Posted on 04/29/2015 4:31:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
It's never enough. American taxpayers have surrendered billions and billions and billions of dollars to the social-justice-spender-in-chief. But it's never, ever enough.
The latest paroxysm of urban violence, looting, and recriminations in Baltimore prompted President Obama on Tuesday to trot out his frayed Blame The Callous, Tight-Fisted Republicans card. After dispensing with an obligatory wrist-slap of toilet paper-and Oreo-filching "protesters" who are burning Charm City to the ground (he hurriedly changed it to "criminals and thugs" mid-word), the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner got down to his usual business: hectoring his political opponents and grousing that America hasn't forked over enough money for him to make the "massive investments" needed to "make a difference right now."
If we are "serious" about preventing more riots, the president declared, then "the rest of us" (translation: all of us stingy conservatives) have to make sure "we are providing early education" and "making investments" so that inner-city youths are "getting the training they need to find jobs."
Narcissus on the Potomac wheedled that "there's a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now." Me, me, me! His laundry list of the supposedly underfunded cures that he can't get through Congress includes "school reform," "job training" and "some investments in infrastructure" to "attract new businesses."
I'll give POTUS credit: He can lay it on thicker than a John Deere manure spreader.
Let's talk "massive investments," shall we?
In 2009, Obama and the Democrats rammed the $840 billion federal stimulus package through Capitol Hill under the guise of immediate job creation and economic recovery. An estimated $64 billion went to public school districts; another nearly $50 billion went for other education spending. This included $13 billion for low-income public school kids; $4.1 billion for Head Start and childcare services; $650 million for educational technology; $200 million for working college students; and $70 million for homeless children.
How's that all working out? Last week, economists from the St. Louis Federal Reserve surveyed more than 6,700 education stimulus recipients and concluded that for every $1 million of stimulus grants to a district, a measly 1.5 jobs were created. "Moreover, all of this increase came in the form of nonteaching staff," the report found, and the "jobs effect was also not statistically different from zero."
More than three-quarters of the jobs "created or saved" in the first year of the stimulus were government jobs, while roughly 1 million private sector jobs were forestalled or destroyed, according to Ohio State University. President Obama later admitted "there was no such thing" as "shovel-ready projects." But there were plenty of pork-ready recipients, from green energy billionaires to union bosses to Democratic campaign finance bundlers. About $230 billion in porkulus funds was set aside for infrastructure projects, yet less than a year later, Obama was back asking for another $50 billion to pour down the infrastructure black hole.
In 2010, President Obama signed the so-called Edujobs bill into law -- a $26 billion political wealth redistribution scheme paying back Big Labor for funding Democratic congressional campaigns. A year later, several were spending on the money to plug budget shortfalls instead of hiring teachers. Other recipients received billions despite having full educational payrolls and not knowing what to do with the big bucks.
In 2012, with bipartisan support, Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act "to encourage startups and support our nation's small businesses."
In July 2014, with bipartisan support, Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to "help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy." (Never mind that a GAO review of the feds' existing 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies "generally found the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small, inconclusive or restricted to short-term impacts.")
In December 2014, the White House unveiled nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5."
That's all on top of the $6 billion government-funded national service and education initiative known as the SERVE America Act, which was enacted less than a month after the nearly $1 trillion stimulus with the help of a majority of Big Government Senate Republicans. The SERVE America Act included $1.1 billion to increase the investment in national service opportunities; $97 million for Learn and Serve America Youth Engagement Zones; and nearly $400 million for the Social Innovation Fund and Volunteer Generation Fund.
The "social innovation" slush fund was intended to "create new knowledge about how to solve social challenges in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development and school support, and healthy futures, and to improve our nation's problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities." The biggest beneficiaries? Obama's progressive cronies.
Apparently, the richly funded "social innovators" haven't reached the looter-prone neighborhoods of Baltimore yet. But it's not ideologically bankrupt Obama's fault. It's ours.
