House of Eratosthenes

Democrats have lambasted Republicans for years for believing in “Voodoo economics.”

Well, the evidence is mounting that economic superstition is alive and well in the nation’s political circles, though it has nothing to do with a fondness for tax cuts. It’s instead the crazy belief that the government can spend its way to prosperity for the rest of us. Underscoring this conclusion, the Ways and Means Committee in the new GOP-majority House released a report titled “It’s Official: On Unemployment and Jobs, Democrats’ 2009 Stimulus Was a Huge Failure.”

The Ways and Means report provides a number of striking reminders about the predictions the White House made in January 2009 while urging the passage of their $814 billion Keynesian spending bill. By January 2011, the stimulus bill was supposed to have lowered the unemployment rate to 7 percent. It now stands at 9.4 percent, and the report notes that “the unemployment rate would be 11.3 percent if it included all the ‘invisible unemployed’ — American workers who have simply given up looking for work.” The report also claimed that the stimulus would create 3.7 million jobs by now, for a total of 137.6 million jobs in the American economy. Currently, there are 130.7 million jobs. Since passage of the stimulus, 47 of the 50 states have lost jobs; overall, the private sector has seen 1.8 million jobs disappear.

I’d like to know what the rebuttal is, aside from the standard change-the-subject.

Thank goodness we did this or else even more jobs would’ve been lost?

The GOP-led Ways and Means committee is making it all up?

You’re-a-racist?

Seriously, I would like to know how they plan to respond to this. Let us review: The economy is collapsing because of FaPoBuAd (failed policies of the Bush administration) so we have to stimulate it to keep it from entirely bottoming out…the taxpayers have to give us all this money so we can check out these key ways we can stimulate the economy. And oh my goodness, it turns out to be a matter of giving a billion dollars at a time to our friends! That, and putting all of the nation’s interconnecting traffic thoroughfares under construction at the same time. Yeah, that’s a great way to stimulate the economy.

If you need to get something from Folsom to Auburn or vice-versa in order to run your business — the road you would be using has been torn to shreds for just shy of about two years now, thanks to Obama. There’s really no practical way around it. My girlfriend works in Roseville, and it affects her. Every time I lend her an assist I can’t help myself, that’s where I say “if I ever did like Obama, this, right here, all by itself, would be where I change my mind.” The economy is barely treading water…so…let’s tear up all the roads! It’s a Fish-Called-Wanda situation, calling it stupid would be an insult to stupid people.

And now the facts are in and they say it didn’t work. Well, duh. How on earth could it.

But has there ever been an oxygen-breathing creature on all of Creation, less capable of learning from experience than the dedicated Keynesian?

Update 1/25/11: Aw, darnit all, we didn’t even get our road problem fixed with this boondoggle.

Oh man, when my Dad and I went to Sturgis last August, we passed by, and through, an endless succession of “road work”, and this was about 6 states…. And we didn’t come back the way we went. Even Yellowstone wasn’t unscathed…. Funny enough, only Oregon didn’t have any, that I recall.
- KG | 01/24/2011 @ 10:40
How will they respond to it?

They won’t. The willful ignorance of the modern liberal is well-nigh invincible. If Kos or Keef Olbermann don’t mention it (well, I guess not so much Keef anymore), it just didn’t happen as far as they’re concerned. They’ll be all “Ways and Means report? What Ways and Means report?” And then change the subject, or accuse us of lying, or of racism, etc. if we persist.

I have fun conversations like this with liberal coworkers all the time. For instance, there’s that leftist canard that Scalia said he’d vote against Brown v. Board of Education. I point out that what the good justice actually said was that it was the morally right decision but based on faulty judicial reasoning, and that he’d vote against Plessy v. Ferguson…. you know, against the whole “separate but equal” thing.

Google’s just full of all kinds of interesting stuff, I tell them.

One favorite party trick for annoying the hell out of liberals is to point out that they know nothing whatsoever about our side. For instance, I asked somebody railing against Glenn Beck what their beef was with Hayek, and he replied, “who?” It’s classic, I tell them — I know exactly what the hive-mind is thinking on any given day, since all I have to do is watch ABC or read Kos and it’s all there. I can make the case for their programs better than they can, given that I’m familiar with both basic history and basic economics. But they know nothing — zip, nada, zero– about anything we think or read or say. For all they piss and moan about him, they couldn’t pick Glenn Beck out of a police lineup if their lives depended on it.

For them to respond, I guess I’m getting at, they’d first have to be aware. And that would mean fielding a question from a media member. And that’s gonna happen about six years after hell freezes over….
- Severian | 01/24/2011 @ 14:35
Necessity is the mother of invention. And they’ve had no necessity to say those magic words, “I think X, but I can understand how a reasonable person might think not-X.” Since the need has not arisen, they have no ability to do this.

Their arguments are for those I have begun to refer to as the hyper-credulous, those who, once told a certain thing is so, believe it absolutely uncritically without even trace quantities of reservation. And so their idea of “engaging arguments” is to simply figure out if they like the argument or not, and react accordingly.
- mkfreeberg | 01/24/2011 @ 14:43
Well said.

And I really will get around to making my own blog someday soon, instead of just noodling around in the comments of yours.
- Severian | 01/24/2011 @ 15:05

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It Is Now, Officially, a Huge FailureMonday, January 24th, 2011

It Is Now, Officially, a Huge Failure
Monday, January 24th, 2011