Obama's Lame Revisionist History for his sorry Economic plans ....

I mean, how stupid does he think we are ....

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzEwOWNiMWY4ZDMyOGIzMDQxNDI5YzdlNmFmZTUwMDg=

He defines Porkulus as being conceived simply to stop the economy's "free fall".

"The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall."

Pathetic. Just pathetic.

Obama's Op-Ed, Annotated [Stephen Spruiell]

President Obama has an op-ed in the Washington Post today defending the stimulus package. Let's take a look under the hood:

Nearly six months ago, my administration took office amid the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. At the time, we were losing, on average, 700,000 jobs a month. And many feared that our financial system was on the verge of collapse.

Wait a minute. At a press conference a few weeks ago, when confronted with the disparity between his administration's projected unemployment figures under the stimulus (8 percent) and the real unemployment figures (9.7 percent), Obama said, “Keep in mind the stimulus package was the first thing we did... If you recall, it was only significantly later that we suddenly get a report that the economy had tanked.”

So Obama took office amid the most severe downturn since the Great Depression, at a time when the country was hemorrhaging jobs and the financial system was on the brink of collapse. He said as much a week before signing the stimulus into law. But don't blame him for overselling the impact the stimulus would have — his administration was totally blindsided by a sudden report that the economy had tanked!

The swift and aggressive action we took in those first few months has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink. We took steps to restart lending to families and businesses, stabilize our major financial institutions, and help homeowners stay in their homes and pay their mortgages.

Let's examine that phrase, "swift and aggressive action." For Treasury Secretary, Obama rammed a tax cheat through the confirmation process by claiming he was the only man who could do the job. Secretary Geithner then proceeded to unveil a plan to save the banking system that inspired so little confidence, the Dow fell 300 points upon its announcement. Geithner's Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy troubled assets from banks has failed to launch, primarily because the Financial Accounting Standards Board loosened mark-to-market accounting rules, thus enabling banks to avoid write-downs on their toxic mortgage-backed securities. Now that banks can hold those assets without booking losses, they have little incentive to sell them at a discount to the P-PIP. With P-PIP looking increasingly like a dud, the adminitration's only real plan to deal with crippled banks is to cross its fingers and hope the economy grows fast enough to enable them to recover on their own.

Nor has Obama's Making Home Affordable plan been any great success, as Joe Nocera explained in Friday's NYT (best summed up by the phrase "drop in the bucket"). As NRO's editors pointed out when the plan was announced, "The relatively small group of in-deep but creditworthy homeowners who could be helped by Obama’s plan already are positioned to refinance at better rates, or to move from variable-rate loans to low-drama fixed-rate mortgages, without a $475 billion government intervention." That's $75 billion for the program and $400 billion to shore up Fannie and Freddie, the real beneficiaries of the deal.

On the other hand, Obama did move swiftly and aggressively to sign the Lilly Ledbetter act, exposing companies to spurious equal-pay lawsuits; to roll back Clinton-era welfare reforms; to use TARP funds to shield the UAW from the full fallout of the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, and so on. Maybe that's what he meant.

We also passed the most sweeping economic recovery plan in our nation's history.

True, if by "sweeping" you mean "costly."

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall.

This is just a terrible metaphor. Can we decide whether the economy a sick patient or a free-falling object? And how does one give a free-falling object a "boost"?

Keep reading this post . . .