Pay It Backward

October 7, 2011
By Sinclair Soul

President Obama Lobbying for his Jobs BillPresident Obama has been mastering the art of blaming others for the economic woes which we are all going through on his watch. He and his flock have beaten to death the “we inherited” talking point when it comes to the economy for the past three years, a strategy which has evermore diminished credibility as time moves on and we get further from the reign of Obama’s predecessor, the evil and immoral George W. Bush.

This year, the President has added a new plank to the “blame someone else” platform drawing in world events such as the Japanese tsunami, European financial crisis, and “Arab Spring” as excuses for why his policies haven’t prevented the over 9% unemployment rate, nor boosted the nearly 0% economic growth. None of these excuses seem to be working as the President’s approval ratings are in a downward spiral.

With his re-election fate being decided in barely a year, the President has launched into his most cynical “blame someone else” scheme yet with the introduction of a “jobs bill” that noone really wants, will never get passed, and can’t even get a Democratic House member to sponsor it. The $450 billion bill provides nothing new or innovative compared to the nearly trillion dollar stimulus passed in 2009 (which did nothing to boost the economy, only increase the national debt). This bill, like that one, belongs on the shelf next to the Charmin. But like that previous stimulus bill, the strategy here is not based on the actual results of the real world, but what the hypothetical results of some alternate universe.

Although the 2009 stimulus bill was sold on the premise that it would keep unemployment form ever reaching 8%, after it passed the real world saw consistant unemployment rates between 9 and 10%. How does the Administration explain this? It would have been “much worse” if we hadn’t passed that bill.

With this new “jobs bill” the strategy is similar but in the opposite direction. The President knows this bill will never pass Congress as proposed. He’s also quite sure the economy will be in the dumps next year in the heat of his re-election campaign. But alas! If only this bill was passed back in late 2011, we’d be in much better shape! Blaming Bush will be nearly impossible by that time, so there has to be another scapegoat for his economic incompetence. Nothing is more convienient than “pay it backward”, revisionist, hypothetical history.



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