‘Recovery Summer,’ One Year Later

[Geee]

National Review:


One year ago today, the Obama administration launched its “Recovery Summer” publicity tour to bolster flagging support for the “stimulus.” Vice President Biden said, “The fact is, the recovery act is working.” But the fact is, it didn’t. “Recovery Summer” fizzled, much like the “stimulus” itself.

Republicans have a real blueprint for job creation — the “Plan for America’s Job Creators.” What makes our plan different is that it focuses on one thing: removing government barriers to private-sector job growth.

The “stimulus” was all about big spending and big government — not jobs. That was obvious on the day the “Recovery Summer” began in my home state of Ohio. Local construction workers on a nearby site in Columbus were forced to take the day off, without pay, so the White House entourage could roll through and tout all the taxpayer dollars they were spending. But all that spending got us was more debt and fewer jobs.

Approximately 1.5 million jobs have been lost since the “stimulus” was signed in 2009 — roughly 300,000 of them as administration officials hopped from town to town promoting the “summer of recovery.” The national unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in May — far above the 8 percent promised by the White House — and has averaged 9.5 percent throughout the Obama presidency.
The president can call this a “bump in the road,” or blame ATMs, or joke that those “shovel ready” jobs that were promised “weren’t as shovel ready as we expected.” But there’s nothing funny about policies that keep workers on the unemployment line and drive us deeper into debt. Those aren’t the kinds of results — and this isn’t the recovery — the American people deserve.