Hey, Tea-Baggers, Dig This!

I started here: The Stimulus Worked.

Bob Cesca too liberal for you? OK, how about this report from Think Progress: CBO: Recovery Act Raised GDP And Lowered Unemployment But Effects Are ‘Expected To Wane’

Hmmm. "Progess" too liberal for you? OK, how about this from ABC's Jake Tapper? CBO: Effects of the Stimulus Spending Are Now 'Diminishing'

Ahhh, more like it, it may have worked before, but now it's starting to wear off. See? Obama's a failure!

Well, we can always go to the source (pdf):

• They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent,
• Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.8 percentage points and 2.0 percentage points,
• Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.6 million, and
• Increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 2.0 million to 5.2 million compared with what would have occurred otherwise (see Table 1). (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers).

Well, the non-partisan CBO is a propaganda arm of the Obama White House, ain't it? Yeah, Obama will admit that when you Tea-Baggers admit Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are the propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

The GOP ran on the fiscal irresponsibility of deficit spending of the Obama White House, completely ignoring the deficit spending of the Bush White House. Completely ignoring the fact that Obama's deficit spending was coupled with real economic growth out of the recession (I will concede that there may not have been much lower we could have gone, but in truth, there was) while Bush took a government budget surplus and squandered it on unfettered plutocracy that did nothing to stimulate American job creation (that is, plenty of jobs were created in India and elsewhere to take advantage of lower labor costs). Completely ignoring the fact that the Obama deficit includes war budgets on Iraq and Afghanistan, while Bush's supplemental war spending conveniently held most costs off-budget.

As Obama has unfortunately retreated from the bold steps he took in the first two years to re-build the economy, the GOP momentum will very likely put Obama on his heels until 2012 with using the federal budget to stimulate job creation. No amount of supply-side tax cuts is going to create jobs; what it would do is let the rich repay themselves for what they perceived they lost under Obama (when it's under Bush that most of them lost wealth).