Stimulus Failure Is Clear; Dems Lose Claims To Job Creation

Failure - No Jobs

As a reminder, Congress remains in a modified form of recess. The House members are totally in recess and out on the campaign trail as all House seats are up for election every two years. The Senate will next reconvene for official legislative business on Monday, November 15th.

However, the Senate never went on long term recess but meets in regularly scheduled pro forma sessions throughout the recess period to prevent President Obama from making recess appointments. The next session will be on tomorrow, Oct 28 Friday at 11:30 AM. The Senate will also hold pro forma sessions on: November 1 at 9:00 AM, November 4 at 9:00 AM, November 8 at 12:00 PM, November 10 at 9:30 AM, and November 12 at 10:00 AM.

The Democrats used this process routinely during the second term of President GW Bush to prevent him from filling critical vacancies being blocked Democrats. The Democrats agreed to the present pro forma sessions at the insistence of Senate Minority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell because President Obama had previously skipped the regular Senate confirmation process and appointed a controversial appointment during a scheduled Senate recess. In reality, any Presidential appointments made at this time would cease to be valid with the convening of the new Congress in January, 2010. The Democrat leadership agreed because many of them were up for re-election and could not afford the distraction of more controversial appointments by President Obama.

The AP reports today, “The job market and the economy will improve only slightly next year, according to an Associated Press survey of leading economists whose outlook for 2011 has dimmed over the past three months. The latest quarterly AP Economy Survey shows economists are pushing back their estimates of when key barometers of economic health — hiring, spending, expansion — will signal strength. In their view, shoppers and employers will stay cautious. Households will keep saving. Inflation will remain tame. And unemployment will dip only a bit from the current 9.6 percent rate to a still-high 9 percent at the end of 2011.”

Recall that when President Obama and Democrats were first selling their $814 billion stimulus bill, White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein said the “unemployment rate with … the recovery plan,” would not exceed eight percent. Yet the unemployment rate has been higher than 8% since February 2009, the very month Obama signed the stimulus bill. And unemployment has been stuck at 9.6% or higher since August of last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That’s not the only promise the stimulus has failed to live up to. Shortly after the bill was signed, Vice President Joe Biden boasted, “[T]his is about getting this out and spent in 18 months to create 3.5 million jobs and tee this up so the rest of the good work that’s being done here literally drop-kicks us out of this recession and we begin to grow again . . . .” Since then over 3.3 million jobs have been lost. And today’s AP story notes that economists forecast that “[t]he economy will expand just 2.7 percent next year, scarcely more than the tepid growth predicted for all of 2010. Under an economic rule of thumb, growth would have to average at least 5 percent for a whole year to lower the unemployment rate by 1 percentage point.”

Little wonder, then, that Americans no longer have a lot of confidence in Democrats’ economic solutions. According to The New York Times, a new NYT/CBS poll finds, “On the issue most driving the campaign, the economy, Republicans have erased the traditional advantage held by Democrats as the party seen as better able to create jobs; the parties are now even on that measure. By a wide margin, Republicans continue to be seen as the party better able to reduce the federal budget deficit.”

As Senate Republican Leader McConnell said after the release of the disappointing September jobs report, “[W]ith each passing month, and each new jobs report, it becomes increasingly clear that while massive Washington spending is growing the size of government, it’s clearly not growing sustainable private-sector jobs. The trillion-dollar stimulus didn’t live up to promises made by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress; the massive growth of the federal government didn’t result in a similar growth of jobs; and the maze of new regulations, health care mandates and taxes are having a predictable impact on the economy. Again and again, Democrats were faced with a problem, and their solution was to ram through some costly, big-government solution Americans didn’t want.”

Many Americans now agree. According to the NYT, “In a follow-up interview, one poll respondent, Judy Berg, an independent from Morton Grove, Ill., said she voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 because she was ‘looking for a change,’ adding, ‘the change that ensued was not the change I was looking for but something totally out of left field.’”

Yesterday, The Times - Picayune reported that Louisiana Lt. Governor Scott Angle "changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican because of his dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama and the administration's recent actions on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico."

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