Six years ago President Obama Asked for More ‘Stimulus’ Money as the deficit grew
Just a month after one bill was passed, President Obama went right back to Congress, pushing more legislation, introduced by Senate Democrats, which would renew expiring unemployment benefits, and extend business and individual tax breaks.
Reuters reported that “The bill complements one passed in the House of Representatives last month, which would authorize about $80 billion in new spending and add $31 billion to the deficit. Some of the bill’s costs would offset by raising taxes on hedge fund managers….Obama warned that without additional aid, states could be forced to enact ‘massive layoffs’ of teachers, firefighters and other employees.”
photo: TaxRebate.org.uk
“People are suffering out there. We want to keep this economy growing faster. We want to see an acceleration of job creation. And we have to take some steps to continue in that direction,” top White House adviser David Axelrod told NBC’s Meet the Press while promoting the spending increase.
The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a $830 billion spending blowout was sold by the White House as a way to keep unemployment from rising above 8%.
“But the stimulus would fail on its own terms. 2009 marked the first of four straight years when unemployment averaged more than 8%. And of course the unemployment rate would have been even worse in those years and still today if so many people had not quit the labor force, driving labor-participation rates to 1970s levels,” noted the Wall Street Journal in 2014 on the anniversary of the stimulus bill.
The 2010 spending was a stop gap to keep the wheels turning AFTER the first trillion started to dry up.
” The federal government poured billions into the government and education sectors, where unemployment was low, but spent only about 10% on promised infrastructure, though the unemployment rate in construction was running in double digits,” the WSJ analysis reported.
“The legacy is a slow-growth economy: Growth over the last 18 quarters has averaged just 2.4% — pretty shoddy compared to better than 4% growth during the Reagan recovery in the 1980s and almost 4% in the 1990s recovery.”
photo donkey hotey
