“If we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today,” President Obama said in his State of the Union address last week. “More businesses would certainly have closed. More homes would have surely been lost.”
These words remind me of that old “Sesame Street” skit — the one where Ernie has a banana in his ear. He tells Bert that it’s there to keep alligators away.
“Ernie!” replies the ever-annoyed Bert. “There are no alligators on Sesame Street!”
“Right,” Ernie says. “Works pretty good, doesn’t it, Bert?”
Obama can always scare people with counterfactual narratives — “If I hadn’t done it then …” — because we’ll never really know what would have happened. But when you look at what he claims he’s done for the economy, and the damage his solutions have done to the taxpayer, it is hard to tell whether the alligators ever existed. Or whether they were so bad. Or whether they aren’t eating us already.
The Trouble Asset Relief Program bailouts — initiated by President Bush but fully supported by then-Sen. Obama and continued by President Obama — were supposed to save the economy from widespread collapse. Without it, we were told, the crisis would have prevented banks from making business and home loans on Main Street.
And according to this week’s report from TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky banks still aren’t lending on Main Street. Meanwhile, the TARP program for helping homeowners renegotiate their loans has helped only 11,600 homeowners. For context, there were nearly three million foreclosures last year.
After TARP, there was the $787 billion economic stimulus package — unfairly stigmatized, according to Obama adviser David Plouffe. Without it, Obama says, we would have lost far more than the 4 million jobs shed in 2009. The stimulus created or saved … how many jobs?
“1.1 million jobs,” says Vice President Biden.
“2 million,” says strategist David Axelrod.
“1.5 million,” says spokesman Robert Gibbs.
“Thousands and thousands,” says adviser Valerie Jarrett.
The official estimate from Recovery.gov was about 640,000.
Anyone can make up numbers, but here are some real ones: An Examineranalysis found that at least 95,000 of the jobs reported as “created or saved” were bogus. They were pay raises misreported as jobs; jobs that hadn’t actually been started; jobs that paid impossibly small amounts to be full-time equivalents; jobs that were really just part-time work-study on college campuses.
And most of jobs “created or saved” appear to have been government jobs.The Boston Herald reported this week that71 percent of the jobs “created or saved” in Massachusetts were government jobs.
Main Street has always been part of Obama’s economic equation, only on the wrong side of the ledger. The average taxpayer is not the beneficiary, but the source of the money. He has become a piggy bank for two institutions largely responsible for putting Obama in the White House, government unions and Wall Street.
The public sector unions, Obama’s Election Day muscle, have received a bailout through the stimulus package. The financial industry, whose employees (the people Obama demonizes for taking bonuses) gave nearly twice as much money to Obama as to his opponent, received a bailout through TARP.
We can’t be sure what would have happened to the economy without TARP and the stimulus package. But we can be fairly certain that a lot of Obama donors would have had nothing to give in the next election cycle.
David Freddoso is The Examiner‘s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].
