Newt Gingrich wonders why the press is suddenly so shy and timid. Someone has to pick up the slack, so Gingrich has taken it upon himself to compare President Obama’s claims with reality. If anyone in the press bothered to do the same their ratings would certainly rise. What Gingrich found is disturbing. Not only has Porkulus not helped, it’s actually made things worse. At least if you judge by the Obama administrations pre-Porkulus predictions.
The problem goes way beyond media bias. The Obama Administration is engaged in an ongoing con job when it comes to its policies on the economy. The stimulus bill, sold to the American people as the last great hope for economic recovery, is being revealed for the giant pot of political payola it was.
The administration is trying to muddy the waters by its constant use of the meaningless metric “jobs saved or created” – as President Obama did yet again when he said that the stimulus bill would result in 600,000 jobs “saved or created this summer.”
But the May unemployment numbers put the lie to this slippery formulation. The administration told us that with the stimulus bill we would have 8 percent unemployment and without it we would have 8.7 percent unemployment. In reality, we have 9.4 percent unemployment. How did the stimulus manage to “save” jobs when there are a million less jobs today than there would have been if Congress hadn’t passed it?
Maybe the administration’s fuzzy math is great politics, but it is meaningless economics. Isn’t discerning the difference between the two what the White House press corps exists to report?
The press corps has gone to great lengths – from publishing top secret information to ruining lives and careers – to let the American people know when they think they’re being duped. So where are the exposes on the Obama Administration’s budget trickery? Where is the question being asked: If government can so easily control the economy, can’t it hurt as well as heal?
Where is the network news feature on the 1,000,000 Americans who would have jobs today if it weren’t for the Obama stimulus act?
Lately it seems we have many more good questions than good answers.
H/T Town Hall
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