Obama the Slow Learner (about creating jobs)

Weekly Standard ^ | January 25, 2010 | Fred Barnes

[reaganaut1]

President Obama is a slow learner. For all his brainpower, he’s saddled himself with three ideas about the economy and job creation that aren’t working, either substantively or politically. And he appears to be too ideologically rigid or stubborn to consider the evidence and jettison the failed ideas.

Instead, he puts himself in embarrassing situations. On the day the Labor Department announced the unemployment rate was stuck at 10 percent and 85,000 jobs had been lost in December, Obama insisted he continues “to explore every avenue to accelerate the return to hiring.” So what did he propose? Tax credits totaling $2.3 billion to create “green jobs” and a second stimulus package of $150 billion (the first one, enacted 11 months ago, cost $787 billion). This is more of the same.

Cristina Romer, the chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, managed to out-embarrass the president. Last week, she sandwiched her highly improbable claim that the administration’s stimulus had created or “saved” 1.5 million to 2 million jobs between an Associated Press finding that $20 billion in stimulus funds for roads and bridges had failed to reduce the unemployment rate anywhere and a Labor Department announcement of a rise in new claims for jobless benefits.

The first of Obama’s failed ideas is that government spending is the most effective method of stimulating the economy, spurring strong growth, and generating new jobs. The president needs to chat with Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna on this subject. They studied dozens of examples of economic stimulation between 1970 and 2007 in 21 countries, including the United States.

Their findings are unequivocal. “Fiscal stimuli based upon tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based on spending increases,” they wrote in a paper revised and published last October.

[timetostand]

The slow learners are the ones who believe O is a slow learner!! He knows what he is doing! I believe his only mistake has been his under-estimation of the American people.

There is still a he** of a Fight Ahead to free us from the Washinton madness!

[mo]

Deregulate....Detax...rinse ...repeat for a generation or two...when Washington DC is once again a sleepy, southern town on the banks of the Potomac...the rest of the country will prosper.

[abclily]

You are exactly right. Why does Fred Barnes not say this? Is Fred Barnes the slow learner?