King Arthur Movie Tristan

If you were to follow Republican talking points you would think that President Obama actually increased spending; if you are to believe their lies you would also get the impression that it was President Obama with “his” stimulus that helped get us deeper into an economic mess.

There are two things to keep in mind here and let it be clear that President Obama actually reduced spending. From the look of figures it was Bush who went overboard on the spending. Then the stimulus is a stinking dead herring; to put it bluntly: the wealthy Wall Street wolves got the money while the American people got zilch. Therefore, one has to conclude that one, the Wall Street wolves got rewarded for sinking the economy and two the stimulus was at the very best anemic…it should have been much bigger.

Why don’t we take a look at these charts from Dave Johnson and compare the Bush spending with Obama’s?

Government spending increased dramatically under Bush. It has not increased much under Obama. Note that this chart does not reflect any spending cuts resulting from deficit-cutting deals.

We can also look at the deficit and it follows pretty much in the same lines…the Republicans are lying…no other verb or word can describe what they are saying:

Notes, this chart includes Clinton's last budget year for comparison.

The numbers in these two charts come from Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2012. They are just the amounts that the government spent and borrowed, period, Anyone can go look then up. People who claim that Obama "tripled the deficit" are either misled or are trying to mislead.

And then there is the reality of the stimulus…no band aid, no sugar coating, no pretense here…the Republicans have to live with this one as one of their biggest fibs that the stimulus didn’t work.

In this chart, the RED lines on the left side -- the ones that keep doing DOWN -- show what happened to jobs under the policies of Bush and the Republicans. We were losing lots and lots of jobs every month, and it was getting worse and worse. The BLUE lines -- the ones that just go UP -- show what happened to jobs when the stimulus was in effect. We stopped losing jobs and started gaining jobs, and it was getting better and better. The leveling off on the right side of the chart shows what happened as the stimulus started to wind down: job creation leveled off at too low a level.

It looks a lot like the stimulus reversed what was going on before the stimulus.

Conclusion: THE STIMULUS WORKED BUT WAS NOT ENOUGH!

More False Things

These are just three of the false things that everyone "knows." Some others are (click through): Obama bailed out the banks, businesses will hire if they get tax cuts, health care reform cost $1 trillion, Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme or is "going broke", government spending "takes money out of the economy."

Why This Matters

These things really matter. We all want to fix the terrible problems the country has. But it is so important to know just what the problems are before you decide how to fix them. Otherwise the things you do to try to solve those problems might just make them worse. If you get tricked into thinking that Obama has made things worse and that we should go back to what we were doing before Obama -- tax cuts for the rich, giving giant corporations and Wall Street everything they want -- when those are the things that caused the problems in the first place, then we will be in real trouble.

Arguably, the stimulus was directed to benefit the banks, Wall Street and the very wealthy; it was not enough because it excluded the middle class and the poor. While all the Wall Street fat cats were carrying off our stimulus money in wheelbarrows, the general population was feeling the effects in terms of job losses and house foreclosures. But let’s keep it in perspective, shall we? And realize that it was basically a directive initiated and carried out by the Bush administration and it extended itself into the first part of the Obama administration.

To claim that Obama’s stimulus didn’t work is ludicrous because it wasn’t Obama’s to begin with and it wasn’t enough either. I think these Republicans better start checking facts and figures and abandon this effort to confuse and misinformed the voters. Voters are fed up with their lies…those who believe in them are becoming fewer and fewer and hopefully by the time next election comes around there will be enough of us to vote the bastards out of office and totally humiliate them…we need to put them in their place where they belong…we need to view them for what they are: extremist right wing fanatic, ideologues and traitors.

SOURCE: http://critterscrap.blogspot.com/

CHARTS: at Campaign For America's Future

PHOTO SOURCE: http://tenthltr2u.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/budget-cuts-kill-the-middle-class/dave-johnson/