Thank-you for posting it. Saw the title over at Frontpostmag.com but I am wondering if they are having troubles with DDS again?
All of this because the America’s top earners are not paying their “fair share”...
How about trying to cut off all welfare? Then people would have to earn the bread on their tables and pay for their own rent.
This was in the comments .... sums a lot of this mess up nicely:
But the stupidest thing we have done is to allow dem politicians to steal our money to buy votes and subsidize ignorance and sloth and then cover it all up with political correctness. (Richard Simon, commenter on Townhall article by Michelle Malkin).
Welfare should only be a temporary solution and those who mothers who have one child after another by different fathers just so they can get welfare should be the first ones to be taken off
Here are a few no-cost tips for improving the job prospects of inner city yutes: Pull your pants up; ditch the hoodie, doo-cap, grill, and bling; and learn the difference between "ask" and "ax."
How about two differing sex parents?
Black wives matter.
The writer’s figures are wrong. Since LBJ’s malignant lWar on Poverty began in the ‘60s, the US Middle Class has had almost $20 TRILLION dollars of its incomes confiscated by governments, federal, state and local, to “eliminate poverty.” Yet we have more “poor” than ever.
However, we have millions of government employees getting fine paychecks to administer the hundreds of programs “for the poor.” Poverty would be greatly decreased and the plight of the ghettos and barrios greatly improved if 70% of these destructive government programs would be abolished.
You cannot educate another person. All you can do is to provide the facilities in which they can educate themselves.
A school culture in which attempting to do so is considered "acting white," and is likely to get you ostracized and/or regularly beaten up is not one in which much actual learning is going to take place. No amount of money can change that, as the Kansas City schools failed experiment demonstrates conclusively.
My daughter just went through an extended training program as a video teller for Bank of America. They had a zero tolerance policy for tardiness during the training. Show up late and you're out.
So she had backups to her backups to wake up on time and get to work. Never actually needed them, as it turned out.
About 25% of her class got bounced for one reason or another during training. Mostly things that equate to not being responsible.
Why the hell should anybody worry about spending. Print more. Jordans for everyone. The Fed gives .gov unlimited power to deficit spend. And by the way, but more stawks. Nothing will happen. Soon no one will be working and everything will continue to improve. /S
Big Br’O’s popularity stands at 50%. Presumably, if he were running, he would be re-elected. The problem isn’t with elites, it’s the people.
Barack Hussein Obama Manure spreader - there are three problems it is quite expensive,it is always full of manure and will have no place to be spread significantly in 21 months time.
You can bet those idiots who voted for him would vote for him again because they haven’t learned a thing
The urban underclass is like a fleet of cars that breaks down continuously, never gets fixed properly, and is a huge drain on the owner's resources. The mechanics who work on these cars don't want the owner to get new cars (for obvious reasons), and because the government owns the cars there is plenty of political influence to keep the owner from replacing them.
Good analogy, but I'd take it a step further. I would replace "never gets fixed properly" with "purposefully sabotaged".
A more lovely poetic headline I have never read!
That being said the crown prince of babble will not likely be able to escape his connections to CLINTON CASH...and therefore he will soon be rendered....Inoperative.
The worst thing to do for that cesspool is to enable them to stay in the hood and not work. More money enriches the grifters in the middle like Hillary and gives the unemployed just enough to stay poor but not interested in going where there is work.
President Obama confused his terms: he uses the term 'investment' in place of the more truthful term "throw money down a rat hole' in this speech.
And we've done enough of that... just how much 'training' do blacks need?
Poor third world people flood across our borders to get jobs... and NO ONE HAS "INVESTED" in them or given them "TRAINING".
Poor third world people don't get 'investments' OR training... they have a willingness to work hard and they don't steal. Really, how long does that take to 'teach'. WORK HARD DON'T STEAL. WORK HARD DON'T STEAL. WORK HARD DON'T STEAL.
Can I get a million dollar training grant now?
No mention of Baltimore being ruled at all levels by Democrats for the last 50 years. Awfully poor return on investment.
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