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Larry Summers has a new tool for assessing the economy and the success or failure of Obama's stimulus plan (which formerly Obama sold us as "an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that will immediately jumpstart job creation and long-term growth."
Emphasis added because the President now says he never promised us a rose garden OR anything about 'immediate' or job creation).
Summers' new approach is pretty, um, interesting. But that's only because I'm hopelessly old fashioned and out of date.
As Ace explains:
Silly critics, thinking that a spending initiative pledged to "save or create" jobs which hasn't "saved or created" jobs is a failure simply because it didn't do what it was intended to do.
Again, old thinking.
Old thinking, in fact, much like thinking that job losses and job creation were the relevant terms of evaluation vis a vis the unemployment rate and economic health of the nation. Who knew there was a third, more important, statistic lurking out there, "jobs saved"?
But note now that that new-fangled statistic is also discarded as not truly bearing on the current situation. We have a new statistic that proves success.
His plan is a failure, and now he's lying about the claims he made for it, even though those claims are readily available through the internet, through transcriptions and video footage of his speeches. He does this blatant, bold faced lying because he's been getting away with it for ages- through his entire campaign the media never called him on it, and the public just stared, glassy-eyed, mesmerized by... what? I don't know, but the public doesn't seem to have been noticing that whenever he said something like, "But let me be clear. We have ALWAYS said/NEVER denied...." he was lying.
And Betsy McAughey catches him telling us stories again:
PRESIDENT Obama promises that "if you like your health plan, you can keep it," even after he reforms our health-care system. That's untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests.
Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these "qualified plans." If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year "grace period" to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you'll have less time.
And as soon as anything changes in your contract -- such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year -- you'll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).
When you file your taxes, if you can't prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you'll be fined thousands of dollars -- as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size -- and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).
He promises not to sign any health care bill that adds to the deficit. But he's already hedging and engaging in some twisty political speech on that one.
Because according to the non-partisan CBO-
the actual hit to the federal deficit for this program alone exceeds $239 billion over the next decade.
The Democrats have a plan for this. Does it involve cutting spending? Nope. Does it involve raising taxes, even? Not this particular time. It merely involves fiddling the books and calling the spending something else.
By this reasoning, since the Cherub is allergic to corn, wheat, and eggs, and this puts a serious crimp on portions of the grocery budget as well as eating over with friends, I could simply overcome this problem by calling those products something else- say, cherries, rice, and pickles, and then she would not longer be allergic to them.
"Very Interesting," as Arte Johnson used to say in his fake, over the top German accent on Laugh-In. And we know how he finished that off, don't we?
"But shtupid!"
