So Much For Stimulus...

The AP has an important article out today that highlights the abject failure of President Obama and the Democrats' so-called "stimulus plan." According to the AP, hardly a bastion of conservative opinion, "A federal spending surge of more than $20 billion for roads and bridges in President Barack Obama's first stimulus has had no effect on local unemployment rates, raising questions about his argument for billions more to address an 'urgent need to accelerate job growth.'"

What a shocker. The Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumvirate got it wrong again. They jammed through an ill-advised bill that was supposedly going to jump-start the economy. The president himself doled out a healthy dose of fear-mongering, brazenly claiming that if the bill passed ASAP, we might see unemployment peak at only 8%, but if it didn't, we'd see employment hit double digits. Well, guess what? The $787 billion of pork got rammed down the throats of the American people by the Democrats, and unemployment STILL hit double digits.

All the talk about "shovel-ready" projects that would stimulate employment has turned out to be false. All the so-called "stimulus" did was 1) line the pockets of special interest groups that call the Democratic party home and 2) allow state governments to paper over the massive holes in their budget for another year- meaning that when the well dries up, those state governments will still be in dire straits, since they haven't been forced to make difficult decisions about raising taxes and/or cutting spending.

And now, with its many failures well-documented by, of all media outlets, the Associated Press, the administration and its congressional cohorts want to...TRY IT AGAIN? Only in Washington DC is the solution to a complete failure to simply repeat the same steps but pour in more money. We see it time and again- on education reform, for example- that no matter how many times government is definitively shown to be the problem and NOT the solution, politicians turn to, of all things, MORE government. It's insanity.

Those of us who like our government small and its scope limited warned all along that the "stimulus" bill was nothing of the sort. But Barack/Nancy/Harry knew best. After all, as they pointed out, elections have consequences- it's their turn to govern (ruin?) the country. The stimulus legislation was just another in a long line of examples of the big-government liberal philosophy: government, not individuals, knows what's best for America. Government ought to tell us how to spend our money, government ought to intervene in the free market, government ought to tell us what health care plan we must purchase. Individuals like you and me are too naive, too stupid, too unenlightened to make choices about the way we wish to live and how we wish spend our hard-earned money, so a bunch of bureaucrats need to do it for us.

Welcome to the era of the nanny state.